Ariel Levy | |
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Born | 1974 (age 49–50) |
Occupation | Writer |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Wesleyan University |
Notable works | Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005) |
Spouses |
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Website | |
ariellevy |
Ariel Levy (born 1974) [1] is an American staff writer at The New Yorker magazine [2] and the author of the books The Rules Do Not Apply and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture . [3] Her work has appeared in The Washington Post , The New Yorker , Vogue , Slate , and The New York Times . Levy was named one of the "Forty Under 40" most influential out individuals in the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate . [4]
Levy was raised in a Jewish family [5] in Larchmont, New York, and attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, graduating in 1996. She says that her experiences at Wesleyan, which had "coed showers, on principle," [6] strongly influenced her views regarding modern sexuality. [7] After graduating from Wesleyan, she was briefly employed by Planned Parenthood but claims that she was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist." [8] She was hired by New York magazine shortly thereafter.
At The New Yorker magazine, where Levy has been a staff writer since 2008, she has written profiles of Cindy McCain, Silvio Berlusconi, Edith Windsor, Caster Semenya, Lamar Van Dyke, Mike Huckabee and Callista Gingrich. At New York magazine, where Levy was a contributing editor for 12 years, she wrote about John Waters, Stanley Bosworth, Donatella Versace, the writer George W. S. Trow, the feminist Andrea Dworkin, and the artists Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow. Levy has explored issues regarding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian history and culture, and the popularity of US pop culture staples such as Sex and the City. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts on the status of modern feminism.
Levy criticized the pornographic video series Girls Gone Wild after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the debauchery she was witnessing. Many of the young women Levy spoke with believed that bawdy and liberated were synonymous.
Levy's experiences amid Girls Gone Wild appear again in Female Chauvinist Pigs , in which she attempts to explain "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit." In today's culture, Levy writes, the idea of a woman participating in a wet T-shirt contest or being comfortable watching explicit pornography has become a symbol of strength; she says that she was surprised at how many people, both men and women, working for programs such as Girls Gone Wild told her that this new "raunch" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, but Levy was unconvinced.
Levy's work is anthologized in The Best American Essays of 2008, New York Stories , and 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary .
In 2013 The New Yorker published her essay, "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" about the loss of her newly-born son at 19 weeks while traveling alone in Mongolia. [9] In March 2017, Random House published Levy's book, The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir , about her miscarriage, an affair, her spouse's alcoholism, and their eventual divorce. [10] [11]
Levy was the co-writer for Demi Moore's 2019 autobiography, Inside Out . [12]
In April 2020, Levy wrote a controversial article for The New Yorker about Renee Bach, a white American missionary accused of pretending to be a medical professional and performing procedures on Ugandan children. [13] Levy took a sympathetic view towards Bach. The group No White Saviors, whose co-founder, Kelsey Nielsen, was interviewed for the article, demanded a full retraction and apology, claiming Nielsen was misquoted and discredited, and that Levy "underrepresented and manipulated" the experiences of alleged victims and purposely left out evidence against Bach in the article. [14]
Levy, along with actor John Turturro, adapted Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater for the stage. In 2023, the Signature Theatre Company produced it at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre of the Pershing Square Signature Center, an off-Broadway theater, with Turturro starring as Mickey Sabbath. [15]
Levy is openly bisexual. [16] She married Amy Norquist in 2007. [17] They divorced in 2012. [18] Levy chronicled the divorce in her memoir. [19] In 2017, she married John Gasson, a doctor from South Africa who tended to her during her miscarriage in Mongolia. [20]
Chauvinism is the unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak, unworthy, or inferior. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as a form of "excessive and unreasonable" patriotism and nationalism, a fervent faith in national excellence and glory.
Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most commonly examined at the level of a society, but can also refer to the behavior of individuals and is a type of dehumanization.
Sex-positive feminism, also known as pro-sex feminism, sex-radical feminism, or sexually liberal feminism, is a feminist movement centering on the idea that sexual freedom is an essential component of women's freedom. They oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults, whether they are initiated by the government, other feminists, opponents of feminism, or any other institution. They embrace sexual minority groups, endorsing the value of coalition-building with marginalized groups. Sex-positive feminism is connected with the sex-positive movement. Sex-positive feminism brings together anti-censorship activists, LGBT activists, feminist scholars, producers of pornography and erotica, among others. Sex-positive feminists believe that prostitution can be a positive experience if workers are treated with respect, and agree that sex work should not be criminalized.
Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Boi is slang within butch and femme and gay male communities for several sexual or gender identities.
Wendy Shalit is an American conservative writer and author who has written the books A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, published by Free Press in 1999; Girls Gone Mild: Young Rebels Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good, published by Random House in 2007; and The Good Girl Revolution: Young Rebels with Self-Esteem and High Standards, published by Random House in 2008.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is a 2005 book by Ariel Levy that critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".
Patricia Marx is an American humorist and writer. She currently works as a staff writer for The New Yorker, and teaches at Columbia University, Princeton University and 92nd Street Y.
Raunchy or raunch may refer to:
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Pornification is the absorption by mainstream culture of styles or content of the sex industry and the sexualisation of Western culture, sometimes referred to as raunch culture. Pornification, particularly the use of sexualised images of women, is said to demonstrate "how patriarchal power operates in the field of gender representation". In Women in Popular Culture, Marion Meyers argues that the portrayal of women in modern society is primarily influenced by "the mainstreaming of pornography and its resultant hypersexualization of women and girls, and the commodification of those images for a global market". Pornification also features in discussions of post-feminism by Ariel Levy, Natasha Walter, Feona Attwood, and Brian McNair. Pornography began to move into mainstream culture in the second half of the 20th century, now known as the Golden Age of Porn. Several Golden Age films referred to mainstream film titles, including "Alice in Wonderland" (1976), "Flesh Gordon" (1974), "The Opening of Misty Beethoven" (1976) and "Through the Looking Glass" (1976). Pornification is a product of the widespread availability of porn on the internet.
Emily Nussbaum is an American television critic. She served as the television critic for The New Yorker from 2011 until 2019. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
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