using the master's tools.

so maybe you’ve heard of this book, Female Chauvinist Pigs. i can’t get away from it - the feminist blogosphere is all atwitter with debates about sex-positive feminists, anti-porn feminists, raunch culture, sex, power, and agency. of course, i must chime in.

some reviews of the book are sympathetic, others are more critical. the author, Ariel Levy, makes the argument that after the feminist split in the 70s into “sex-positive” and “anti-porn” camps (a binary that i’m not entirely comfortable with, but whatever), the sex-positive idea got lost (or subsumed) in a sea of raunch-filled, male-dominant media culture. the result is a generation of girls who embrace Playboy, cardio strip-tease classes, Girls Gone Wild, etc. in other words: female chauvinist pigs.

i have to say, i’m more sympathetic to the sympathetic reviews. those critical of Levy’s argument feel that she dismisses the way that the third wave has taken media culture and done their best to work from within it, to subvert the culture using its own recognizable signs and symbols. i’m torn about this. on one hand, i don’t know how anyone can claim to stand above culture in order to critique it – we’re all immersed in pop culture all the time, and it’s dishonest to try to look at it from the outside. you can’t. however, it’s also intensely problematic to try to use the master’s tools to dismantle his house. i think that the predominance of “choice” language to describe feminism has been insidiously hurtful in that regard – when you have a woman saying she “chose” to get breast implants “for myself,” because it “made me feel good,” you know something has gone horribly wrong.

the root of the whole problem, i think, is the conflating of sex with power. as far as a patriarchal culture goes, sex is never truly power. sex can be influence, sex can be manipulation, sex can be personal gain, but it’s never cultural power. and for god's sake, don’t trot out Madonna. i'm so tired of hearing about Madonna as feminist icon. Madonna used sex for personal gain, and did it incredibly well – good for her. she controlled her own image and her own little media empire, and made a killing. however, for all of the feminist rhapsodizing about her gender-bending and her role-playing, it didn’t translate into shit. because what did we end up with, 20 years later? Britney.

seriously, don’t even get me started on it. Madonna? owned companies like BoyToy Films and Slutco. Britney? didn’t understand that she didn’t own her BMW, but leased it. Madonna? sang about expressing yourself. Britney? sang about being a slave for you.

this is why sex does not equal cultural power. sex (even the “subversive” kind) can sooooo easily be co-opted by power structures like record labels or movie companies or whomever, and repackaged so as to re-inscribe the underlying patriarchal culture. and you end up with Madonna admitting that she was sleeping in Britney t-shirts because she thought they would bring her luck.

i've said it before, and i'll say it again: a system doesn't reform itself.