[BRIEF NOTE] Female Chauvinist Pigs
Oct. 5th, 2005 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAriel Levy's new book Female Chauvinist Pigs examines the interesting phenomenon of women who sexually exploit themselves and other women. It's an interesting rejoinder to the sort of feminist sentiment expressed in the song "Germaine" by Sinéad O'Connor, who quoted at length from Germaine Greer:
It may well be that things like women editing Playboy and running Girls Gone Wild reflects the fact that feminism hasn't gone far enough, that women (and men!) are still operating under patriarchal constraints and are simply trying and failing to adapt patriarchy to their own desires. I rather think that the sorts of active female participation in raunch culture that we're now seeing might stem rather from the deep structures of human sexual desire. If sexual attraction is produced by one person who sees something that he or she wants to possess, by the sense of lack and the vulnerability produced by this shortfall, it would stand to reason that suitably autonomous people would feel free to experience all manner of unequal relationships. We're all primates, after all, and status-competitive primates at that.
If this is true, then all that feminism did was allow women to exploit each other, and allow women to exploit men, and allow men to exploit themselves in order to attract suitably autonomous women. Reciprocated sexual attraction as mutual exploitation? This explains a lot.
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant by as a kind of spontaneous cooperative action, the like of which we have never seen. Which is so far from people's ideas of state structure and vital social structure that seems to them like total anarchy. And what it really is is very subtle forms of interrellation which do not follow sort of hierachical pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity. And I think it's women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation. (My emphasis.)
It may well be that things like women editing Playboy and running Girls Gone Wild reflects the fact that feminism hasn't gone far enough, that women (and men!) are still operating under patriarchal constraints and are simply trying and failing to adapt patriarchy to their own desires. I rather think that the sorts of active female participation in raunch culture that we're now seeing might stem rather from the deep structures of human sexual desire. If sexual attraction is produced by one person who sees something that he or she wants to possess, by the sense of lack and the vulnerability produced by this shortfall, it would stand to reason that suitably autonomous people would feel free to experience all manner of unequal relationships. We're all primates, after all, and status-competitive primates at that.
If this is true, then all that feminism did was allow women to exploit each other, and allow women to exploit men, and allow men to exploit themselves in order to attract suitably autonomous women. Reciprocated sexual attraction as mutual exploitation? This explains a lot.
