Cover Story
Jennifer Aniston is on the cover of Vanity Fair this month. To the extent you don’t know and haven’t heard because, you know, you’ve been living in an Armenian monastery and pretending it’s the year 1210, Jenn and Brad are over. I know, it hurts. Tough news and all that but maybe we could leave these beautiful, rich people in peace for five seconds and focus on something else? Just a thought.
The really eye-catching cover in Vanity Fair doesn’t belong to Aniston, ‘tho she does look lovely, it’s in the inside and belongs to this:
The VF editors describe the book as: New York magazine writer Ariel Levy strips the Girls Gone Wild culture of cuteness in her provocative Female Chauvinist Pigs (Free Press), arguing that post-feminist poster girls such as the Playboy Bunnies offer only faux empowerment.
Yeah, this book is tak’n on the Bunnies. And Paris Hilton. And something called raunch culture. The cover copy goes something (exactly) like this:
In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture–the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be "one of the guys." And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.
In the tradition of Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.
Yeah, but isn’t the pink book cover pretty?
August 10th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Hmmmm…. Sounds like a good book to combat insomnia to me…
I’m afraid the heathen in me doesn’t want to know why college girls flash their arses at every opportunity. Funny, but I don’t recall flashing anything when I was in college. Must be an American thing (g)
August 10th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
I’m with you. And, really, no one wants me flashing anything. That’s just not a good look.
August 10th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
I went through one of those stages YEARS ago. Luckily, not on film. (wg) I’m sure the author will sell a ton of copies on the title alone.
August 10th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Wow. That sounds really, really interesting. Gotta remember to get a copy of this book.
I’m SERIOUS. Stop laughing at me!
*runs away crying*
August 10th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
Candy - Was there an animal on the cover and I missed it?
Don’t know. It might be good but it has the sexuality-is-bad feel to it. We’ll make Candy read it first.
August 10th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
“…argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity.”
I think, in some ways, we see the same thing in the romance genre.
I find this interesting too — (I’ve had this book on my To Buy List for a while) clever title, but I don’t think she’s all that mistaken in her thesis. Whether the argument holds up is something else entirely…