Raunch Dressing, Not on the Side

The review of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs in today's NY Times Book Review triggered some thoughts. Levy expands her New York Magazine article on the rise of Girls Gone Wild, magazines like Maxim and Stuff, and porn stars appearing everywhere outside their movies on regular shows and music videos as if it were normal. Well, according to Levy, it is normal: America has been pornified.

Jennifer Egans' review mentions one omission of the book's argument and might have missed another. Egan says Levy spends scant time on Madonna, who turned sex into self-empowerment ever since 1984. That's sad. Because the singer/video star has done a lot to move the ball down to the end-zone. No one exploits me but me, was her mantra. (Or is that womantra?) Also, I wonder if the young's acceptance of this lite porn stems from the shrill, humor-free days of the late 80s and 90s when people were politically correct to a fault.

I took three feminist courses at SUNY New Paltz in 1988-89, and these were deadly serious areas unless you were mocking men. So far, so shrill. After the Anita Hill hearings, lawyers and human resource consultants entered the fray. Telling a woman she looked nice in a sweater could be a litigious offence and the days of humor were over. I sat in on my share of HR seminars on how to be a sensitive co-worker and managers. Thank goodness the Internet boom rolled around so we could concentrate on making money.

Egan's review does not mention the feminist left's melding with the Christian right in its views on pornography. Even though both sides have different views on modern women -- kitchen vs. the board room -- they could both easily hate Hugh Hefner, Howard Stern, and even Victoria's Secret. Like the flimsy bras in the pages of those monthly catalog, something had to give.

The so-called third wave of feminists hated Christian prudes and the smelly feminists of yore. Howard Stern was a free-speech liberator, Hugh Hefner made sure his Playmates were treated well, and a whole raft of magazines from London came in with bad jokes and pics of models and actresses in bra and panties. Where was the victimization? Jenna Jamison looked healthy, drug-free and all-American to most people.

The Man Show debutted and rose in the ratings around the time that America read The Starr Report and expressed shock and acceptance. Bill Clinton looked like a serial humper from Day One and besides, the economy was roaring. Why jinx it? The Man Show was fighting against the notion that being a guy had been a bad thing for more than a decade. Pictures of cleavage, bodily function jokes and reviews of beer seemed almost elevating back then. It was.

There is a downside, though. I like my subscription to Stuff and one day would like to write captions for those magazines, but why is it so hard to find clothes for my daughter that doesn't like the laundry pile from a Vietnamese brothel? Does my listening to Stern and Opie and Anthony's antics mean that my daughter has to dress like a hooker?