Female Chauvinist Pigs

The explanation that Levy provides in the discussion on what female viewers and readers got out of raunch culture and how girls just want to be “one of the guys” I feel is true to a certain degree. I think the biggest issue in women taking on this new female chauvinism is the fact that they want to mask their insecurities by pretending to be okay with raunch culture, rather than comparing themselves to the women in it.

Joe Francis and the Girls Gone Wild group has simply mastered the art of peer pressure. The success in the GGW business has come from their ability to convince girls, minus the ever-so willing ones, in public places, surrounded by their peers, that this is what they want to do. Had the girl in the black bikini not become surrounded by people on the beach, undoubtedly GGW would have received no footage. Now that the GGW empire has been created, however, it’s much easier to receive immediate voluntary footage. It’s sad to see that we have come from a world where porn and such was a “back alley” deal for women to secretly make money to a world where porn is a center stage deal for women to earn themselves a trucker hat.

The Gay and Lesbian Niche Market

Given that the statistics provided in the reading on the average annual income were researched in the early 1990's, I don't think they would have been so accurate but maybe even a bit modest. During this time, homosexuality was still on the cusp of breaking through conservative backlash, which inevitably caused many people to "stay in the closet" out of fear. I would be interested in knowing what the difference would have been in average annual income had the majority of the gay population been accounted for. This, along with the other reasons provided, I think is was led to the discredit of these types of statistics.

In the reading it is stated that, "characteristically, consumer culture offers redress for the disenfranchisement of those who have traditionally been cast as "other" on the basis of their identities." Despite this fact, would marketers even have acknowledged this group had they not become a rather large proportion of the population and proved to exceed the national salary averages?