Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs denounces the belief that women must be overtly sexual in the way they look, act, dress and speak in order to feel “empowered” – the raunch culture that has taken over today’s mainstream society is nothing but a vale hiding the regression, rather than the progression, of the feminist movement. Today, women are being duped into pursuing sexual freedom, empowerment and liberation via scandalous clothing, sexy dance moves and promiscuous sex; this pursuit is nothing but an abandonment of the real empowerment and liberation and equality that the foremothers of the earlier waves of feminism fought so hard to achieve; they lobbied and persevered so that women could be considered equal to men, and now raunch culture has women looking like nothing more than mere objects for men to ogle and fondle. Such abandonment is present in various aspects of media, including the focus on this particular blog: Jersey Shore. Jersey Shore is a show on MTV that aired in late 2009 and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. It follows the lives of 7 Italian-American twenty-somethings as they spend their summer living in a house together on the Jersey Shore, drinking, partying and fist pumping all the while. Specifically, the clip I have chosen is the trailer that MTV aired for several weeks prior to the show’s premiere; even though this is just a preface to what the show actually entails, one can see that this show and the women in it align with Levy’s school of thought that women in today’s society are tricked into accepting the ideals of raunch culture as liberating and feminist, evident in the way that the female characters dress scandalously, dance provocatively and live promiscuously.
In terms of clothing, the women of Jersey Shore all have pretty much the same mentality: wear the least amount of clothing possible in order to expose as much skin, particularly cleavage, as they can. According to Levy, our current “establishment” has decided that scantily clad women are in fact the “strong, powerful” ideals to which we all must aspire (Levy, 26). Snooki, a self-proclaimed “guidette” who stands barely at 5 feet tall often wears tops that expose her breasts in order to attract men because her mission in life is to “marry a guido. [Her] ultimate dream is to move to Jersey, find a nice, juiced, hot, tan guy, and live [her] life.” Levy would say Snooki and the other women of Jersey Shore’s desire to be “overtly and publicly sexual” in the way they dress stems from the fact that we confuse “sleazy energy” with real human sexuality in modern society (Levy, 26). Since “hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it” (Levy, 31) the girls of Jersey Shore spend their money on hair extensions, fake tanning, clothing and makeup to achieve the “hotness” level required to be considered desirable by the opposite sex. In other words, they feel dressing “slutty” and looking sleazy way will allow for them to exude their sexuality or sexiness to the public, and to ultimately attract male attention, whether it is positive or negative.
When the residents of the Jersey Shore house go out to party, they aren’t messing around – the women are on prowl for their next victim, aka hook-up. The women of the Jersey Shore are aggressive predators who have an insatiable sexual appetite and they have no problem of making it known to the opposite sex; one of the girls, Sammi, stated on the show’s premiere, “Your No. 1 mission is to go out and find the hottest guido and take him home.” JWoww also had similar thoughts, proclaiming: “I’m like a praying mantis. After I have sex with a guy, I will rip their heads off. I have a bad habit of playing little emotional games with men. When they date me, it’s cool at the beginning, we do our thing in the first month, and then I send them on a roller-coaster ride to hell.” When the girls go out to clubs, they bump and grind with strangers – Snooki once declared, “I just let loose and fuckin’ kill it on the dance floor” – all night long, hoping the unknown men buy them drinks, and come home with them for to continue the night back in the Jacuzzi at the Jersey Shore house, and eventually end up in the bedroom with them. In the way the Jersey Shore girls act at the clubs and towards the opposite sex, Levy might say that they are “projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention [they] receive for [their] physicality is welcome” (Levy, 33). Is this liberation? Is this empowerment? Levy would say a resounding “NO” and suggest that these girls have become desensitized to their actions when they go out; they don’t think it’s a big deal to gyrate on the dance floor with strange men, or make out in public and take random guys home – to her the world has become “a pretty trashy place” (Levy, 35) and the girls of Jersey Shore are simply adding to the mess and have no intention of cleaning up after themselves anytime soon.
Furthermore, Levy would say that these girls are even going so far as to act like men, in that men are usually the ones on the prowl for women, trying to get them drunk enough to come home with them and have an uninhibited one night stand. While a lot of Levy’s focus on women “acting like men” has to do with the business world, I think it’s definitely an issue in the case of the girls of Jersey Shore. These women are trying to prove their worth and make themselves acceptable to the men they encounter at the clubs night after night. It’s like a reflex for them – they think it’s necessary for them to stand out enough in order to find a guy finds them sexy and wants to get to know them long enough that he wants to go home with them. To Levy, these girls are “tomming,” or “conforming to someone else’s—someone more powerful’s [men, television viewers, entertainment industry executives, etc.]—distorted notion of what [they] represent” (Levy, 106). They figure, “Hey, I’m on Jersey Shore, I need to act this way in order to keep up my reputation/image,” and hey buy into raunch culture because it’s how they’re going get attention and score with guys. And now, it’s how they’re going to pull a $10 000 per episode paycheck week after week when Jersey Shore hits MTV for its highly-anticipated second season.
On the other side of the spectrum, Levy’s detractors would say that the Jersey Shore girls are progressive, and they’re helping empower the female youth of America one fake tan at a time. Some would say that these girls are an abandonment of the Italian-American women often portrayed on television – either loud-mouths, housewives or daddy’s girls. They live their lives how they see fit; they do what they want, when they want and give a big ““FUCK YOU! If you don’t want to watch, don’t watch. Just shut the hell up! I’m serious. FUCK YOU!” (courtesy of Snooki) to those who think they are permeating negative stereotypes or setting poor examples by giving into raunch culture on international television each week. In fact, some might go as far to say that these girls are revolutionaries and a breath of fresh air – what’s wrong with girls knowing what they want to look like (fake hair, fake boobs, fake tan) and knowing what kind of guys they want (“Tall, completely jacked, steroids”), and going after both of these goals with a “I don’t give a f***” type of attitude? Levy’s opponents would say that these girls are sexually free, and are simply embracing their human sexuality for no reason other than it’s how they want to live their lives.
Ultimately however, Levy’s argument holds far more merit than those of her opponents and the Jersey Shore girls prove that accepting raunch culture as “normal” and living life according to this type of culture causes a regression in the feminist movement. After all, how could the likes of Snooki, Sammi and JWoww really be considered visionaries for the feminist movement? Simply put: they can’t. The girls of Jersey Shore make it seem okay to dress baring everything, leaving nothing to the imagination, dance like they’re having sex on the dance floor, and have sex with any guy that bats their eyelashes at them; they believe that by acting this way they are empowered in that they have control of their lives, but they have it backwards. In reality, they have no control because the way they are perceived by society is anything but positive – they are walking jokes around the water coolers in most offices, in the common rooms of dormitories and on most Hollywood entertainment talk shows. I also think that maybe it’s just their television persona, and they know that the way they act on TV is going to make them the most talked about characters around, so they do it for the popularity and for the money. We don’t really know who these people are, or what they’re all about – we only know what we see on TV, and for now I’m going to assume that what we see is what we get, and the girls of Jersey Shore are very much like the people we see on MTV week after week. Anyways, the men on Jersey Shore aren’t a step up from the women, but that’s another blog entirely. Yes, Jersey Shore is a cultural phenomenon and these girls have become overnight celebrities, but in the end, they are doing nothing for the feminist movement except allow for the acceptance of raunch culture and the devaluation of women to pervade throughout mainstream society.
Oh the delightful Jersey Shore. Not only have these women tainted my home state, but they have also tainted women in general. Between the ripped t-shirts and Daisy Duke shorts, these women have no shame in letting it all hang out. These three girls are the epitome of Ariel Levy's Raunch Culture. They show how free and liberated they are through their sexuality. I agree with Lisa, these women do not act any different than the men. I guess nothing screams feminism like a bedazzled Ed Hardy tank top.
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