The Female Chauvinist Pig Ideology

I have nothing to say about feminism.

Except for this:
I have noticed that since reading Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy, in class, that many of the women who decided to begin a blog for their final project have decided to do so based around this book, carving out their own unique feminism, and their own unique counter to the raunch culture coined by Levy. It is my theory that everyone who reads this book is automatically obligated to become a feminist instantaneously. It is as though that feminism is now a new gender role that every woman must take up.

I for one believe that this is admirable. A consciousness about one's place in the world and their relations to others in important. As a man, I admit this. As a man, I admit, I too am a feminist.

What Ariel outlines is the idea that contemporary women feel that they have only one thing to offer to succeed in life. This is the sex, or conceding to male counterparts. But what she is also implying is that this is the only thing that men want, is the sex and the concessions made to them by female counterparts. While this may currently be true, I don't find these sentiments within myself, for what we are operating on is a system of expectations. There is a machismo expectation, a chopping wood expectation, a muscular expectation from men which stems from an inherent hunter instinct, a bring-home-the-bacon instinct. None of these I have, since my my body is too slender and effeminate to hunt, or build muscle, or make any money at any time, so I feel that I am prohibited by my gender role.

As Dag in Generation X would say, I am a lesbian trapped in a man's body.

Living in Salt Lake, I observe gender roles play out like gangbusters. This is a society where the church is prevalent. We have passed laws that force people to fall into their gender roles, the ideological role of marriage. This is a place that, if born into the religion, your role is mapped out for your throughout your life, and a deep schism and separation is made aware from the outset. Feminism is kind of like the desert here.

But outside of Utah, in real life, there is a semblance of hope. What Levy is writing about is a generation different from my own. I was born a generation later from those HBO executives she writes about. We are a generation apart from many of the people she targets in her book. She appears to be in or on the cusp of the Generation X. But I fall into the Generation Y, which is marked with cynicism and apathy and irony and technology, and the role of feminism seems to be moving closer and closer to a Julia Kristeva perspective, in The Cyborg Manifesto, whereas humans are becoming more and more interconnected to technology, which is sexless, that they themselves become sexless. The movement seems to be more toward an androgyny of a Woolfian type, but with a technological basis.

Therefore, I believe as we move closer and closer to a unixex culture, there will still remain one last bastion of sexism:


This image reminds me of some other image I recall in my recent past:


This picture, illustrated by Jacques Lacan, is telling of the remaining gender differences that will be the most persistent in society. The doors are the same, the toilets are the same, the only thing separating the two is the acknowledgement of difference in genitals. As long as we are forced to acknowledge that our genitals are different, we will always acknowledge that we are different, which will stem into a percieved knowledge that our roles are different, no matter how androgynys we may become. When we move further towards technology to the point where we cannot see each other, and are able to ignore the slight physical difference between each other, perhaps then we will be able to inhabit more equitable planes.