Trouble at the Raunch?

There’s a theory that’s still prevalent in some of the higher echelons of academia about the “death of the author”
As I understand it, mainly from reading an essay by David Foster Wallace on the subject, the theory posits the notion that authors are basically a conduit for the broader social and political concerns of their time.
But after going through the all the theories on the subject in some detail he ends the essay with the Occamian, no-bullshit line, “the damn books don’t write themselves.”
I thought about this a little when I finally got round to reading Fat Land last week and realised that I’d read almost all the arguments before, as I felt I had when I read the highly-regarded Silent Takeover by Noreena Heertz a few years back.
Likewise I felt able to comment on the god-awful book by David McWilliams which I never bothered reading beyond the first line as was obviously bereft of any new ideas and written in prose that would have made me throw up and have to pay the library to get a new one.

I feel much the same way about Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by the wonderfully named Ariel Levy, who’s obviously pointed the right way to pick up current trends. Maybe if you got up on the roof and turned her around she’d write a book about global warming or obesity, but faced the way she is she’s managed to write a book about something everything columnist has already spent their 2 cents on, and that adds up to quite a few euros in this age of information overload.
Her startlingly unoriginal thesis is that women are co-operating in their own oppression by confusing “raunchiness” with liberation, wearing playboy T-shirts in much the same way the global corporations market the image of Che Guevara.

I’m really grateful that we have observant authors who’re able to read the signatures of all things in ways that mere bloggers like myself aren’t able to. Me, I’d never have noticed that young girls walk around in t-shirts with pornstar written on them or wear tight tanktops and skirts that barely cover their asses because I’m not really attuned to that sort of thing but even if I was I wouldn’t be able to interpret the broader trends behind all of this because I’m just a blogger.
It seems that she thinks that women have been fooled into thinking that they’ve achieved equality and that’s why they can parade their sexuality with aplomb. But she warns, as many feminazis do, that the sex war isn’t over yet as women in the most highly paid jobs can get paid as much as 15% less than their male counterparts. To me, the issue is not that female executives don’t get paid enough, but get paid too much, while their male counterparts get paid way too much.

Chuck Palinhuk wrote that we can’t start talking about equality until men can have kids and he has a point: What man on the top end of the pay scale wouldn’t take a 15% pay cut in return for being able to retire and have kids any time he wants?
Even though the doubtless lovely-but-not-in-slutty-way Ms. Levy may think she has her finger on the pulse, she may be missing out on a more profound reason for the rise of “raunch” in the last few years.
When the cold war was going on, people in the west developed a consumer lifestyle in opposition to the dreary conformity of the Warsaw Pact countries. Our new enemy, or at least so we’re told, is the fundamentalist Muslim World, where women are are forced to cover up every part of their bodies.
Just as during the cold war their was a large movement to convert the west to a nicer version of socialism, now there’s a new Puritanism in our society which the likes of Levy seem to represent.

I was reading one of her fellow-travellers in our own Sunday Tribune yesterday who claimed that she saw young girls who were “…dressed, and there’s no other way to say this, like whores.”
Oh, No? What about B-girl, bag, bawd, bimbo, blower, broad, call girl, camp follower, cat, chicken, chippie, concubine, courtesan, fallen woman, floozy, harlot, hooker, hostess, hustler, loose woman, midnight cowboy, model, moll, nymphomaniac, painted woman, party girl, pickup, pink pants, pro, scarlet woman, slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tart, tomato, tramp, trollop, or working girl?
The fact that she didn’t know any of these terms, or have the presence of mind to look them up on www.thesaurus.com as I just did doesn’t say a whole lot for her journalistic abilities.
What’s more shocking is that the author of this lexically-challenged piece tells anyone who didn’t fall asleep before getting that far that she finished her own primary education all of half a decade ago, which would make her 23.
I could have a cheap shot at her and say she’s probably a lesbian but the truth is probably more complex than that.

I read that one of the Queen Bees of Feminazism, either Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon claimed that women who suppose erroneously that they enjoy sex are “collaborators” in a “Sex War” to which I can only reply, speak for yourself, you fat dyke!
People who’ve done research into the area rather than assume that their own prejudices reflect universal truths have found that at least 30% of women enjoy having sex just as much as men. For the vast majority of civilisation women’s sexuality has been denied as much as their intelligence or their ability to do most jobs as well as men, or even their humanity in the case of loony-tunes philosophers like Descartes.

We’re probably living in a brief Chrysalis moment where women are both able to enjoy the benefits of civilisation and live a sexually liberated life, yet an unholy alliance of radical feminists and the religious right wants to deny them this.
In John Updike’s latest book, Villages, set in the 60’s a woman utters the immortal line “the only thing we have to trade on in fucking, and since the pill the price has gone way down.”
The fact that sex isn’t something women have to withhold from men in order to gain financial security is something that ought to be celebrated.
Which is why I got such a kick from reading this review from the Guardain:

There, there, dear," I kept wanting to say to Ariel Levy, as I read her rightful, righteous wrath about women's collusion in their own objectification, their willing embracement of - hell, no, grotesque submission to - the current dominant value of "hotness". (Which she well defines as the constant demonstration not of actual desire but of simulated desirability conjoined with availability.) Don't take on so. What else would you expect in a world that has commodified desire along with dissent? Just laugh at the lapdancers, pet, and giggle at the college girls going wild: you'll only wear yourself out fulminating against fashion, and fashion is what it is. It will pass. Corsets and chemises did. Besides, you've a gift for reporting - your description of an uncool woman challenging a female media boss at a press conference has clarity with depth - and you wouldn't want to spend the next 20 years tossing off copy on tits and totty any time an editor wants to run explicit pictures, would you? Now go and research women's economics, which I bet you could make interesting.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.