Free Republic

Earlier this year, I got the call that every author pines for. Wendi Wan, a producer from the "Dr. Phil" show, alerted my publisher that the daytime pop psychologist wanted to design a program around my new book, "Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good." They would need copies straightaway, and soon I was subjected to an hour-long interrogation. To my great relief, I passed the inquest, and my appearance on "Dr. Phil" was confirmed. Yet the producers required others to appear with me, and they needed my help. And so, for...

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch CultureBy Ariel Levy (Free Press, 224 Pages, $25) Once men like me were the enemy. Today we are the ideal. Well, not exactly. The drunken frat guy is the ideal. As are juggly strippers. As far as feminists are concerned, I still am the enemy. That's pretty much what I got out of Ariel Levy's new study of raunch culture, Female Chauvinist Pigs, that the new feminism is simply the old objectification of women repackaged in a sleazy wrapper. Midway through Ms. Levy's treatise we hear this from one successful New...

-snip- Levy, 31, has written a book on a topic as prickly as its hot-pink cover. "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" is a collection of investigative pieces that takes the author from a spring-break Florida beach where giggling college students lift their shirts for video crews from the popular "Girls Gone Wild" soft-core empire and backstage with the women producers of Comedy Central's erstwhile Juggy-fest, "The Man Show" to interviews with teens and 20-somethings on their attitudes toward sex. It's part of the job description of being female, to couch all their success and intelligence...

Politics and creativity are not always mutually exclusive. Recently, terms such as “South Park Republicans,” and “Trustafarians” have been coined, and now, Ariel Levy has unveiled, “FCP,” which stands for, “Female Chauvinist Pig.” The peculiarities of this peculiar cultural phenomenon are explored in her new book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. What exactly is a FCP? She is a woman possessing male sexual proclivities, who has, what can be described most charitably, as alternative cultural values. Often, she is an aficionado of porn, a habitué of strip clubs, or, in the case of one young...

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...

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn't, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in "Female Chauvinist Pigs." It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls "raunch culture," now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with "Porn Star" across the chest. Teen stores sell "Cat in the Hat" thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters' friends to "cardio striptease" classes for birthday parties. This is liberation? Ms. Levy is baffled. "Why," she wondered, "is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?" Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before...