Princesses & Pornstars (Emily Maguire, Text, $32.95 pb, ISBN 9781921351310, March) ***

Modern-day feminists, if they exist at all, look very different to the crinoline wearing, bra-burning feminists of old. They come in the form of pouting, Paris Hilton wannabes and Brazilian-waxed pole dancers who claim that ‘feminism is dead.’ In her new book Princesses and Pornstars Emily Maguire looks at the very 21st-century phenomenon of raunch culture, its twisted logic and pseudo-sexual language, and asks: what happened to the battle ground? Sure, women can vote and get an education, but are they true equals? Are lap dances and glittery G-strings really a form of liberation? Or are women still pandering to the patriarch? Intelligent, witty, at times a little didactic, Princesses and Pornstars will leave you nodding your head with its judicious, good sense. But, disappointingly, Maguire doesn’t say anything new. She challenges age-old social and sexual stereotypes, looks at why feminism is, still, a dirty word, and encourages a culture of choice and equality. Princesses and Pornstars could sit next to Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs on the bookshelf, but it moves beyond being simply a critic of raunch culture and looks at other issues facing women today: motherhood, abortion and education.

Esther van Doornum works at Readings in Carlton

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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