Ariel Levy

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Ariel Levy is a contributing editor at New York magazine and author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Vogue, Slate, Men's Journal and Blender.

Levy was raised in Larchmont, New York, and attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s. Her experiences at Wesleyan, which she says had "co-ed showers, on principle," strongly influenced her views regarding modern sexuality. After leaving Wesleyan she was employed by Planned Parenthood for about a week but was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist." [1] She was hired by New York magazine shortly thereafter. Levy has explored issues regarding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian culture, and the pop culture popularity of U.S. staples like Sex and the City and Gwen Stefani. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts concerning the status of modern feminism.

The video series Girls Gone Wild got some searing criticism from Levy after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the young women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the alleged debauchery she was witnessing. For many of the girls Levy spoke with, "bawdy" and "liberated" were synonymous; for them, Girls Gone Wild was only one example of something that was happening all across popular culture. Levy herself felt that these women, and women as a whole, had forgotten that sexual power is only one variety of power, and that "this spring-break variety of thongs-and-implant exhibitionism" is only one variety of sexuality. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Female Chauvinist Pigs

Levy's experiences amid Girls Gone Wild appear again in Female Chauvinist Pigs, attempting to explain "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit." In today's culture, Levy writes, the idea of a woman participating in a wet T-shirt contest or being comfortable watching explicit pornography has become a symbol of feminist strength; she notes she was very surprised at how many people, both men and women, working for programs like Girls Gone Wild told her that this new "raunchy" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, as it supposedly proves U.S. women have become strong enough to express their sexuality publicly.

On the other hand, Levy does not feel it is good for women to resurrect stereotypes of women's sexuality that the original feminists fought to break free of. "It is worth asking ourselves," she writes, "if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go."

Her book has met with mixed reactions. It was criticized for its assertions regarding the nature of sexuality and gender: critics said that women are not playing into a male-dominated sexuality through these practices, but only expressing their own desires and personalities, and that public displays of sexual power are indeed a valid and proper expression of empowerment. Levy's work has notably drawn fire from the proponents of entertainment groups such as CAKE, which describes itself as "Committed to examining and demystifying the politics of female sexuality." ^{[citation needed]}

Outside of this, however, there are many who have given Female Chauvinist Pigs excellent reviews, calling it "smart," "closely argued," and "accurate." There are also several other authors who have written similar critiques of modern feminism, such as Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty and Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. ^{[citation needed]}