Are You a Chauvinist Pig?

This chapter finds that the male chauvinist pig was easy to spot but hard to define. It offers an exploration of the various incarnations of male chauvinist piggery and provides insight into the confusion surrounding many people’s encounters with feminists, the Women’s Liberation Movement via the mass media and in daily life. The media continued to trivialize feminism and the women’s liberation movement, using headlines and content to turn serious struggles into an ongoing joke about the Female Chauvinist Pig. Meanwhile interviews, surveys, and personal testimonies often revealed through humor that the male chauvinist could possess a mixed political consciousness that was far from settled. In much the way scholars have come to understand feminisms as complicated through the lens of intersectionality, chauvinism was not a singular concept but a set of fluid sometimes contradictory ideas, attitudes, and moods. Even self-declared male chauvinists had reactions sometimes surprisingly similar to their feminist adversaries. In fact, there was little agreement on who or what defined a male chauvinist pig and although he could be an asshole, he was more complex than a simple stereotype.