Why do middle-class mums go to the gym for pole-dancing classes? Because, says Ariel Levy, they have been conned by kitschy, slutty ‘raunch culture’
Some version of a sexy, scantily clad temptress has been around through the ages, and there has always been a demand for smut. But whereas this was once a guilty pleasure on the margins — on the almost entirely male margins — now, strippers, porn stars and Playboy bunnies have gone mainstream, writing bestsellers, starring in reality television shows, living a life we’re all encouraged to emulate. Prepubescent girls wear ‘thong’ underpants, their mothers drive off to the gym for pole-dancing classes after lunch.
Last week Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, hit out at what she called ‘pimp and ho chic’. ‘A lot of people seem to think that it’s cool to be a pimp or a ho,’ she said. ‘But it’s not cool. The reality is dark, evil, appalling and unregulated. There are thousands of ads, mostly focused on women and young girls, that say you are not attractive, you are not sexy, you are not intelligent unless you look like this. Something has gone very wrong.’
What Dame Anita called ‘ho chic’ I call ‘raunch culture’, and it’s everywhere. Men and women alike have developed a taste for kitschy, slutty stereotypes of female sexuality — we don’t even think about it any more, we just expect to see women flashing and stripping and groaning everywhere we look.
Not so long ago the revelation that a woman in the public eye had appeared in any kind of pornography would have destroyed her reputation. 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. She managed to make a comeback as a singer, but the point is that being exposed as a porn star then was something you needed to come back from. Now, it’s the comeback itself.
Paris Hilton was just a normal, blonde New York socialite, an heiress with a taste for table-dancing, before she and her former boyfriend Rick Solomon made a video of themselves having sex. Somehow the footage found its way on to the internet and was distributed worldwide, after which Paris Hilton became one of the most recognisable and marketable female celebrities in the world. Since the advent of the sex tapes, Hilton has become famous enough to warrant a slew of endorsement deals. There is a Paris Hilton jewellery line (bellybutton rings feature prominently), a perfume, and a string of nightclubs called Club Paris set to open in London, New York, Atlanta, Madrid, Miami and Las Vegas. She also has a modelling contract for Guess Jeans, and her book, Confessions of an Heiress, was a bestseller. Her debut CD — the first single is entitled ‘Screwed’ — is about to be released. Paris Hilton isn’t some disgraced exile of our society. On the contrary, she has become our mascot, the embodiment of our collective fixations — blondness, hotness, richness, anti-intellectualism and exhibitionism.
The rise of raunch culture in the West seems counterintuitive to some. What about conservative values and evangelical Christianity? they wonder. But raunch culture transcends political parties both in America and the UK because the values people vote for are not necessarily the same values they live by. Even if people consider themselves conservative, their political ideals may be a reflection of the way they wish things were, rather than an indication of how they plan to lead their lives.
Raunch culture is not essentially progressive; it is essentially commercial. It isn’t about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple and, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff — big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs — then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping: you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.
There is a disconnection between sexiness, or ‘hotness’, and sex itself. As Paris Hilton told Rolling Stone, ‘My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.’ And any 14-year-old who has downloaded her sex tapes can tell you that Hilton looks excited when she is posing for the camera, bored when she is engaged in actual sex. (In one tape, Hilton took a cellphone call during intercourse.) She is the perfect sexual celebrity for this moment, because our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure.
Passion isn’t the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture is less about ‘connection’ than consumption. ‘Hotness’ has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to acquire it. Hotness is not the same thing as beauty, which has been valued throughout history. Hot can mean popular. Hot can mean talked about. But when it pertains to women, hot means two things in particular: fuckable and saleable. These are the literal job criteria for our role models: strippers and porn stars. These are women whose profession is based on faking lust, imitating actual female sexual pleasure and power. If we’re all trying to look like porn stars these days (and we are), we’re imitating an imitation of arousal. It’s a long way from sexual liberation.
This is not a situation foisted upon women. In the West, in the 21st century, we have opportunities and expectations that our mothers never had. We have attained a degree of hard-won (and still threatened) freedom in our personal lives; we are gradually penetrating the highest levels of the workforce; we get to go to college and play sports and be secretaries of state. But to look around, you’d think that all any of us women want to do is to rip off our clothes and shake our butts in men’s faces.
So why do we go in for raunch culture? Why, when the feminist movement was supposed to have freed us from stereotypes, have we deliberately embraced them again? The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only ‘women’s issue’ worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. It’s ironic that we call this ‘adult’ entertainment, when reducing sexuality to implants and polyester underpants is really pretty adolescent.
Ariel Levy’s book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, is published by Simon & Schuster.