Dedication
For Ben, Ruby, and Oscar
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Introduction
1:Pretty on the Outside
2:Sex in the 90s
3:The Goldilocks Conundrum
4:Women Who Worked
5:Bad Mom
6:First Bitch
7:Female Anger
8:Manly
9:Damaged Goods
10:Victims and Violence
11:Catfight
12:The Girl Power Myth
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Many women remember the first time they were called a bitch in pristine detail, like a first kiss or childbirth. For me, it was at a party for my high school soccer team where I got drunk for the first time. An argument with a friend about a boy escalated into yelling and she called me a bitch. I was so startled that I slapped her in the face. It was the talk of the lunchroom the next week, in part because we had just learned about irony in English class and my friend’s last name happened to be Slappey. Being the perpetrator was humiliating. Girls didn’t hit and I had violated the code. But I had to retaliate because innately I knew that being called a bitch was the worst possible slight.
“Bitch” is a gendered insult with a long history of reducing women to their sexual function. Ancient Greeks slandered women by calling them dogs in heat who begged for men—a slur that referenced the virgin goddess Artemis, the huntress who changed herself into a wild dog. According to etymologists, the word has long been used with the intent of “suppressing images of women as powerful and divine and equating them with sexually depraved beasts.” From its very conception, “bitch” was a verbal weapon designed to restrain women and strip them of their power.
Today, “bitch” has been spit-shined, retooled, and given new life. We hear women using it to describe one another—“boss bitch,” “basic bitch,” and “resting bitch face” are ubiquitous terms on social media, in the school lunchroom, and around the office watercooler. What was once a derogation is now seen as an appellation of empowerment and sisterhood. But the attempted reclamation of the word doesn’t change its history or more common use: it has historically been, and remains, the worst invective hurled at women—one that degrades, disparages, and disenfranchises all at once.
This is plainly on display in the historical record. Use of the word has increased as women have gained power and influence, specifically to undercut their achievements and stop their progress. Indeed, this is the real story of how “bitch” and its corollaries were deployed by misogynists in the 90s, and how the word and the concept proliferated throughout society in that decade. This “bitch bias” shaped the way a generation of women and men came of age, and also this current moment. We can no longer ignore the history of “bitch” and how it has influenced the world we live in today.
I’ll use the verb “bitchify” and the noun “bitchification” to characterize how 90s media and societal narratives reduced women to their sexual function in order to thwart their progress.
Introduction
I’m not sure whether to follow the girl in the Hanson tee or the guy in the All That hat. They are walking in opposite directions. If they are both headed to the inaugural 90s Fest—a Nickelodeon-sponsored outdoor concert featuring a scattershot assemblage of popular bands from that decade—then somebody is lost.
The large lot on the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, features a slime machine opposite the large stage. Contest winners, Pauly Shore, and the rap duo Salt-N-Pepa will later be doused in green goo. Life-size Jenga and Connect Four draw a few players. Girls are sprawled atop a leopard coverlet in a “Real-Life 90s Girl Bedroom” sponsored by Shop Betches.
The 90s may be the frame, but this is still a 2015 music festival. The eight-dollar hot dogs are named for performers, and the wristband handlers are high. Attendees wear the decade’s full regalia—baby tees and butterfly clips, combat boots, flannel, acid-washed jeans, oversize blazers, leggings, kinderwhore, neon. Some are dressed as the Spice Girls. Others wear Clinton/Gore 1992 T-shirts that look conspicuously white and crisp for twenty-three years later.
Children of the 90s are a demographic relatively new to the workforce and to their own money, and businesses want to lock them down for life. Their childhood television programmer, Nickelodeon, wants them back, too. The network is promoting a new block of programming called the Splat that will air the shows attendees watched as kids.
I am one of these 90s kids. I was eight years old at the start of the decade and eighteen at its end. It’s easy to rhapsodize about the years spent shedding childhood, and I have warm memories of mine. I collected the stuff—the American Girl doll, the baby tees, the Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper—and mainlined the culture. I loved films like Clueless and Reality Bites and devoured book series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. I watched tabloid talk shows and MTV, and learned to drive listening to Nirvana and Lauryn Hill on compact discs.
The nostalgia strategy Nickelodeon is banking on seems inspired by how we hear the music of our youth. Brain-imaging studies reveal that the deep attachment we feel to the music from our adolescence isn’t a conscious preference or reflection of critical listening, but the result of a host of pleasure chemicals bombarding our brains. Despite our tastes maturing, 1990s daughters and sons will likely prefer TLC, Smash Mouth, and New Kids on the Block to new hits—not for their quality, but for their emotional wallop. Perhaps that’s one reason why clubs from Brooklyn to Portland have found success with 90s Nights, drawing thousands to reminisce and dance to the songs they once loved.
This onslaught of 90s nostalgia is no great surprise, as kids of the 90s tumble into adulthood, bidding reluctant farewell to their younger zine-reading, Game Boy–playing, Rugrats-watching selves. They are pondering having children of their own, or are newly minted parents. Nostalgia is a gift and affliction of every generation. It eases the collective identity crisis as adulthood’s mundanities gel.
It’s also unsurprising that 90s Fest presents a version of the 90s that doesn’t attempt to deviate much from history’s script. And the children of the 90s don’t seem to want it to. Reheating and serving the commercial culture that we 90s kids remember is just fine, thank you. In between band sets, a jumbotron plays a montage of clips from 90s television shows, movies, music videos, and advertisements. Festival goers intermittently sigh and aww at the Saved by the Bell credits, Sunny Delight ads, and Freddie Prinze Jr. But the pull of the past has clouded our critical minds. Are the 90s really as great as we remember them to be?
THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED DECADE OF WOMEN
As the decade dawned things were looking up for women. Daughters of second-wave feminism came of age and chose new paths unavailable to their mothers: delaying marriage and children, pursuing higher education, joining the workforce, and assuming independence and identities outside of the home. The gaps between men and women in education “have essentially disappeared for the younger generation,” declared a 1995 report by the National Center for Education Statistics. At that time, female high schoolers bested their male counterparts in reading and writing, took more academic credits, and were more likely to go to college. By 1992, they earned more bachelor’s, master’s, and associate’s degrees than men. The equal education promise of Title IX was coming to fruition.
In the 80s, women began marrying older, or not at all. For more than a century, the median marriage age for women swung between twenty and twenty-two, but in 1990, it nearly jumped to twenty-four
. By 1997 it reached twenty-five. Carefree sex outside of marriage became increasingly acceptable. Access to birth control expanded. Postponing marriage and kids liberated women sexually; it also gave them increased economic power and paved their entry into male-dominated careers. By the decade’s end, women accounted for close to 30 percent of lawyers, nearly half of managers, and more than 40 percent of tenure-track professors. Almost half of married women surveyed in 1995 reported earning half or more of their total family income, leading the study’s sponsor to declare, “Women are the new providers.”
The forward motion of the 90s seemed to build on the 80s, a decade of hallowed female pioneers in diverse fields. Sally Ride traveled to space. Geraldine Ferraro secured the vice presidential nomination of a major political party. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison won Pulitzer Prizes for their epic, women-centered fiction. Madonna smashed barriers in music, entertainment, and popular culture. Because these firsts and many others were so widely celebrated, society assumed these trailblazing women would also cut a path for all women to advance in work, entertainment, politics, and culture in the years to come. At last, the dream of gender equality would be realized.
The dream, as we know, was not realized. But a quick glance back at the 90s would suggest that American women indeed made significant progress during the decade. In Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, Judith Rodin, and Carly Fiorina, the 90s saw the first woman attorney general, secretary of state, president of an Ivy League institution (University of Pennsylvania), and CEO of a Fortune 100 company (Hewlett-Packard). More women won political office than ever before in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when their numbers in the Senate tripled (from a measly two to a small but more respectable six).
Cultural feminism in the 90s made strides, as well. The “Girl Power” movement promised that progress for women would trickle down to girls, too. Indie subcultures defined by girl-made zines, music, art, and websites flourished, providing young women new platforms for self-expression. Girl culture was reclaimed and celebrated by the Riot Grrrl movement, Sassy magazine, websites like gURL.com, government initiatives, subversive feminist musicians, and independent films.
Indeed, the 90s was a decade in which women were front and center—but not in the way we like to remember.
“‘BITCH’ IS LIKE A TITLE. I’VE SEEN THEM OWN IT.”
Backstage at the 90s Fest, I ask Coolio why rappers in the 90s were so enamored with the word “bitch.” He should know. His song “Ugly Bitches” excoriates them as lazy, slutty, and deserving of murder.
“They were a bunch of nerds. They didn’t have no game. A lot of rappers acted like they hated women,” he says, excluding himself.
Why? I ask. Could they have done better by women?
“Rappers didn’t do anything to women. You know how many women got rich off rappers? How many women rappers made rich? You got to take the good with the bad. He might call you a bitch, but most women say, ‘Well, I’ll be a bitch if I got three zeros or six zeros on my bank account. I’ll be two bitches,’” he replies. “‘Bitch’ is like a title. I’ve seen them own it.”
Coolio wasn’t the first to deploy this particular articulation of “bitch.” “Bitch” was defined in 1811, in Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present, as “a she dog” and “the worst name one could call an Englishwoman, more provocative and insulting than ‘whore.’” A whore was at least paid for sex, but a bitch gave it away for free. Being sexually needy while lacking capitalistic acumen made a bitch all the more detestable. Nearly two hundred years later, this meaning found its way into contemporary music.
Hip-hop was largely created by two groups who, to craft masculine, flinty personas, separated themselves from women by deriding them as bitches: Public Enemy and N.W.A. Public Enemy’s 1987 hit “Sophisticated Bitch” describes a “stone cold freak” bedding “execs with checks” and “boys from the dorms” in the same week. This bitch incites violence. “People wonder why did he beat the bitch down till she almost died?” the group sings.
Public Enemy needed to appear hard. Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and crew pioneered hip-hop after meeting at the liberal arts school Adelphi University on Long Island amid suburbs and swimming pools, not the gunshots and hard streets they rap about. Through that lens, “Sophisticated Bitch” looks like a vehicle to diminish women, to achieve the steely, gangsta rep that a childhood of cul-de-sacs and BBQs couldn’t provide.
N.W.A, comparable to Public Enemy in their contributions to hip-hop, put out their own bitch anthem in 1987, “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” implicating their entire female audience. “Now ask yourself, are they talking about you? Are you that funky, dirty, money-hungry, scandalous, stuck-up, hairpiece contact wearing bitch? Yep, you probably are . . . Bitch, eat shit and die (ha ha).”
As in physics, in popular culture, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the 90s, against the backdrop of bitchification normalized by N.W.A and Public Enemy, among others, feminists attempted to reclaim the word for their own purposes. The reclamation spread through media. Bitch magazine promoted feminism to young women, inspired by gays and lesbians who had successfully taken back “queer” from its oppressive uses. The term appeared on novelty items like T-shirts and buttons. Countless products marketed in the 90s celebrated the bad-girl sex icon—the bitch—and accorded her power. Elizabeth Wurtzel published Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. Her definition included being able to “throw tantrums in Bloomingdale’s.” Pop icon Madonna embraced it, saying in an interview, “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.” Singer Meredith Brooks crooned that she was one—along with a lover, child, mother, and host of other female identifiers—in her hit song, “Bitch.” Its incessant radio play in the late 90s suggested that, for women, being a bitch was not only kosher but aspirational.
By the end of the decade, however, the promise of equality for women was revealed to be something between a false hope and a cruel hoax. Parity, it turned out, was paradox: The more women assumed power, the more power was taken from them through a noxious popular culture that celebrated outright hostility toward women and commercialized their sexuality and insecurity. Feminist movements were co-opted. Soon, women would author their own sexual objectification.
Many 90s efforts to take back “bitch” were rooted in consumerism. “Bitch” and its villainous corollaries became a bad-girl identity to sell—a sly marketing tool. The advertisers’ bitch was a sexy villainess at the mall and in Hollywood. When Chanel debuted a red-black nail polish shade, Vamp, in 1994, stores fought to keep it in stock. Other makeup purveyors released nail and lip colors with names like Vixen, Wicked, and Fatale. But beneath the message that buying bitch gear was empowering lurked a sinister trait.
In the 90s, the music, media, and products freely portrayed women as bitches and every nasty offshoot imaginable. The generation’s youth, and girls in particular, internalized this term and saw its power to offend and undercut even the most powerful women—the First Lady, the secretary of state, and the attorney general, to name a few. I believed such descriptions of public women and didn’t question them, and I know I’m not alone. Anita Hill lied, Monica Lewinsky was a tramp, Marcia Clark was unqualified, and girls were supposed to “go wild” for cameras or be nasty because it was liberating and empowering. The public colluded in degrading women, and an entire generation of girls grew up in the fog of a bitch epidemic. Our would-be role models were pilloried, our authentic selves were pried away from us, and to get them back we were told to buy lingerie and magazines featuring sex tips.
THE DECADE THAT DESTROYED WOMEN AND POISONED GIRLHOOD
In the end, the 1990s didn’t advance women and girls; rather, the decade was marked by a shocking, accelerating effort to subordinate them. As women gained power, or simply showed up in public, society pushed back by reducing them to gruesome sexual fantasies and misogynistic stereotypes. Women’s careers, clothes, bodies, and families were skewered. Nothing was off-limit
s. The trailblazing women of the 90s were excoriated by a deeply sexist society. That’s why we remember them as bitches, not victims of sexism.
The 90s bitch bias is so pervasive, so woven through every aspect of the 90s narrative, that it can actually be tough to spot. Stories of notable women in the 90s almost invariably suggest they were sluts, whores, trash, prudes, “erotomaniacs,” sycophants, idiots, frauds, emasculators, nutcrackers, dykes, and succubi. These disparagements were so embedded in the cultural dialogue about women that many of us have never stopped to question them. I spoke with more than a hundred women about their remembrances of the 90s, and the majority of them internalized 90s bitchification, too. The stories of 90s women have become sexist mythology, an erroneous history that saps women of their power, just as it was intended to do. Indeed, the aftershocks of 90s bitchification ripple into contemporary society. Discrediting women based solely on their gender, sexually harassing them, and reducing them to their fuckability endures today from the school yard to the boardroom in part because this was, writ large, ubiquitous and accepted behavior in the 90s.
I loved my 90s childhood. But it wasn’t until returning to this decade as an adult that I came to see how mainstream 90s narratives in media and society promoted sexism and exploited girlhood. I wrote this book because I was utterly shocked by what I found while investigating 90s narratives about women. The decade is barely considered history. It was supposed to be the modern era, with doors flung open to unprecedented advancement for women and gender equality. But 90s bitchification was like water flowing into every crevice. It existed everywhere I looked, which is why this text is by no means exhaustive. The stories I’ve chosen to reexamine are the ones that I believe reached the furthest and have had the most resonance. Taken together, they explain the status of women in American society today.
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