Female Chauvinist Pigs

Meet the ‘female chauvinist pigs’ – a new generation of ‘empowered women’. If the male chauvinist pigs of yesteryear saw women as pieces of meat, today’s female chauvinist pigs go one better, wearing the Playboy bunny with pride and making sex objects of themselves. They think they’re being brave, they think they’re being funny – but, Levy asks, what if the joke is on them?

Levy interviews young women raised on a diet of Paris Hilton and plastic surgery, and dissects the media and marketing that have helped to promote ‘raunch culture’. She argues that the trend reveals unresolved conflicts between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution – and that rather than being a sign of women’s liberation, today’s ‘raunch culture’ is doing young women real harm.

In the afterword to this new edition, she reflects on her initial findings and considers how much – or how little – has changed five years on. Hailed as ‘provocative and persuasive’ by the New York Times and ‘brilliantly acerbic’ by Linda Jaivin in the Monthly, Female Chauvinist Pigs remains the definitive account of a phenomenon that refuses to go away.

About the Author

Ariel Levy is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Vogue, Slate and New York Magazine.