Author Ariel Levy gives a lecture about her novel “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” and touches on other feminist topics Tuesday evening in Gold Room B of the Union. “Women are entitled to focus on their own passions,” Levy said as she addressed current raunch culture problems.
Playboy bunnies, “Girls Gone Wild” and g-strings were a few of the topics author Ariel Levy discussed Tuesday when she spoke to a crowd of more than 160 people at the Union.
Levy, a writer for The New Yorker and author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” discussed the phenomenon of today’s young women striving to emulate porn stars and celebrity starlets as part of the 21st-century feminist movement.
The talk was part of the Gender and its Intersections speaker series, sponsored by the MSU Women’s Resource Center.
Levy told the audience she started to notice a shift in women’s behavior a few years ago, inspiring her to write her book, which was published in 2005. She said an increase in the popularity of Paris Hilton and magazines such as Maxim and FHM, which portray women as “cartoonish,” was different than feminism in the 1990s.
“I realized that every time I turned on the television, no matter what time it was or what station I had it set to, there was always a show on about strippers,” Levy told the audience. “These are cartoonish images, in that they’re not subtle. They’re broad and they’re silly.”
She continued to tell the audience how she spent a spring break following a film crew for “Girls Gone Wild,” interviewing the crew as well as the performers. One 19-year-old college student told her the reason she stripped for the camera was because it felt like a reflex and showing off her body was empowering.
“I wanted to look at how an interest in raunch has gone from something we see as private and kind of trashy, and certainly antifeminist, to something that seems like good for women, something that women think they should do like a reflex,” Levy said.
Although the audience varied in age and gender, a number of students and instructors were in attendance to listen to Levy, whose book has garnered the attention of Oprah, Stephen Colbert and NPR.
“I think the reason that the book is moderately popular with college students and with women’s studies classes assigning it, it’s because you don’t have to have any kind of elaborate expertise to understand the cultural references of ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and Facebook,” Levy said.
Kate Morgan, a comparative cultures and politics junior, said she had read the book when it came out, but wanted to hear more of what Levy had to say.
“I really liked (her book),” Morgan said.
“I think she has some pretty interesting ideas and not something I’ve really heard before. I’m a women’s studies specialization so I read a lot of feminist literature and she has a pretty interesting argument.”
Jayne Schuiteman, an associate professor in the Women’s Resource Center, said Levy’s message is an important one in today’s society that lends itself to the objectification of women.
“Some of our feminist foremothers would just roll over in their graves to hear women define freedom that way — in ways that are so objectifying,” she said.
“It’s kind of like we’ve come full circle from women trying to fight objectification of women. Now we see a lot of women partake in their own objectification in the name of freedom.”
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