“The bimbo is back,” said Ariel Levy ’96, but she wasn’t referring to herself. In her new book “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” Levy explains why young women of this generation are more likely to engage in lewd activities, thus earning Levy’s title “bimbo.”
Levy spoke on Wednesday as part of the Russell House Distinguished Writers Lecture Series. She addressed the rise of exhibitionism in contemporary culture, pointing to the “Girls Gone Wild” chain of videos as an example of this phenomenon. In 2004 Levy accompanied the company’s camera crew on a spring break search for girls willing to bare all, and what she witnessed, she said, deeply disturbed her.
“There is this expectation that women should be exploding in baseline exhibitionism,” she said after reading an excerpt from her book detailing what she saw on her trip.
Levy presented a convincing hypothesis as to how this exhibition expectation arose. She said that all the aspects of “raunch culture” (pornography and overt sexual displays, for example) that 1960s and 70s feminists detested are now seen by many young women as examples of sexual empowerment and freedom. Levy argued that this view is misguided.
“There is little emphasis on pleasure and hedonism,” she said. “Instead the emphasis is on performance. Women appear sexy at the expense of being sexual.”
Levy said this exhibitionist culture is more and more evident. She told the audience that the number of women getting breast implants has increased by seventy percent over the last ten years. She also noted that many of the women stripping for the “Girls Gone Wild” cameras, including three Ph.D. students in anthropology, said that stripping was a reflex action.
Levy cited the rise of pornography and reality television as a main contributor to our society’s increasingly lewd behavior.
“Reality television remains untouched by societal movements and change, least of all feminism,” said Levy, criticizing the popular genre.
She said shows such as “The Bachelor” and “The Swan” have led to a large population of young women overly concerned with being sexually desirable. Flaunting their bodies has become a “rite of passage” into this culture. She also pointed to stars such as Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson, whose fame only increased after the release of their sex tapes. To her this represented what really matters to society: the exposition of sex.
It is no surprise that, with the importance she places on the performance aspect of sex, pornography played a significant role in her talk. Levy said she does not see anything inherently wrong with pornography, but she is concerned with how Americans perceive it. Along with the frightening increase in breast implants, she has noticed another alarming trend. According to her observations and findings, vaginal cosmetic surgery is becoming prevalent in American culture. She believes this is because many women see the commercialized images in pornography as the ideal body types. Levy emphasized that Western culture must move away from this need to appear sexy. Only then, she said, will the bimbo disappear.
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