Disturbed

I just came across the most disturbing website. Some dude has been taking random pictures of curvy women and posting them on the web. It's basically a whole web page full of big bootied women in tight jeans. I'm not going to post the link because I don't want to direct anyone to a website that encourages men and women to objectify and reduce a woman to the size of her ass or cup size.

It's funny that I should run across this website, randomly, after starting an excellent book called Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy (Levy writes for New York magazine), which details the bizarre and very alarming trend among young women to exploit other women and themselves as sex objects and call it "liberating" and "powerful". Levy discusses the birth and death of radical feminism and the division amongst women involved in the movement over pornography.

Over the last decade or so I've had a lot of problems with boyfriends, roommates, friends and, in the past 2 1/2 years, fellow volunteers, chastizing me for my often times loud vitrolic objections to pornography. I've been called a prude, uptight and an all around spoilsport because not only does pornography make me uncomfortable (I feel a genuinely uncomfortable and embarassed for the women being degraded in pornography) I honestly don't find it empowering towards women at all. In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Levy does an excellent job of explaining how we've been sold the idea that women can only be powerful through selling themselves as sexual objects, only this time the pornography industry calls it "liberation" and "freedom" for women. They've made women feel like they've got complete control over their sexuality, which, I guess they do, but at the expense of making themselves into sexual objects.

If you're at all interested in pornography or the really odd, ugly direction pop culture has taken in the past few years, you should check out this book. You might not find yourself nodding your head and shouting "Right on, sistah!" like I do (okay, I don't actually yell that outloud, but I do in my head), but it's good food for thought.