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Jewish World Review Sept. 23, 2005 / 19 Elul, 5765 Female chauvinist pigs By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The next big thing in cell phones, The New York Times reports,
will be pornography. As more advanced phones feature full-motion
Internet video, they will become portals for X-rated content. This
is in keeping with a technological dynamic as important as Moore's
Law, which says computer chips roughly double in power every 18
months — to wit, every technological advance serves the more
efficient delivery of pornography.
We live in a world seemingly designed to gratify the teenage boy
in the movie "Animal House" who is looking at a copy of Playboy when
miraculously a cheerleader is thrown through his window and onto his
bed. "Thank you, G-d!" he exclaims. Our "raunch" culture, as author
Ariel Levy calls it, abounds in such moments for lascivious male
teenagers of all ages. Among the forces supporting this pornified
culture that gleefully objectifies women, according to Levy, are
women.
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"A baseline expectation that women will be constantly exploding
in little blasts of exhibitionism runs throughout our culture," Levy
argues. "'Girls Gone Wild' is not extraordinary, it's emblematic."
Women strive to look the part. Breast-augmentation procedures zoomed
from 32,607 a year in 1992 to 264,041 last year. A gruesome-sounding
surgical procedure to make women's genitalia look like those of porn
stars is increasingly popular.
It wasn't so long ago that pornography was disrespectable:
"Think of Vanessa Williams, crowned the first black Miss America in
1983, and how quickly she was dethroned after her nude photos
surfaced in Penthouse." In contrast, Paris Hilton's sex video
rocketed her to stardom. Hookers and porn stars are mainstream
figures.
This isn't quite the liberation feminism promised. "Raunch
culture is not essentially progressive," Levy writes, "it is
essentially commercial. By going to strip clubs and flashing on
spring break and ogling our Olympians in Playboy, it's not as though
we are embracing something liberal — this isn't Free Love. Raunch
culture isn't about opening our minds to the possibilities and
mysteries of sexuality. It's about endlessly reiterating one
particular — and particularly commercial —shorthand for sexiness."
No lustful man would have looked at Gloria Steinem in the 1970s
and thought, "She is going to help fulfill my most absurd
voyeuristic fantasies." But the currents unleashed by feminism,
especially the drive to have women behave like men, have done just
that. The mother of the hyper-sexualized pop star Christina Aguilera
has said of her daughter, "She's a wonderful role model, trying to
change society so that a woman can do whatever men do." Since women
don't have the same interest in seeing members of the opposite sex
expose themselves and dress in skimpy bunny costumes as men do,
acting like men effectively means objectifying women, too, playing
along with the sweaty teenage fantasies. Levy describes going to a
gathering of a group called CAKE, devoted to female sexuality" and
experiencing "feminism in action." It devolves into women performing
Sapphic sex acts for the men in the crowd.
All of this isn't healthy for anyone, guys or gals. But men —
at least men without daughters — will have very little interest in
changing it, and as long as the feminist left associates sexual
restraint with outdated prudery, there won't be pressure for change
from that quarter, either. So Levy cries in the wilderness, while
all around her lascivious men ogle the movable bimbonic feast of
American culture and lift their voices to the heavens: "Thank you,
G-d."
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||||||
