Oink! The Male Chauvinist Pig And The Erasure of Feminist Humor in The 1970s

 

The most famous male chauvinist pig was a white, middle-aged tennis player named Bobby Riggs who in October 1973 lost a highly-publicized, battle-of-the sexes to female tennis champ Billie Jean King. Although King’s infamous victory would shape the trajectory of women and sports and the larger liberation movement of which she was a part, Riggs would help transform the male chauvinist pig into an endearing icon. Despite his humiliating defeat, he inspired men in the face of feminist adversaries to embrace array of schoolboy antics and everyday challenges to feminism that turned on comic relief, jokes, and reflected a larger assumption that feminists lacked humor.  The male chauvinist pig’s popularity is revealed through cheap jokes, popular musician’s lyrical taunts, and advertisements for kitschy merchandise.  Much like the playboy's bourgeois lifestyle, but far more accessible to the ordinary man, the male chauvinist provided a way for men to assert a rebellious attitude that was part of a longer history of the male rebel whose celebrated style and other accouterments were particularly well-suited for a consumer-oriented capitalism. To be sure, some chauvinist pigs did little more than whine about their own victimolgy, but the more appealing image was that of the male chauvinist pig with a panache for self-mockery.  In bold contrast, feminists were cast as moralizing and without humor, despite a rich history of feminist street theater and comic comebacks.