Tits and ass used to be for the boys. In porn, it was all about the money shot.

But these days, women buy porn, go to strip clubs, get Brazilian (all the way) and Playboy (landing strip) waxes, wear Hustler and Playboy T-shirts and talk openly about sex. This is raunch culture, where women are no longer sexual objects, and no longer simply the hunted. Now, men don't have to twist women's arms to get them naked and in front of a camera.

The setting is Miami Beach in the summer of 2005. A gang of dudes with a camcorder approache a bunch of bikini-clad chicks. The guys walk cockily up and yell, "Hey ladies, show us your tits!" Chances are, you don't have to picture it in your head. You might have already seen it in the video "Girls Gone Wild: Beach Babes 2," in which young women are willing and eager to show their stuff off for the boys (and girls) at home.

If this happened in the '70s, at the height of the Women's Liberation movement, it might have gotten ugly. And the women would've probably sported one-pieces and armpit hair instead of triangle tops and no hair.

So what happened in the last 30 years? How did we go from women's liberation to women's indulgence?

In a new book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture," author Ariel Levy defines raunch, and argues that in 1970s America, major progress was made toward gender equality. "Roe v. Wade" and the Equal Rights Amendment were on everyone's minds. Women were suddenly going to Ivy League schools, working more, burning their bras and demanding oral sex. Talk of clitorises was no longer shushed.

Then, sometime in the 1980s and '90s, porn became popularized. Howard Stern started showcasing strippers and porn stars on his radio show. Pamela Anderson became a household name. And it became trendy for straight women to go to strip clubs, get lap dances and watch other women take it all off.

Sophie Cho*, a 28-year-old San Francisco professional, typifies raunch culture: she occasionally indulges in porn; keeps it Brazilian "down there"; and talks frankly about doin' it, just like her idols on "Sex and the City."

"A generation of women has been brought up to ignore their sexuality and the power dynamic that female sexuality can bring," Cho says. "Now many young women are saying, 'The heck with that. We have libidos and we're not gonna apologize for it.'"

Fernando Socorro, who teaches Women and Media at SF State, ties the shift to the evolution of mass media over the last few decades. "The ubiquity of media in general, the saturation, has a lot to do with the rise of raunch," he says.

It's now hard to imagine a future in which women don't indulge in these formerly boys-only games. Waxes and T-shirts will surely fade with changes in fashion. But it can't be wrong for the ladies to be in touch (pun intended) with their own sexuality. People like Levy will argue that contemporary women are fooling themselves, wrapping their behavior in the cloak of liberation. But with women increasingly calling their own shots, everybody scores.

* Name changed to protect source's identity