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I'm certainly no prude but after reading about some of these girls' escapades, I should return to the nunnery. Levy trails the crew of Girls Gone Wild (GGW), as they capture hundreds of girls, or should I say young women, exposing themselves during their spring break travels. Many consider it a rite of passage to appear on the show.
Another raunchy institution Levy explores is Playboy magazine. The interesting connection between GGW and Playboy is that women largely run both of them. You can't blame men when it's women yelling out, "We want boobs."
The idea behind the female chauvinistic pig is to be like "one of the guys" by beating men to the punch, taking advantage of feminine sexuality and making sex objects of other women. But the question is why do straight women want to see strippers pole dance? Levy said it's because women don't want to be excluded from anything.
In the book, she looks at different women in the entertainment and business world -- "loophole" women -- who want to be looked at as powerful and take the shortcut of identifying with a man, rather than trying to elevate the female gender. These women think of themselves as post-feminists, they get it. However, the author notes that while these women see womanhood as something to escape from, in reality, they'll be seen as lesser for trying to escape their gender. When trying to get ahead "like a man," she claims women aspire to be Nathan Lane and Iggy Pop. Who is the mythical man we'll aspire to be? Michael Jackson? Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Levy studies the many contradictions behind this supposedly raunch feminism and questions the idea that showing off your 'ass'-ets is real power and liberation. Although women are catching up with men in sexual prowess, men don't have to pull a Marky Mark and parade around in their underwear to get noticed.
Interestingly enough, this raunch culture is gaining popularity at a time of right-wing conservatism in the country. But like Levy says, people don't vote the way they live. Playboy is more popular in Wyoming than New York and hooker-turned-writer Tracy Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl shared a "meet the author" with Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Despite politics, raunch has embedded itself in every aspect of our culture. That's because raunch isn't really rebellion, as most of Levy's subjects imply, but just another form of consumption and commercialization. Hotness is a currency and Paris Hilton is our president. The ideal model that we use to sell everything in America is to be sexy but not sexual.
Levy questions the future of young people as they grow up in a world where teenage girls shop for thongs with Hello Kitty on them and lesbians dressed like boys are calling their girlfriends "hos." Even Barbie, whose image is exposed to young girls all over the world, was based on German sex dolls. And all the while our government funding is denied to all sex education programs except those touting abstinence only.
This book succeeds in commenting on a cultural phenomenon we're all too familiar with. Levy uses her wit and keen sense of observation to show how this so-called new sexual freedom is really just a smoke screen for how far women haven't come.
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