Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  Gibson and Shelly were sitting in back, drinking beer and looking at their football playbook, and Diana was on her cell phone with Clara. She snapped it shut and said, “She’s being an asshole. She’s not coming.”

  “What did she say?” Kim was crestfallen.

  “She’s just being an asshole.”

  Kim went home.

  “What did she say?” Shelly asked after Kim was gone.

  “She said she wasn’t coming here unless she knew she could get laid.” Diana’s phone rang again. “That was her. Now she’s coming.”

  “I worry about that one,” said Gibson, rolling her eyes. “Then again I worry with every twenty-one-year-old I meet that they’re gonna get their tits lopped off.”

  When Clara arrived at the Lex, she looked too young to be in a bar and too small to be allowed on a roller coaster. Diana pulled Clara onto her lap and said, “See, she’s nice to me because we’re not going out, but if I were your girlfriend I’d think you were a dick!”

  The next night was chilly but sweet-smelling and Gibson was riding her motorcycle, whipping around the curves and up the hills. At around ten she went to Club Galia to see “In Bed with Fairy Butch,” the burlesque cabaret show a woman named Karlyn Lotney has been putting on since 1995. Lotney is a short, hefty butch who uses Yiddish phrases and has a sort of lesbian Nathan Lane vibe. She gives regular seminars like “Femme/Butch Sex Intensives” and “Dyke Sex: Nuts & Bolts,” but she is best known for these shows. She called an audience member up onstage and asked her, “What kind of girl or boi are you into?”

  “That one,” the woman said, pointing at her date.

  “What, have you moved into some weird, monogamous, non–San Franciscan zone?” Lotney asked. She called the date up onstage and the couple made out for several minutes in front of the hooting audience. “Okay! Enough with the processing! Who wants to get laid?” Lotney shrieked.

  A gay guy in his twenties came up onstage and agreed to get his first kiss from a woman. “A real dominant one,” he said.

  Lotney smiled. “Why don’t you show him what we’re doing these days, ladies?” A muscular girl with a shaved head leapt onstage, grabbed the man, and kissed him with a truly impressive show of ferocity. “Yeah!” Lotney yelled. “This is San Francisco! This is what we do!”

  When they were finished, a dancer, chunky and lipsticked, stripped down to her underpants on stage before going into the audience and shaking a dildo at them, which she ultimately put in her mouth.

  Gibson headed out into the night.

  She pulled her Honda Nighthawk in line with a row of other bikes and went into the backyard garden of her favorite bar, the Eagle, a place that shows gay men’s S&M porn on television monitors. She pointed to a dark area behind the cement fire pit. “I had mad sex with this girl there one night,” she said. “The next morning I was like, What did I do? How old was she? I ran into her a few weeks later on the street and we went for beers. She was one of these arty types who won’t give you a direct answer, but I kept asking her until finally she told me she was twenty-eight. So we had mad sex again. But this time inside.”

  Gibson said that she would have nothing against settling down. “I keep trying to grow up,” she said. “But it never seems to happen.”

  There are aspects of life in the lesbian community that are distinct and not really comparable to life in the heterosexual mainstream, and of course the young New York/San Francisco scene is only one small slice of lesbian America. But despite the differences between the scene and, say, spring break in South Beach, there are also meaningful similarities in the ways young women across this country, gay and straight, are conceiving of themselves, their bodies, sex, and each other. Women are invested in being “like a man,” and in the case of FTMs, women are actually becoming men. There is contempt and condescension for “girly-girls” or “bitches” or “hos,” confusingly coupled with a fixation on stereotypically feminine women (especially if they are stripping or dancing on tabletops). Elective cosmetic surgery—implants for straight women, mastectomies for FTMs—is popular to the point of being faddish. Noncommittal sex is widespread, and frequently prefigured by a public spectacle: a coed group pumping their fists at the strippers onstage at a CAKE mixer in New York; a drunk girl heeding the call of Girls Gone Wild to show her tits in Miami; a room full of lesbians hooting at a dildo-wielding dancer at “Fairy Butch” in San Francisco.

  This isn’t about being a lesbian, it’s about being a woman. Or a girl.

  Five

  Pigs in Training

  There’s a rumor going around that “rainbow parties” are the latest teen rage. Rainbow parties are good old-fashioned slumber parties, with a distinctly contemporary twist: All the girls in attendance put on a different color of lipstick, invite over one lucky boy, and then one by one they treat him to oral sex until voilà! His penis is a spectral color chart.

  Everyone talks about rainbow parties, but no one will admit to actually having been at one, which leads me to believe that rainbow parties are more like unicorns than like typical Friday nights. (Rainbow parties are not to be confused with rainbow gatherings, which also involve teens, bright colors, and casual sex, but take place in large wilderness areas, usually out West, where there are rock bands and camping and crafts besides fellatio.) If rainbow parties are a fiction, however, the climate in which they are plausible is entirely real.

  In December 2002, a middle-school girl performed fellatio on the high school boy sitting next to her on the school bus in Kingston, Massachusetts, while their classmates watched. The same thing had happened with a pair of seventh-graders on a school bus back in 1999 in Talbot County, Maryland, where an eighth-grade girl also fellated her neighbor during a crowded study hall. These incidents may have inspired two thirteen-year-olds in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, who were suspended for engaging in a round of oral sex (her on him) in the back of a school bus during a spring field trip in 2004.

  In the winter of 2004, an eighth-grade girl at Horace Mann, one of the top private schools in New York City, made a digital recording of herself masturbating and simulating fellatio on a Swiffer mop. She sent the clip to a classmate she liked, and in a show of gallantry that could come only from a teenage boy, he promptly broadcast the clip to all of his friends. Soon after, someone with the screen name “nyprivateschool” posted the entire thing on Friendster, a Web site where people of all ages can put up their own profiles, link to their friends, meet their friends’ friends, and form expanded online communities. After the digital video went up on Friendster, people started calling the school “Ho Mann” and referring to the incident as Swiffergate. As for the eighth-grader, like Paris Hilton before her, the dissemination of her amateur porn swiftly resulted in a major uptick in her level of popularity and celebrity. “People said they saw her walking down the hallway giving autographs,” said a seventeen-year-old senior at Manhattan’s Trinity School named Talia.*

  “At our senior retreat we all did raps, little skits,” one of her classmates added. “One of the lines was: It was the year of Paris Hilton and the Ho Mann ho!”

  There was more blow job trouble later that year at Fieldston, another elite New York City private school. A white female freshman had oral sex with a black male freshman. He dumped her soon after, and she retaliated by calling him the n-word in an instant message to a girlfriend and saying some other pretty awful things. The girl who received the IM told a couple other people about it, and somebody printed it out at school the next day. It quickly ended up in the headmaster’s hands. “Then there was an assembly and the girl gave a written apology which someone else read,” said Daniel, a Fieldston junior. “The girl was in school for a day. Then she was suspended. Then the disciplinary committee met and they deliberated for like three hours and then they asked her to leave.” She was punished, to be sure, but she was also the talk of the town.

  On a Saturday afternoon that spring at a shopping mall in Connecticut called the Stamford Town Center, I
asked some teens if they could imagine similar incidents occurring at their own schools. Alexa, a junior at Oyster Bay High who was looking at dangly earrings, said she would “definitely expect something like this.” She wore a T-shirt that said GOATS REALLY LIKE TO NIBBLE above a cartoon goat who appeared to be feeding off her newly sprung breast. “In my school, what was very popular was seventh- or eighth- or ninth-grade girls hooking up or having sex, whatever, with junior and senior guys,” she said. “Parents kept calling the school, like, why is this senior at my house when my daughter is a freshman? They dressed so provocatively, the guys couldn’t really tell how old the girls were…all they see is a hot girl.”

  Like a lot of teens, Alexa’s classmates usually wore “tank tops with little Abercrombie skirts,” she said. “I call them belts because they’re so short they might as well be.” As if on cue, a trio in tanks and belts came giggling out of the store Forever 21. Two of them said they were twelve, the third was thirteen. Everybody said they wore thongs. (The thong is a literal byproduct of the sex industry. In 1939, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia insisted that the city’s exotic dancers cover their genitals for the World’s Fair, and the thong was born to placate his decree while exposing the maximum amount of skin. Now they are the underpants of choice for pubescent girls. I saw Hello Kitty thongs for sale at the mall; Abercrombie & Fitch—which markets to seven- to fourteen-year-olds—makes a thong that says WINK WINK and another that declares EYE CANDY; the teen chain store Hot Topic sells a Cat in the Hat thong; Delia’s has a little cotton thong with Bart Simpson on the front and another that asks FEELING LUCKY? with a green four-leaf clover stamped on the crotch. The urban youth Web site Dr. Jay’s has rhinestone Playboy bunny thongs with matching camisoles. When the Washington Post asked Hugh Hefner if he was concerned about his company’s attire being marketed to teens he replied, “I don’t care if a baby holds up a Playboy bunny rattle.”)

  Alexa looked pensive. “Actually, I guess something already has happened at my school,” she said and pulled a folded piece of paper out of her purse. It was a printout of her classmate Jen’s blog from LiveJournal, a Web site with over three million users that is extremely popular with teens, particularly teen girls. (It’s similar to Friendster in that it is ultimately a way for people to meet, or at least cybermeet.) The printout from Jen’s LiveJournal blog read: “I think it’s funny how you say: ‘i don’t need to cry acid tears to get attention, only wear a low-cut shirt’ so basically you’re admitting that you’re a slut? That’s what I thought, so shut your big ass mouth that’s been stretched out from those 5 dicks you sucked about 10 minutes ago and fucking listen up bitch.”

  The low-cut shirt-wearing subject of the rant, a freshman, distributed copies of the blog throughout the school, thus ensuring that everyone knew she was accused of dressing provocatively and fellating promiscuously…which is not really all that surprising when you consider that appearing slutty and getting recognition for it (she was suspended) are the fast track to heightened female stardom right now, in high school as in life.

  What all of these adolescent incidents have in common are, of course, exhibitionism and oral sex—oral sex for the boys, that is. Like the mythical rainbow parties, these situations revolve around girls giving erotic performances and boys literally lying back and enjoying the benefits. “A lot of guys expect oral sex,” Talia said. “Not girls…people would think they were weird if they did.” (That sentiment was echoed almost unanimously by the fifty young people I spoke to between the ages of twelve and eighteen; there is no clinical data available comparing the percentage of girls versus boys who perform oral sex.) I asked Talia if most girls expected any kind of reciprocal sexual gratification for their services. “I don’t think most girls are expecting to have orgasms in high school,” she concluded, “but most guys are. Oh, definitely.”

  Jessica, a senior from Southern California, keeps a home page on LiveJournal—a mosaic of pictures of Paris Hilton with the caption, “You are a blonde sickeningly happy and popular, some would consider you flaky as they come. It’s probably just because they’re jealous of your happiness. I mean…you have the looks, the lover, and the popularity…what more is there to life?” Besides Paris Hilton, Jessica said she looked up to Pamela Anderson: “i love their style and i have blue eyes and color my hair blonde and watch my weight,” she said, via instant messenger. She characterized her social group as sexually active, saying that oral sex was extremely common “especially for guys,” but for girls “not so much, i think it may be cuz they’re less comfortable with having someone down there.” Comparing oral sex to intercourse, Jessica said that “it’s not much of a difference” because both are “super casual.” “I think these days, people at my age, (around 16/17) are so desperate, they don’t really care who they get it from,” she concluded.

  Part of the reason they are so indiscriminate in their choice of partners is that the quality of these sexual encounters in terms of feeling or meaning isn’t really the point. Jessica described sex as something they engaged in primarily for bragging rights. “yeah, i have a good example for you! okay so like every weekend, i get together with a group of friends, guys and girls, and we end up playing this game called ‘slut on the bus.’ every player puts their hands up and takes turns saying things like ‘i never had sex’ ‘i never watched porn’ etc and if the other players have done that thing, they put a finger down. first person to put all ten fingers down wins! ‘slut on the bus.’ ”

  These are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool. While it would be “weird” for a teen girl to pursue sexual gratification, it is crucial that she seem sexy—raunchy, willing, wild. (That’s where the Internet really comes in handy. It allows young women to act out in front of the maximum number of eyes.) The Swiffer sucker and her compatriots at Fieldston and Oyster Bay High weren’t so much experimenting with sex as experimenting with celebrity, albeit a cheesy, tacky, rainbow party–esque version—the kind that’s the most popular and pervasive in our culture today. As one hipster from the senior class at the progressive, elite Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights said, “There’s something so Girls Gone Wild about this. Like videotaping yourself giving a blow job to a Swiffer? It seems like the kind of idea you’d get watching bad reality TV.” Which, of course, many Americans do: Bad reality TV is the most rapidly proliferating genre on television. You can almost imagine a show called Slut on the Bus as the next Survivor spin-off. Adolescents are not inventing this culture of exhibitionism and conformity with their own fledgling creative powers. Teens are reflecting back our slobbering culture in miniature.

  Life is pretty good if you’re David. He already had everything going for him: huge, ocean-blue eyes, a blond goatee, a coveted summer job as a ball boy for his hometown baseball team, the Oakland As, and the pleasant cockiness of a seventeen-year-old guy who is used to things working out. But after a fly ball hit him in the face during a late August game and a clip of the incident was played on ESPN Sport Center, David became a temporary local celebrity. People whom he had never met before started coming up to him to say Nice play! and more girls than usual were smiling at him in the halls at school. Not a bad set of circumstances in which to begin your senior year.

  “Plus I have a really great schedule,” he said over an iced coffee after his first day of classes. “I only have to be there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I can go skiing, I can go to Tahoe for the weekend, I can do whatever. And my classes are really cool: We’re reading James Baldwin and Tupac [Shakur]. It’ll be a great year. So that’ll be nice.”

  David waved every twenty minutes or so at the passing trios of girls in tight, low-rider jeans and tank tops milling around outside the Jamba Juice and the Peet’s Coffee and the Noah’s New York Bagels that sit in a row on Mountain Boulevard, about a half an hour east of San Francisco. This was in the wealthy part of Oakland, where the cars were
mostly Volvos, Saabs, and Range Rovers, within walking distance from Head-Royce, the small, private high school that David and his friends attended. These were teens whose parents paid a lot of attention—and money—to their children’s preparation for successful futures. The Head-Royce campus spread over fourteen acres with views of the San Francisco bay, the average class size was fifteen, and tuition for high school students was over $20,000 a year. For fun, they would occasionally go into the city to try their luck at the bars with their fake IDs, and David and his male friends had a “tradition” of going to a San Francisco strip club when one of them turned eighteen. But mostly their social life was local: Mountain Boulevard after school, weekend nights partying at the house of whoever’s parents were out of town, the occasional dance, the regular sporting events, the weekly boys’ poker night.

  “We need a guys’ night out, because at a party the main objective is like getting a girl’s number or getting with a girl,” David explained. “I have a friend who’s crazy…at the end of the night he’s just not happy if he’s not hooking up.” I asked him if by hooking up he meant actual sex or just fooling around. “It depends,” David said. “It’s like with some of his regular girls, that will happen.”

  David said that generally, his classmates were not promiscuous, but that looking loose was the defining characteristic of his female friends’ style. “There’s not really any sluts at my school, but if you walked in there on your first day, you’d think my whole school was sluts. Everyone’s in tight, white pants and little skirts and little shirts. I know girls who’ve gone on the pill even though they’re not having sex just so their boobs would get bigger.”

  There’s a lot to look at if you’re a guy, and a lot of pressure to make yourself worth looking at if you are a girl. David described the typical female getup as a uniform: a slut uniform. “Guys can wear all different styles,” he said, flapping the front of the blue polo shirt he was wearing. (In fact, he looked pretty much the same as the male seniors did when I was in high school: sunglasses, cargo shorts, flip-flops. Guy wear.) “Guys try to make a match, but you throw on some clothes and you’re just who you are and you hope the girls like you. If guys try too hard, they get labeled metrosexual or gay.”