51�Թ�

In 2005, the year I graduated college, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs came out.

With the scales between men and women tipping towards equality, author Ariel Levy explains in "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" that in a hyper-sexual post-'90s America, many women performed their sexuality boldly, brashly for male pleasure.

The boxes of them recently cleared out of my mother’s attic and my undergraduate thesis — on Cosmopolitan, Ms., and Playboy magazines in the 1960s and ‘70s — prove it. My feminist awakening was, like many others’, peppered with gateway drugs like that: Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” the HBO series “Cathouse,” and, of course, Jezebel — the groundbreaking women’s website, which current owner G/O Media unceremoniously shuttered Thursday after more than 15 years, and where I worked from 2013 to 2017.

“Because of a spiteful female chauvinist rule,” he wrote, “male coaches are not allowed on the floor, and so it is like a science-fiction movie of a time when women have taken over. The judges are all women, as are the assistants, the messengers. The only men on the premises are the piano players — men being built for that sort of quiet work — who huddle together on a bench by the baby grand.”

In 1972, Friedan famously called Abzug and Steinem “female chauvinist boors.”