Pretty on the Outside
It’s no coincidence that 90s bitchification coincided with a radical new media landscape. The emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle—providing real-time, unremitting coverage of live and current events—swiftly infiltrated households and shaped the American consciousness during and after the Persian Gulf War. When the US military bombed Iraq in January 1991, television cameras followed, and the first twenty-four-hour cable news network, CNN, flourished. Americans didn’t just watch—they binged. More than half claimed they were addicted to watching the war on TV, according to a 1991 Times-Mirror survey. A majority of adults under thirty dubbed themselves “war news addicts,” and 21 percent admitted that watching disrupted their focus on their jobs and normal lives.
When the war concluded mere weeks later, CNN had the round-the-clock infrastructure and an insatiable audience; all they needed was another war. But soon they would learn that political dramas, crime, and Hollywood were far cheaper to cover, and often more popular, than bombs over Baghdad.
This continuous, addictive format produced an unrelenting fixation on public figures and news makers, but none so much as the women gaining power and prominence in the 90s. Women touched by scandal, whether they were alleged perpetrators or victims, were hounded by the press. When any woman made the news, she often stayed there for days, weeks, months, and, in some cases, years. Meanwhile, news consumers blamed women for their own unceasing visibility, as if they had narcissistically engineered unflattering coverage of themselves for personal gain.
Another consequence of the rise of the twenty-four-hour news cycle was that the nation consumed the very same stories at the very same time. During the 90s, some of us read newspapers and magazines, listened to the radio, and began consuming news online. But television was by far the largest media stage of all. Many of the decade’s biggest news stories centered on women as TV news increasingly became episodic infotainment. The compulsive focus on scandal-driven tales pitching women out front and center, or against one another, gave new meaning to the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Women didn’t fare any better on fictional television. Television’s ideal woman in the late 80s and early 90s was “beautiful, dependent, helpless, passive, concerned with interpersonal relations, warm and valued for her appearance more than for her capabilities and competencies,” according to a 1992 book-length report by an American Psychological Association task force. This TV dream woman was no real woman at all, but a degraded caricature of one. After analyzing five years of television programming, the APA authors concluded that TV completely ignored its most devout audiences—women, minorities, and the elderly. The proportion of women characters appearing on primetime television barely budged throughout the 90s, moving from 38 percent in the 1990–1991 season to 39 percent in 1998– 1999—a mere one percentage point increase in nearly a decade.
The way women appeared on television in the 90s is easily traced to their underrepresentation both in front of the camera and behind it. Martha Lauzen, a San Diego State University professor, found that only 15 percent of the creators of the top one hundred primetime shows in the 1998–1999 season were women. Women were only 24 percent of executive producers, 31 percent of producers, 21 percent of writers, 16 percent of editors, and just 3 percent of directors. Television misrepresented and objectified women, while its staffers were mostly male. Women weren’t telling their own stories; men were telling the stories of women that they wanted to see.
If 90s television was ground zero for the war on women, the soldier on the front line was Beverly Hills, 90210. The father of jiggle television himself, Charlie’s Angels producer Aaron Spelling, applied said jiggle to high school with his 90210. In the series, young beauties in revealing clothing luxuriate in wealth, among palm trees, and on the perpetual brink of boinking one another. Its objectification game was strong. The program’s credits open by panning up a bikinied body, but the shot cuts away before landing on her face. The 1991 season two premiere was viewed in close to eleven million households, and the show became one of Fox’s top performers. The following year, half of teenage girls polled named it their favorite show.
90210 is set on the lush campus of West Beverly Hills High School, which resembles a fancy college. The main male characters—Brandon, Dylan, and Steve—talk about their emotions and wear wounded looks and sexy sideburns that my grade school friends and I daydreamed about. They are independent and active: playing sports, writing for the school paper, working jobs, and even living alone. Susan Douglas’s book about misogyny in modern pop culture, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism, points out that while the male characters contend with the show’s meatier dilemmas, the female protagonists—Kelly, Brenda, and Donna—are relegated to obsessing over shopping, gossip, and dating cute boys. Their power is concentrated in their looks, how they fill out bikinis, and their likelihood to have—or be victimized by—sex. Women succeed in the show in proportion to their sexiness.
In the bubble of 90210, girls’ bodies exist for enjoyment and ridicule. In the pilot episode, Steve taunts Kelly mercilessly about her summer nose job and asks her, “What’s next, tummy tuck? Liposuction?” as he ogles her backside. Kelly believes the surgery has made her pretty and popular. The other girls follow her lead. “Brenda tries to dye her hair blonde in order to impress Dylan, but winds up looking like a clown” is a logline of one early episode. After making out with Dylan for the first time, Brenda trades her wardrobe of buttoned-up shirts for plunging V-necks and midriff-baring tops. One female character who rejects this path is the smart (and poor, and Jewish) newspaper editor, Andrea Zuckerman. She challenges boys’ ideas, bosses reporters, and wears baggy suits. Her punishment is that other characters treat her like a nuisance, and she is incurably single for much of the show.
Sex, for the girls, careens wildly between dangerous and frivolous. They are graded for performance and blamed when things go wrong. Steve tells David he “dumped” Kelly because she’s “got a nasty personality” and is “lousy in bed.” “I could live with that,” says David. Steve bullies Kelly in hopes that she’ll return to him, which she does, sleeping with him one night at a party. This troubling story line exalts harassment as a means to an end: Kelly is just a tease, and girls like her will give it up eventually.
Brenda’s journey to lose her virginity to Dylan is a cultural touchstone for many 90s kids. Her preparation for the occasion is resplendent with a nearly four-minute montage of Kelly and Donna dressing her for it. The couple has already discussed the act and its potential consequences. What should be empowering—Brenda makes an informed choice that she is happy about—becomes shameful in a later episode, after livid feedback from young viewers’ parents who disapproved of her confidently choosing premarital sex. Brenda feels good about losing her virginity, but later reneges. “I love Dylan and I thought I knew what I was doing, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that it wasn’t worth it,” she says.
The girls endure more body shame throughout the series. Brenda has unplanned-pregnancy and breast-cancer scares, and blames herself for these false alarms. Male characters period-shame the girls, and the girls period-shame one another. “Can’t you stop thinking about guys for one second? There’s more to life,” Brenda snaps at Kelly, who retorts, “Sounds like it’s that time of the month.”
Sex on 90210 is portrayed as transactional, with young women’s bodies traded as currency. It’s no surprise, then, that beauty brands popular with young customers launched 90210 tie-ins. Softlips, Noxzema, Conair, and makeup-organizer Sassaby were among the companies that sold some $200 million in 90210-branded products between 1990 and 1992. 90210 trading cards appeared in Honey Nut Cheerios boxes—a cereal advertised to very young children. One marketing firm found kids as young as seven liked the show. A youth marketing executive told the Los Angeles Times, “The younger kids think it’s really cool. It makes them feel like teens.” A thirteen-year-old Manhattan private schooler revealed to the New York Times that his interest in sex began
after watching 90210. “The people were cool. I wanted to try what they were doing on the show,” he said.
FAT GIRL SLIM
If 90210 schooled a generation of girls that their bodies were for sex, a recurring 90s television character reinforced that troubling lesson: the fat girl who did good and got sexy and thin. Monica Geller on Friends (Courteney Cox) and Helen Chapel on Wings (Crystal Bernard) were both repeatedly identified and ridiculed as formerly fat. On both shows the characters are played by beautiful starlets with arms the size of toilet paper tubes, making it hard to believe that they were ever anything but lithe. Yet their characters’ former large-girl status is a source of humor on both programs and drives much of their pathos.
Monica and Helen must pay for their prior fatness, which will always define them. Other characters never seem to let them live it down. On Friends, fat jokes flow like cappuccinos at Central Perk. “Some girl ate Monica,” Joey says when the gang finds a video of her larger self. Monica’s former fleshiness is played as a recurring fat-shaming laugh line throughout the series. In one episode, the painfully skinny Courteney Cox dons a fat suit and wiggles around in compromising poses—holding a doughnut, for example—for laughs. She orders a pizza for a college party, then hollers when it arrives and eats it in front of everybody. Monica is her most uninhibited self when she wears the fat suit. She’s actually a lot more fun. But “fat” Monica and “fat” Helen are fantasies in the worlds of these shows; the real characters are neurotic skinny women with accentuated collarbones. They’re so happy to no longer be fat that they don’t even defend themselves against jokes about their former weight.
Apart from providing a humorous subplot in both shows, Monica’s and Helen’s off-camera weight loss is fetishized, permitting other characters to sexualize them. Losing her girth allows Helen to become a sexual prize to the show’s leading men, the Hackett brothers, Joe and Brian. “You’ve lost weight,” one says to her. “Maybe a pound or two. Or sixty!” she replies, for big canned laughs. When Joe tells Brian that he can’t date Helen because she’s “like a baby sister,” Brian responds, creepily, “I think it’s time I gave that little tyke a bath.”
Chandler mocks Monica’s size in front of her family one Thanksgiving, only to want to sleep with her the next, after she sheds weight. “Oh my God. You look so different! Terrific. That dress. That body,” Chandler says, leering at her. They end up marrying.
Plotlines like these perpetuated a societal mandate of thinness, prompting girls to seek skinniness to be loved, just like the television characters. Hundreds of pages of advertising and editorial content in magazines like Teen, Seventeen, and YM contained examples of the body ideals that compelled girls to want to lose weight. Nearly 70 percent of elementary school girls said that magazine pictures affected their conception of a body ideal, while almost half said they made them want to lose weight. I remember the wordy, vague weight-loss ads and advertorials in these glossies, encouraging girls to send away $12.95 (plus $3.00 shipping and handling) to sketchy programs with names like Special Teen Diet and the Clinic-30 Program. Black-and-white advertisements featured happy-looking girls in bathing suits or diary confessionals seemingly written by teenage girls thrilled with their diets’ results.
I bought these magazines and wondered if the testimonials were real. I never sent away for these scams growing up, but by the time I was eleven I did consider it. The CDC reported in 1995 that girls were nearly twice as likely as boys to believe they were overweight. It’s no wonder Riot Grrrls took to drugstores, newsstands, and 7-Elevens in the 90s, armed with scraps of paper to covertly slip between these magazines’ pages urging, “You don’t need lipstick to be beautiful,” “This magazine wants you to hate your body,” and “Love your body the way it is.”
Popular touchstones like teen magazines and Beverly Hills, 90210 normalized the commodification of the female body, leading girls to believe that the quest for self-worth worked best from the outside in. The television show’s scads of marketing tie-ins were often the same as magazines’ advertisers—makeup, acne treatments, shoes, perfume, and denim—reinforcing the idea that with enough money, girls could buy body insecurity away. This concept was the target of Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, which investigated how women are saturated with unrealistic images of perfection and hoodwinked into thinking that their value is found solely in their exteriors, leading them to buy numerous fixes. But this was a book for women, and these realizations often eluded girls.
Naturally, the 90s saw an uptick in the incidence of eating disorder diagnoses and discussions about anorexia and bulimia, leading experts to declare an epidemic. The most alarming discovery about disordered eating and negative body image was how shockingly early the signs began. In 1991, more than 40 percent of first through third graders wanted to be thinner. Nearly half of nine-to eleven-year-olds admitted to dieting “sometimes” or “very often,” while between 40 and 60 percent of adolescent girls said they had dieted, fasted, made themselves vomit, or taken laxatives or diet pills. Since 1995, the percentage of girls who believe that they are overweight has tripled.
It goes without saying that eating disorders disproportionately afflicted women. But body anxiety was making women sick in more ways than one. Cultural aspiration to thinness could explain why twice as many women suffered from depression as men, according a 1990 paper by Mandy McCarthy, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In “The Thin Ideal, Depression and Eating Disorders in Women,” she argued that body dissatisfaction coupled with societal mandates of thinness is more likely to cause depression in women than in men.
All the while, celebrities continued to shrink. People magazine documented the “waif wave” trend in 1993, exemplified by Kate Moss, who looked as if “a strong blast from a blow dryer would waft her away.” Moss certainly didn’t cause anorexia. But many anorexics cited her picture “as an ideal,” according to an eating disorders counselor who told the magazine, “I haven’t seen that with any other particular model before.”
The tabloid press wondered whether the entire female cast of the hit show Ally McBeal had launched a starvation competition. Critics attacked Calista Flockhart, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Portia de Rossi for their thinness, as their bodies waned with each successive season, but the actresses didn’t admit that they were practicing extreme dieting and exercise. The takeaway for women watching the show, or seeing the shrinking frames of these celebrities in magazines, was either that they were naturally that thin, or that they were somehow better at achieving the lithe body ideal than the masses. Women looked at thinning female bodies like these and hated their own.
It wasn’t until much later that Thorne-Smith and de Rossi opened up about their diseases in the press. Thorne-Smith gave interviews admitting to unhealthy diet and exercise regimens while working on the show. De Rossi published the memoir Unbearable Lightness in 2010, chronicling the disease that left her at eighty-two pounds and approaching organ failure. But in the 90s, widespread celebrity thinness seemed to deny that eating disorders and extreme dieting were problems.
POWER PANTIES
Meanwhile, as young women carved themselves into more perfect pieces and fretted about the judgments and measurements of their bodies, something was happening to their underclothes. By the 90s, underwear no longer toiled as mere scaffolding for women’s wear. As Madonna foretold in 1990, when she stormed onto television in her cone bra, fashion lingerie became the main event and “assumed a new presence in the lives of Americans,” according to the New York Times. Marketers sold women the bromide that power was a pair of tiny panties. They simultaneously promised men that purchasing panties for their lovers was the key to controlling the sexual experience.
For most women, who wore Jockey and Hanes basics in white and nude, or black for special occasions, Victoria’s Secret was a revelation. The growth of the lingerie retailer, and the expansion of sexy lingerie to suburban women, can be attributed to a male founder’s vision. Roy R
aymond was so uncomfortable buying underwear for his wife, Gaye, that he started a business to ease the burden. Surely other red-blooded men could relate. “When I tried to buy lingerie for my wife,” Raymond told Newsweek in 1981, “I was faced with racks of terry-cloth robes and ugly floral-print nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department-store saleswoman thought I was an unwelcome intruder.” In other words, since its inception, Victoria’s Secret’s raison d’être has been catering to men.
By 1993, Roy and Gaye’s small Palo Alto shop—modeled after and named for their Victorian home—had grown to nearly six hundred stores, riding the crest of the great suburban mall invasion of the 90s. Shopping malls allowed Victoria’s Secret to supplant the country’s obsession with political correctness and family values with an alluring S&M vocabulary. Suddenly housewives and coeds were talking about bustiers, garters, teddies, and merry widows—once-obscure garments that could now be purchased in the same trip to buy kitchenware or pick up a cookie cake. What had once been the purview of pornography, strip clubs, sex dungeons, and Hollywood was now just a car ride away in suburbs of the North Shore or Short Hills. The New York Times credited Victoria’s Secret with helping turn “what was once a discreet (or salacious) business into the fastest growing segment of the nation’s $6.4 billion women’s intimate apparel industry.”
Another reason mass-market undergarments morphed from support to foreplay was the booming mail-order catalogue business. Why drive to a store when you could just walk to your mailbox? By 1992, more than $51.5 billion was spent on mail-order goods, and half of all adults bought merchandise from catalogues.
Lingerie catalogues offered colorful spreads of nearly naked women posing among the trappings of wealth—Oriental rugs, tasseled curtains, and crystal chandeliers—to create desire. The models themselves were emissaries of sex, and women could aspire to the kind of pleasure presented in the pages and shop in complete privacy, without ever leaving their homes. Men could stash the catalogues in their bathrooms next to Playboy and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. By 1997, Victoria’s Secret was shipping out 450 million catalogues a year and banked $661 million in mail-order sales alone. Catalogues concocted a whole fantasy world that begged women to enter and find their beautiful, newly sexually confident selves. Victoria’s Secret telegraphed that empowerment through pleasure was available to purchase in sizes A to DD.
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