Raunch Culture

Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture . New York: Free Press, 2005. 224 pp.

“Raunch Culture” involves the mainstreaming of pornography and strip clubs, Howard Stern interviewing topless women, college girls flashing for the camera on Girls Gone Wild videos, skanky fashions marketed to young teens. In Raunch Culture, a film of Paris Hilton having sex with her boyfriend catapults her to stardom instead of destroying her. In Raunch Culture, Jenna Jameson, porn star and author of the best-selling How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, is pictured in a four-story billboard in Times Square. It is a culture where every district is a red light district, where femininity is reduced to sexiness, and sexiness gets defined by Hugh Hefner.

What especially interests Levy, a contributing editor to New York magazine, is the eagerness of women to conform themselves to the most chauvinistic of male fantasies, and the fact that women partake of Raunch Culture in the name of the feminist goal of “empowerment.”

Levy is no moral traditionalist, but her R-rated and well-written book is an alarming study of the pervasive seaminess of our culture.