One of Levy’s major points is both vital and extremely well-illustrated. Adolescent girls are under tremendous pressure to adopt an image of sexual willingness and to prove it. Unlike women in their 20s or 30s, they’re unlikely to have a media-savvy filter for the messages they absorb. As a result, they’re in serious danger of being slandered at school and online, of sacrificing their youth to self-conscious nymphettishness, of getting pregnant and contracting STDs more often than girls in comparable countries, and of learning too late that sex is something they should actually enjoy. Her chapter on the confusing paradoxes of contemporary urban lesbian culture will also have relevance for younger lesbians unsure of where they fit in.
Unfortunately, “Female Chauvinist Pigs” as a whole lacks the requirements of really energizing feminist polemics—a smooth, engaging prose style; a bird’s-eye view of class, race and geography; and a rallying cry for concrete solutions or alternatives. Most distractingly, Levy provides readers almost no sense of her own background with or relationship to these subjects, except in a few tantalizing statements (inevitably in parentheses).
