The Female Avenger, Women’s Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television

The book by Ariel Levy which critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".

According to Levy, raunch culture is a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. Another source places the beginnings of raunch culture in the permissive society of the 1960s, which in postfeminist perspective was less about female sexual liberation than fulfilling the male fantasy of unlimited female availableness. Levy also characterizes raunch culture as a backlash against the stereotypes of “prude” and “uptight” (women) applied to many second-wave feminists (e.g., anti-pornography feminists). Marcuse's intuition of the increased role of sexuality in advanced industrialism was thereafter increasingly confirmed by a pragmatic alliance between neo-liberalism and the commodification of sexuality.

The 1990s saw the ever-growing sexualization of the media, with raunchiness emerging in the overlapping interfaces of music, TV, video and advertising. By the close of the century, figures like Germaine Greer were talking critically of bimbo feminism, whereby acknowledging one's inner "slut" (in a commodified context) was seen as an ultimate goal.

Levy claims that the enjoyment of raunch, or “kitschy, slutty stereotypes of female sexuality,” has existed through the ages, but it was once a phenomenon that existed primarily in the male sphere and has since become mainstream and highly visible. Raunch culture has penetrated “political life, the music industry, art, fashion, and taste.”