Book Signing: "Female Chauvinist Pigs"

I went to the signing of Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy at Politics and Prose. The book itself was a facinating concept. Levy argues that the popularization of 'raunch culture' is seen by the masses as an empowerment of female sexuality; however, in reality, the commodification and sexualization of women, by women, is actually objectification and a reiteration of women being second class citizens. Additionally, the raunch culture objectifies lesbianism, using it for heterosexuality.

However, you can read the book, it's fantastic! What was interesting to me was the commentary by people attending the lecture.

There was one woman there who, for lack of a better term, was a bigot. She had obviously come to this extremely liberal talk thinking that the actual purpose of it was to teach parents how to prevent their children from entering into the raunch culture. Everyone knew from the first second that she opened her mouth that there was going to be a problem.

A main tenant of the belief that raunch is empowering to women is that women want to "be like men, " and that they see men empowering themselves through the objectification of sex and women and therefore they join the bandwagon. Where the entire room saw that the obvious answer to this dilemma was feminism, and the understanding that we cannot empower ourselves by objectifying ourselves, this woman had a different take on the issue. She said that women are biologically made the way they are and they need to act according to their biology. She argued that women need to fit into their role. She went on a tangent at this point talking about the "normalcy" of the biological role. I quote: "women and men are made to biologically fit together. That is the only way it should be."
I was fuming. What about the intersexed, the transsexual, the lesbians, the gays... how can you say that they are biologically determined to play a specific role? And secondly, what does this have to do with raunch culture? Being myself, I had to get up at the mic and say that there are multiple shades of gender and that nobody is required biologically to fit into a specific role. Also, I decided to go back to the main argument in saying that the raunch culture actually reinforces the gender binary, making women the "other" in comparison to "man." Additionally, this raunch is reinforcing the split between heterosexuals and homosexuals due to its false play with lesbianism.

Many other people took the stand, taking jabs at both the issue and the woman. Eventually the woman decided she had to have the last word (surprise, surprise). She got up and starting going on and on about how there is a misconception about the way it used to be (i.e. in the 1950s). She basically idolized the '50s it seemed, thinking that there was no problem with the way women and men were treated back them. This time she actually did connect back to the issue, though not till the very end, saying that: "All of this raunch culture has done awful things to the murder rate. There didn't used to be so many abortions. There didn't used to be so many babies born out of wedlock!" She then starting pulling statistics out of her arse, but I couldn't hear them because of the tremendous uproar. People started standing up and shaking fists. One man stood up and bellowed: "There weren't as many babies out of wedlock because we FORCED the women to marry if they got pregnant!!!!!" Others screamed that she was utterly wrong. I don't know, I haven't seen statistics on this; however I think she was completely skewed.

Either way, Ariel Levy did something surprising and I love her for it: "Ma'am, I think you should sit down unless you want people throwing my novel at you."

Just to emphasize how much this woman offended me, on the way out, I overheard another conversation she was having:
"You know all they want to do is conquer us. I read the Koran! The entire text is telling them to conquer the world. That's all it's about!"
Please.........