Female chauvinist pigs sparknotes

How naive those women were to think they'd achieved anything; equal-opportunity farting - now that's what I call progress.

An injustice!

While male chauvinist pigs have long been derided, the coinage of Levy's title has risen to the top, claiming that her love of 'all things bimbo' is the gloriously liberated end-result of second-generation feminism. Gloria Steinem?

I don't trust women. The Observer Books.

She s the crew of cult TV-show Girls Gone Wild, in which women are recruited in bars and on beaches and asked to flash for the camera. It's hard to know exactly what to think, because if the women who like it say they find it empowering, who's to argue with their feelings?

She goes to high-end porn parties for liberated working women, at which troupes of girls in satin panties and thigh-high boots shimmy on a stage. Levy documents the 'pornoisation' of our culture and investigates women's collusion in it.

At one point, a female TV producer comes up with this stirring call to arms: '[Boys] get to fart, they get to be loud; now we're saying we can fart and curse and go to strip clubs just as well. She puts it together through skilled, laconic argument and sleek reporting: the mush of ideologies, the Chinese-whispered legacy of feminism, now mutated into a hydra of entirely confounding proportions.

Women, she learns, are 'redefining themselves'; it is empowering to have an overview of an ironic cultural phenomenon; they are 'transcending' feminism or commenting on it.

Women, it seems, either want to be 'like men', in the most limited definition possible, or they want to be like the siliconised women they think appeal to men. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too. If you had arrived in America, as I did, two years ago, and tried to make sense of the position of women here, you might have found yourself wondering how any of this had happened.

Erica Jong offers Levy a sanguine, succinct position: 'The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power - I mean, I'm for all that stuff - but let's not get so into the tits and ass that we don't notice how far we haven't come.

Before we write this book off, we need to be wary that “female sexual liberation” is not “female objectification” under a new name

The Female Chauvinist Pig, Levy argues, is 'post-feminist. She gets it. In Female Chauvinist Pigs, she finds a thread that follows and lays bare all these contradictions. Susan Brownmiller? Silicone sisters. Buy Female Chauvinist Pigs at the Guardian bookshop. Seventies radicals, help us out here! How the place that gave us Gloria Steinem could now be teetering on the edge of banning the right to an abortion.

There is always the option of debasing everything. A of women I know have remarked on what Levy calls 'raunch culture', but nobody wants to be the humourless prude who doesn't 'get it'.

Why try to beat them when you can them? Though the picture is far from reassuring, I'm glad to hear Ariel Levy confirm that it makes no sense at all.

Yet everywhere else she looks, Levy is told that women who are uncomfortable with raunch should 'get with the program'. All this has more than a whiff of the emperor's new thong about it; you'd need subtitles to see the commentary, and this 'new feminism', as Levy puts it, looks very much like the old objectification.

Even women, he explains, don't want to hang out with women. The female organisers claim to be showing 'feminism in action'. Hell, no.

About the author:

We all know our bodies and our selves, don't we? She interviews recent graduates and high-powered executives; she finds strippers hired for teenage girls' birthday parties, and a new fashion for 'top surgery' double mastectomies among gay women. Levy's book is timely.

She is funny. Reuse this content. They find this so exhilarating, Levy is told, that the programme's creator has likened the flashing girls to feminists burning their bras. Gaby Wood.

How reality shows, in which women were surgically transformed into identical Barbie dolls, could become the most widely watched phenomenon on television. How teenagers across the country could be taught abstinence as their only form of sex education, despite evidence that this had resulted in the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the industrialised world.

How Oprah Winfrey could declare true 'liberation' for women to be found in a book offering advice on the accurate assessment of men's desires.