Female Chauvinist Pigs
Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Introduction
I first noticed it several years ago. I would turn on the television and find strippers in pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out.
Charlie's Angels, the film remake of the quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one in 2000 and made $125 million in theaters nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its stars, who kept talking about "strong women" and "empowerment," were dressed in alternating soft-porn styles -- as massage parlor geishas, dominatrixes, yodeling Heidis in alpine bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 -- in which the Angels' perilous mission required them to perform stripteases -- pulled in another $100 million domestically.) In my own industry, magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag, which ... read full excerpt from: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture ebook