Am I a Lipstick Feminist or a Female Chauvinist Pig?

I went to the Women's Studies Conference yesterday; I spent the whole day there and I am really glad I did because I got to see a pattern of thought within Lubbock feminism at least in regard to women in the media. To say that women are sexualized in the media is an obvious understatement. You can't really be a feminist, even if you're in the early stages, to realize that. But as Sara Peso White put it, there's really no escaping it, and sometimes we find ourselves consuming it and allowing it to influence our realities of gender roles and female sexuality. According to Ariel Levy, this is when we risk becoming "female chauvinist pigs."

Now, I have not read this book but I am familiar with Levy's work and her basic premises, so forgive me if I get her message wrong here. This book has been mentioned over and over in my classes and is a very influential work so it's probably about time I got around to reading it. In any case, I couldn't help thinking what Levy would think of me and the media that I consume while I was listening to these presentations at the conference.

This blog is meant to be a way for me to rip myself open in terms of my feminism, and it wouldn't be genuine if I didn't question my own motives or wasn't brutally honest about who I am. When the presenters were showing these sexualized pictures of women, I thought of the pictures I had saved on my own desktop of various actresses and artists I admire - and by admire, I also mean feel attracted to. And a lot of them are heavily sexualized images:

I grew up with these kinds of images like other girls, but unlike other girls who aspired to look like them and suffered over it, I just...wanted to get with them. I thought "Man, she's really beautiful" and appreciated what looked like her enjoying her own beauty, her own sexuality, her own confidence. That's what I wanted as a girl, even as I knew I would never look as "perfect" as they looked. Perhaps in a way, my sexual fluidity (I shy away from the term bisexuality as I don't think that label really applies to me well) provided a kind of resiliency against poor body image that many straight girls I knew experienced. This is only a theory, and would need to be tested out, but this was my own meaningful experience.

So, as I said in my blog post about Glee, these pictures are hot, they are arousing, and I like looking at them. Does this make me a female chauvinist pig? Am I looking at these women through the same lens as the chauvinist male gaze? I guess you could argue that. At the same time, I am mindful of the fact that everyday women don't look like this and it is not something to aspire to. And yes, maybe these women are exploiting themselves, but seriously, isn't feminism about making your own choices, not the right choices according to certain people, whether it's feminists or anti-feminists?

In conclusion, I guess I outed myself in this blog post in a couple of ways, both as a sexually fluid woman and possibly a lipstick feminist, which is apparently a bad thing according to Levy and other feminists like her. And as a side note, this does not mean I am just looking for surface beauty in either a man or a woman. I want brains and looks and sex appeal according to what attracts me; I want the whole package. And I'm sorry, but no one, feminists or anti-feminists alike, is going to make me feel bad for what gets me off.