PARIS HILTON

As we have been writing for some time now, Paris Hilton is ready to launch a pop career. As unbelievable as it might actually sound, Paris Hilton signed a recording contract with Warner Brothers Records. Paris might just become the new Britney Spears, who knows.

She has reportedly summoned the incredible writing powers of Cathy Dennis, who penned chart-toppers like Britney Spears' 'Toxic' and Kylie's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head.'

Her debut album is set to feature a track called 'My Mistake' - recorded about the famous sex footage of the heiress and her boyfriend which set the internet ablaze.

BRITNEY SPEARS

Britney Spears is planning on a pop comeback because she's reportedly bored by the music playing on MTV and the radio, according to a published report.

The uber-critical Pop-Tart turned her back on recording and touring nearly two years ago to become a wife and mother, but now she's ready to challenge the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson & Hilary Duff and reclaim her pop crown.

She tells People magazine, "I haven't seen anybody out there who has had a performance where I'm like, 'That's fukking awesome.' It's been boring."

FROM FEMINISM TO RAUNCH CULTURE

In the new raunch culture, the freedom for women to be sexually provocative has usurped genuine liberation.

A few years ago I noticed something strange was happening in my native US. I would turn on the television and find strippers in nipple-tassels explaining how best to lap-dance a man to orgasm.

I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me that I felt like we used to go out.

In my own industry - magazines - a porny new genre called lad mags were hitting stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture in the past: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.

Some odd things were happening in my social life too. People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating and rebellious.

My best friend from college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars.

Only 30 years (roughly my lifetime) ago, our mothers were supposedly burning their bras and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?

What was even more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and - often - the women who edit magazines such as Maxim and produce reality television series about strippers.

This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd "earned" the right to look at Playboy; we were "empowered" enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes.

Women had come so far, I learned, that we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture where men had been enjoying themselves all along.

If male chauvinist pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would beat them at their own game and be female chauvinist pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.

I tried to get with the programme, but I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavoured to banish good for women? Why is labouring to look like Paris Hilton empowering?

And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star - a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place - going to render us sexually liberated?

This new raunch culture is being replicated in the UK too. As Natasha Walter noted after the publication of Naomi Wolf's new book last month, there's "a general feeling that feminism had become tolerant of cultural sexism".

And that cultural sexism is linked to underlying political and economic inequalities that make it not so ironic or funny.

There is a widespread assumption that, simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda.

But it doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and buttocks we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go.

Many women today, whether they are 14 or 40, seem to have forgotten that sexual power is only one, very specific, kind of power. And what's more, looking like a stripper or a Playboy bunny is only one, very specific, kind of sexual expression.

Is it the one that turns us - or men - on the most? We would have to stop endlessly re-enacting this one raunchy script to find out.

We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly girls in G-strings faking lust.

This is not a sign of progress, it's a testament to what's still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all of its complexity and power.

We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex that we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept of "sexy". It's kind of pathetic.

Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short.

Without a doubt there are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. I wish them many blissful and lubricious loops around the pole.

But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter - more empowered, more sexually liberated, and all the rest of it - if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment.

This is not about the sex industry; it's about what we have decided the sex industry means ... how we have held it up, cleaned it off and distorted it. How we depend on it to mark us as an erotic and uninhibited culture at a moment when fear and repression are rampant.

In 2004, George Bush, the leader of the free world, proposed an amendment to the United States constitution to for ever ban gay marriage - which was already illegal. In opinion polls, about 50% of respondents said they thought Bush had the right idea.

If half my country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law) that they turn their attention - during wartime - to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated.

Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words.

The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only "women's issue" worth paying attention to.

And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist.

There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire.

We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex, instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be sexual liberation.

If we believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or like men or like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves.

That won't be easy, but the rewards would be the very things Female Chauvinist Pigs want so badly, the things women deserve: freedom and power.

Ariel Levy @ Guardian