Sometimes I look up from my bookshelf of feminist classics and examine the miniskirts, the lap-dancing clubs, the sexualisation of modern society and wonder what the hell happened? I struggle to see the liberation in sex work, the empowerment in selective sexism. If you asking those questions too, then this is the book for you. At 200 pages, Female Chauvinist Pigs is a short, snappy diatribe on the raunch culture and the women who buy into it. Levy deconstructs modern culture from Girls Gone Wild to the rise of abstinence only sex education to explain why this isn't what feminism was working towards and how far we have to go. It makes for a shocking but fascinating read that deals with business, stripping, teenage sexuality and the LBGT scene. Her main arguments, that putting down the girls so you can be one of the boys doesn't work well for the rest of womankind and that our static view of sex as consisting of porn stars, boob jobs and showing off is constricting and damaging the development of women's real sexuality, are convincingly argued and backed up by examples ranging from statistics to personal experience to interviews. The book is engagingly written and bursting with fresh insight, I personally enjoyed the chapter dealing with the Lesbian scene because I knew so little about it. It is however very America-centric although readers from other countries will be able to empathise and find examples of what Levy discusses in their own culture. It is also, unfortunately, like most feminist books very much focused on the white, middle-class ,who to be fair do make up much of the phenomenon that Levy is dissecting, but it would have been nice to talk about the many black, disabled or working-class women also affected by the rise of the raunch culture. The lack of the latter seems like an oversight because they do make up the majority of the women feeding the obsession; they're the strippers, porn stars and lap dancers. That Levy manages to avoid blaming the women, from Playboy's CEO to the HBO boss who bought the world G-String Divas, is to her credit but it is coupled with an abdication of responsibility for the men involved that I find irritating. These problems however, which only began to bother me after several rereading, do not distract from a book that is worthy of the title, feminist classic. Everyone, male or female, should read this if only to remind them of how far we have to go.