Ariel Levy

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Ariel Levy (born October 17, 1974) is a contributing editor at New York magazine and author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Vogue, Slate, Men's Journal and Blender.

Levy was raised in Larchmont, New York, and attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s. She says that her experiences at Wesleyan, which had "co-ed showers, on principle", strongly influenced her views regarding modern sexuality. After leaving Wesleyan she was briefly employed by Planned Parenthood, but claims she was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist."^[1] She was hired by New York magazine shortly thereafter. Levy has explored issues regarding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian culture (Levy herself is a lesbian^[2]), and the pop culture popularity of U.S. staples such as Sex and the City and Gwen Stefani. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts concerning the status of modern feminism.

The video series Girls Gone Wild got some searing criticism from Levy after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the young women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the alleged debauchery she was witnessing. For many of the girls Levy spoke with, "bawdy" and "liberated" were synonymous; for them, Girls Gone Wild was only one example of something that was happening all across popular culture.

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 feminist 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 "raunchy" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, because it proved that U.S. women have become strong enough to express their sexuality publicly.

Levy argues for understanding of why some women have resurrected stereotypes of women's sexuality that the original feminists fought to break free of. "It is worth asking ourselves," she writes, "if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go."