Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture was critiqued by Valenti. She agreed with me when she says, ‘she fails in that she seems to have little sympathy for the women she interviews’ and ‘telling young women they’re being taken advantage of isn’t necessarily the best way to effect change.’ And she goes on to say ‘there is a middle ground between rabid antiporn Dworkinizing and Girls Gone Wild vapidity.’
Girls Gone Wild – a popular example of deplorable “humilitainment” and exploitation Valenti condemns as one of ‘the most sexually predatory groups in America today
it’s a roving band of would-be rapists and assaulters who get treated like celebrities wherever they go.’ Here, it’s shown a few of those employed by GGW were in fact criminals, one of which was a serial rapist.
Repressing sexuality and shaming people for having it creates a guilty hunger for outlets, like porn (oh, the hyporcrisy), thereby encouraging sexual liberation to fulfil those needs
And that the movement requires the prevalence of raunch to stay relevant, because if they succeed by sanitising the world and abolishing women’s rights, what more do they have to campaign for, or against? If they no longer have a cause, they have no power. I’m not entirely sure about this last part. Maintaining the new social order of oppression (with dissemination of propaganda, and so on) would require effort and resources, and someone has to be in charge of that, right?
*It occurs to me that when [vaginal rejuvenation] surgery is performed on women in Africa, we call it female genital mutilation, but in the oh-so-enlightened United States, we call them designer vaginas. Continue reading “Valenti postulates the virginity movement’s repressed sexuality has unwittingly created the very thing it seeks to eradicate: raunch”