2008 Woodie Awards
Scholar takes action for women
Donnae Wahl
Issue date: 2/6/08 Section: News
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According to Kenna Johnson, the coordinator for the Women's Resource Center, 589 tickets were distributed in advance for the event.
Levy's book documents the change in cultural norms, with many young women embracing "Playboy," "Girls Gone Wild" and stripping; things that were once considered a male chauvinist realm.
"I just noticed that all at once, five years ago, that what was considered acceptable had changed," said Levy, a graduate from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. "When I was growing up, feminism had some kind of power, even if it was just a joke. In America, at that time, it was becoming inappropriate to treat women as objects."
According to her book, that has changed. But it's not men treating women as objects, it's women treating themselves as sexual objects. Levy noticed a change in young American women eight years ago.
"I would walk around New York City where I lived, and all these girls would be wearing Playboy bunny shirts. 'Sex and the City' was on television at the time, as was 'The Man Show.' It struck me that things had changed," Levy said. "We're going back to this retrograde sense of humor."
"Female Chauvinist Pigs" is taught in many Women's Studies 101 classes at UNC. According to Barbara Hawthorne, who is a lecturer in women's studies and anthropology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the book is taught because of the way it speaks to college students.
"It is consciousness raising, it pulls them in and provokes their thinking," Hawthorne said. "The pressure on both females and males about their appearance above everything else. It is so striking and so poignant that they fall in the trap."
As far as Levy is concerned, there is a certain message she would like readers to take away from her book.
"I'd like females and males to take away some kind of open-minded inquiry to what we are taught to consider normal," Levy said.
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