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Female Chauvinist Pigs

Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
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Jan 09, 2015ilanaaq rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Levy is generally quite astute – she writes intelligently with an accessible but not dumbed-down vocabulary. For the first three-quarters of the book, she also made the connection between the sexualization of women and the negative aspects – kids in thongs, womens’ value (both in society’s eyes and their own eyes) being equated with sexiness and baring all, the way people use each other, including the boi/butch/femme relationships within lesbianism, etc. The whole book is coherent and well thought out except for one section at page 158 where she lost that clarity of thought. In particular, she was talking about why abstinence education in high schools is ludicrous and says of the high schoolers’ general situation: “If you process this information [abstinence education] through the average adolescent mental computer, you end up with a printout that reads something like this: Girls have to be hot. Girls who aren’t hot probably need breast implants. Once a girl is hot, she should be as close to naked as possible all the time. Guys should like it. Don’t have sex.” The next paragraph begins, “It’s interesting (in a nauseating kind of way) to watch educators struggle to make this message coherent.” From there she spends several pages bashing abstinence education without addressing the fact that there could _possibly_ be something wrong with the first four sentences of the “printout." This is even more surprising considering the first three-quarters of the book did shed critical light on the general situation described in those first four sentences. Overall, it was a worthwhile read, but it's important to keep the thinking cap operational at all times!