BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine Read online

  to our readers

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  foreword

  introduction

  1 - Hitting Puberty

  Amazon Women on the Moon - Remembering Femininity in the Video Age

  Rubyfruit Jungle Gym - An Annotated Bibliography of the Lesbian Young Adult Novel

  Stormin’ Norma - Why I Love the Queen of Teen

  Sister Outsider Headbanger - On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead

  Bloodletting - Female Adolescence in Modern Horror Films

  The, Like, Downfall of the English Language - A Fluffy Word with a Hefty Problem

  Teen Mean Fighting Machine - Why Does the Media Love Mean Girls?

  2 - Ladies and Gentlemen

  Urinalysis - On Standing Up to Pee

  The Collapsible Woman - Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse

  The Princess and the Prankster - Two Performers Take on Art, Ethnicity, and Sexuality

  What Happens to a Dyke Deferred? - The Trouble with Hasbians and the Phenomenon of Banishment

  On Language - You Guys

  Skirt Chasers - Why the Media Dresses the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels

  Fringe Me Up, Fringe Me Down - On Getting Dressed in Jerusalem

  Screen Butch Blues - The Celluloid Fate of Female Masculinity

  Dead Man Walking - Masculinity’s Troubling Persistence

  3 - The F Word

  And Now a Word from Our Sponsors - Feminism for Sale

  I Can’t Believe It’s Not Feminism! - On the Feminists Who Aren’t

  Celebrity Jeopardy - The Perils of Feminist Fame

  Unnatural Selection - Questioning Science’s Gender Bias

  On Language - Choice

  Laugh Riot - Feminism and the Problem of Women’s Comedy

  Girl, Unreconstructed - Why Girl Power Is Bad for Feminism

  4 - Desire

  In Re-Mission - Why Does Redbook Want to Keep Us on Our Backs?

  Hot and Bothered - Unmasking Male Lust

  I Heard It Through the Loveline - And Misinformation Just Might Make Me Lose My Mind

  The New Sexual Deviant - Mapping Virgin Territory

  Envy, a Love Story - Queering Female Jealousy

  Fan/Tastic Voyage - Rewriting Gender in the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction

  Hot for Teacher - On the Erotics of Pedagogy

  Holy Fratrimony - Male Bonding and the New Homosociality

  5 - Domestic Arrangements

  The Paradox of Martha Stewart - Goddess, Desperate Spouse-Seeker, or Feminist Role Model?

  Double Life - Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts—Until Your Baby Needs Them

  Queer and Pleasant Danger - What’s Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?

  Mother Inferior - How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place

  Hoovers and Shakers - The New Housework Workout

  6 - Beauty Myths and Body Projects

  Plastic Passion - Tori Spelling’s Breasts and Other Results of Cosmetic Darwinism

  Vulva Goldmine - The New Culture of Vaginal Reconstruction

  Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? - Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show

  Busting the Beige Barrier - The Limits of “Ethnic” Cosmetics

  Your Stomach’s the Size of a Peanut, So Shut Up, Already - An Open Letter to Carnie Wilson

  Beyond the Bearded Lady - Outgrowing the Shame of Female Facial Hair

  7 - Confronting the Mainstream

  Pratt-fall - Ten Things to Hate About Jane

  Marketing Miss Right - Meet the Single Girl, Twenty-First-Century Style

  The God of Big Trends - Book Publishing’s Ethnic Cool Quotient

  The Black and the Beautiful - Searching for Signs of Black Life in Prime-Time Comedy

  I Kissed a Girl - The Evolution of the Prime-Time Lesbian Clinch

  XXX Offender - Reality Porn and the Rise of Humilitainment

  Bias Cut - Old Racism as New Fashion

  8 - Talking Back

  Please Don’t Feed the Models - A Day in the Life of an Urban Guerrilla

  Refuse and Resist with Jean Kilbourne - How to Counteract Ad Messages

  Full Frontal Offense - Bringing Abortion Rights to the Ts

  Meet Anne - A Spunky, Adventurous American Girl

  How to Reclaim, Reframe, and Reform the Media - A Feminist Advocacy Guide

  About the Author

  Praise for bitchfest

  the BITCHfest resource list

  about the contributors

  acknowledgments

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  foreword

  Margaret Cho

  WHENEVER ANYONE HAS CALLED ME A BITCH, I HAVE TAKEN IT as a compliment. To me, a bitch is assertive, unapologetic, demanding, intimidating, intelligent, fiercely protective, in control—all very positive attributes. But it’s not supposed to be a compliment, because there’s that old, stupid double standard: When men are aggressive and dominant, they are admired, but when a woman possesses those same qualities, she is dismissed and called a bitch.

  These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard. Not being a bitch means you agree with all the bullshit. Not being a bitch means you don’t appreciate all the other bitches who have come before you. Not being a bitch means since Eve ate that apple, we will forever have to pay for her bitchiness with complacence, obedience, acceptance, closed eyes, and open legs.

  There is a dangerous myth going around this country that sexism doesn’t exist anymore, that we have gotten past it and that “alarmist” feminists are an outdated nuisance. Warnings like “Oh, watch out—here comes the feminazi!” abound in our culture, as if for a woman, entitling yourself to an opinion puts you on a par with followers of the Third Reich.

  Women who are dissatisfied with the status quo are often met with society’s ire. They say we are outlaws, we are enemies, we are in need of a “real man” to show us what’s what. Here’s just one example: When I was seventeen, I went to see a friend’s band in a little roadhouse shack about three hours outside of San Francisco. My friend Rebecca and I were almost the only audience members, except for a really drunk guy near the bar. He kept trying to talk to us, and we just ignored him, which just made him try harder to get our attention. We started laughing at him because he was getting madder and madder that we didn’t want to have sex with him. After the show, Rebecca and I walked out to my car, which we had parked next to a field. It was very late and very dark and very rural. We got into the car, and as I looked out Rebecca’s side, I saw a man’s crotch through her window. It belonged to the drunk guy from the bar, a guy now so angry at our independence that he had sobered himself up and was out for revenge. He tried to open the door, but Rebecca had locked it lightning fast. (Feminists have great reflexes.) Screaming, I peeled out of the parking lot as the formerly drunk, now-even-madder mad guy chased after our car with a pair of nunchakus—yes, nunchakus—screaming, “BITCH!!! YOU FUCKIN’ BITCH!!!!”

  Ever since then, I have been proud to be a bitch. Being a bitch meant I could be safe. Being a bitch meant I could take care of myself. Being a bitch has set me free.

  That’s why I just love Bitch. It is essential reading for the modern woman. It never insults my intelligence or my compassion. Its incredible honesty and unflinching critical eye affirm my own suspicions about our unbelievably sexist, racist, homophobic, and hateful world, and make me feel l
ess alone. I believe that a thinking person in today’s society can be driven mad by isolation. Everywhere we look we are bombarded with hypocrisy and exploitation, and then monstrous consumerism preying on us while we are weak, constantly threatening to sell us back to ourselves. We need a bitch with a flashlight to guide us through this darkness.

  I don’t always agree with what’s in Bitch. It has given me terrible reviews in the past, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t ever afraid to criticize or question anything, and that is rare and admirable. I would like to have some of that quality myself. [For the record, we have also said many nice things about Margaret as well.—Eds.]

  There are women who don’t like being called a bitch. There are even women who claim not to be feminists. That just scares me. How can you not be a feminist? How can you allow yourself to be treated like a second-class citizen and not be outraged by it? How can you align yourself with a dominant culture that hates you? It’s true that we women are vulnerable to the cultural forces that seek to brainwash us; media, movies, and advertising all conspire to keep women at each other’s throats, dreading age and flab and competing for male attention. How can we not buy into it when it seems like everything and everyone is telling us to?

  We need clear and rational thinking, some intelligence to cut through the bullshit. Bitch is the perfect chaser to the straight-up woman-hate we encounter daily, and there is nothing more refreshing.

  introduction

  THE AZTECS HAD QUETZALCOATL AND THE UNDERWORLD OF Tlalocan. The Egyptians had Isis and Osiris. The Greeks had Homer. The Elizabethans had Shakespeare. We have American Idol, Us Weekly, and Angelina Jolie.

  Actually, when Bitch was born we had Beverly Hills, 90210; Reality Bites; and Mademoiselle. It was 1996, but even then, before the popular advent of the Internet, reality TV, and blogs, pop culture comprised our contemporary oral traditions, shaped our modern myths, and provided us with our gods and goddesses. As freshly minted liberal-arts college graduates with crappy day jobs and a serious media jones, we were prime targets for movies, TV, ads, and glossy magazines, all of which fell over themselves telling us how to dress, what to eat, where to work, where to go after work, whom to lust after, and how to lust, period. More than that, they sought to tell us—as they seek to tell everyone—who we were.

  The thing is, we pretty much already knew who we were—or at least who we weren’t. We weren’t breathy, baby-voiced Kelly, using her bruised-blonde shtick to steal Dylan away from Brenda. We weren’t Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, shtupping Kyle MacLachlan in a pool in hopes of career advancement. We weren’t the waifish, expensively clothed girls draped mournfully across the pages of Vogue and Bazaar. We weren’t even Xena, warrior princess. What we were was curious about what those fictional women and their representational peers had to tell us about our cultural take on femininity, “proper” male and female behavior, and women’s place in the world.

  We were also obsessed with how pop culture treats—and by “treats” we mean ignores, sidelines, and denigrates—feminism. The mid- to late ’90s saw the rise of so-called postfeminism. The concept wasn’t necessarily new; it was associated with postmodernism and French feminism, and introduced to nonacademics in a 1982 New York Times Magazine article titled “Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation.” But now, all of a sudden, there were books about postfeminism, references to it in film and literary criticism, even an entire website called the Postfeminist Playground where a group of women wrote about sex, culture, and relationships from a standpoint that assumed a world where the gains of feminism were unequivocal and its goals roundly met.

  Postfeminism is, perhaps not surprisingly, very similar to old-fashioned antifeminism; at bottom, it suggests that the culture at large is just fine and that our pervasive, ongoing struggles with, for instance, workplace equality or work/family balance aren’t societal problems—they’re personal ones. And winking slogans like “Postfeminism: Boys Like It” revealed an image of feminism and feminists that was still loaded down with some very familiar, very unattractive baggage. The term was (and still is) an insult to the legacy of feminism, an eye-rolling suggestion that we need to get over it and move on, already. But postfeminism can exist only in a postsexist world, and we’re not there by a long shot.

  If we were, feminism wouldn’t still have this persistent image problem. A gorgeous woman like Ashley Judd can be loud and proud about being a feminist—even appearing on the cover of Ms. in a T-shirt reading “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like”—but when tasked with conjuring up feminism, most of the mainstream media still sees lumpy, frizzy, hairy she-trolls advancing with castrating knives in hand. It’s this persistent misconception that sometimes makes our ƒ word seem so much more controversial than that other one. Every young feminist has a story about the time she had a run-in with it. Maybe it was chatting with a high-school classmate about an upcoming march for reproductive rights, only to hear her deliver the gentle dis: “Well, I believe in equal rights, but I don’t need to march for it.” Maybe it was overhearing a male peer complaining in the college dining hall, “I’m here to learn, not to hear about women’s issues.” Maybe it was a new friend responding to an offhand comment about not fitting the girly-girl mold with, “You’re not one of those militant feminists, are you?” As twenty-three-year-old women in 1996 (and as thirtysomethings now), we found it ridiculous and enraging that such simple concepts—that women deserve equality, that gender shouldn’t determine the course of our lives, and that the world we live in is often arranged in a way that does not serve these goals—freak people out so much. And the sparks of indignation we felt ignited a burning need to correct the record about what both women and feminism can and should be.

  That indignation is a big part of why we chose to call the magazine Bitch. (If you were wondering about that name, you’re not alone.) We’d argue that these days the word “bitch” is as loaded as the term “feminist”—both are lobbed at uppity ladies who dare to speak up and who don’t back down. This is not to say that Bitch is down with being gratuitously mean or catty; no, we just know that taking a stand is usually more important than being nice. ’Cause here’s the thing about “bitch”: When it’s being used as an insult, the word is most often aimed at women who speak their minds, who have opinions that contradict conventional wisdom, and who don’t shy away from expressing them. If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch, we’ll take that as a compliment, thanks. And if we do, the word loses its power to hurt us. Furthermore, if we can get people thinking about what they’re saying when they use the word, all the better. Last, but certainly not least, “bitch” is efficiently multipurpose—it not only describes who we are when we speak up, it describes the very act of making ourselves heard.

  That said, we are aware that the word carries a difficult, complex legacy (though the many people who call the office to berate us about the title may think it’s all too simple), as well as the fact that its popularity as an epithet is more sanctioned than ever. And yet we still think, ten years later, that it’s the most appropriate title for a magazine that’s all about talking back.

  And what better to talk back to in this intensely mediated day and age than the boundless source of material that is pop culture? Anyone who protests that a focus on pop culture distracts from “real” feminist issues and lacks a commitment to social change needs to turn on the TV—it’s a public gauge of attitudes about everything from abortion (witness all the convenient miscarriages that befall characters torn between keeping and aborting their pregnancies) to poverty (two words: welfare queen) to political power (if Commander in Chief is accurate about nothing else, it nails the fact that our first female president will be scrutinized through the lens of gender every day of her working life). Contemporary feminism has always had ties to popular culture and its representation of women: Gloria Steinem’s first big break was “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” her expose of the working conditions of the cottontailed waitresses in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs;
two of the highest-profile early women’s-lib actions were a protest of the Miss America Pageant and a sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal.

  The notion at the heart of Bitch is simply this: If the personal is political, as that famous phrase goes, the pop is even more so. And like that other maxim, its truth doesn’t mean that we can ignore the other things that are also political. On the contrary, they all go together—living-wage campaigns with critiques of Maid in Manhattan, antiviolence organizing with questions about why the Lifetime channel loves its women so victimized—informing each other to keep this movement vital. The world of pop culture is, in a metaphor that has turned out to be all too close to literal, the marketplace of ideas; if we’re not there checking out the wares, we won’t be able to respond effectively—or put our own contributions on offer.

  At the time we first ventured into the Xerox-and-pasteup world of zine making, we were frustrated readers as much as burgeoning activist writers. We wanted to read something that would put the lie to the cliché of young women the nation over saying, “Well, I’m not a feminist or anything,” before voicing their desire for equal treatment. We wanted to read something that would call the news media on its ghettoization of feminist viewpoints and its vicious stone-casting at women like Anita Hill and Patricia Bowman, who stood up to abusive behavior from a future Supreme Court justice and members of the Kennedy family, respectively, and were dragged through the mud for their efforts. We wanted to read something that talked about why all the actresses on the cover of Vanity Fair and Details and all the female musicians on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone were dressed in lingerie with their mouths hanging open. We wanted to read something that talked back to the forces that had been talking to us for years: the ones telling us and countless others that, say, men are useful only for the two-carat diamonds they provide, that without children our lives will be sad and incomplete in spite of dazzling careers and intense friendships, that consumer freedom is just as good as social equality.