Raunch feminism
"Our popular culture," says the New York Times, paraphrasing Levy, "has embraced a model of female sexuality that comes straight from pornography and strip clubs, in which the woman's job is to excite and titillate — to perform for men. According to Levy, women have bought into this by altering their bodies surgically and cosmetically, and—more insidiously—by confusing sexual power with power, so that embracing this caricaturish form of sexuality becomes, in their minds, a perverse kind of feminism."
In an interview with Salon, Ariel Levy says: "In this new formulation of raunch feminism, stripping is as valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education or supporting rape victims. Throwing a party where women grind against each other in their underwear while fully clothed men watch them is suddenly part of the same project as marching on Washington for reproductive rights."
If you want to see the ideology of raunch feminism—the idea that women can achieve empowerment without bothering to dismantle the male-centric values of patriarchy— in action, you just have to turn to an article in last week's Sunday Times. The article ran in the Style section which, from the URL, you'll notice the Sunday Times groups as a "women's interest" (presumably on the assumption that only men are reading the politics and economics sections of the paper). "Tokyo is still the most mind-melting city on the planet, but, as Jessica Brinton reports, its radical fashion, sexual bravura and cultural weirdness are finally beginning to liberate its women". And there we have it, the usual idiotic, cliched Western take on Japanese women. They are "behind" Western women, diminutive, cute, squeaky-voiced and "submissive" creatures who are only now beginning to catch up thanks to... well, thanks to raunch.
Japan is conservative, says Brinton, "a country where females are still not allowed to ascend to the throne. The 1960s and its feminist revolution never happened there." Wow, so feminism was all about allowing every country to have its own Queen Elizabeth II! Who knew? Brinton continues with her catalogue of "feminist" developments in Japan: male hairdressers are now trained to flirt with their female customers! And there's something we might call 'equal-opportunity objectification' going on: "We all know about hostess bars, the men’s pleasure domes that hit the big time during the 1980s economic boom. Now there are host bars too, for Japan’s rich and independent-minded women."
Inevitably, the Sunday Times gets around to the old prostitution-as-empowerment line: "The Japanese are the mad professors of consumer desire, and Shibuya girls — female teenagers who treat this place like their playground — are the most brand-savvy of all. They congregate inside the auditory bedlam of the Shibuya department store 109. Or outside McDonald’s, where they occasionally pick up older men for a few hundred yen (the extra cash goes towards the latest Chanel handbag). Aggressive, self-empowered and sexy, they dress as they want — from orange tans, razor-sharp stilettoes and microskirts, through Victoriana to extreme punk with pink nail varnish — shop as they want, and behave exactly as they want."
Woooh! Yeaaaaaah! How much for thirty minutes? Raunch feminism, you rock!