Not long after the peak of her success “the pop sensation with an eleventh-grade education” suffered a psychotic breakdown. When she did her Rolling Stone “comeback” cover in 2008, the magazine accused her of engineering her persona. Spears was smart enough to know what the culture wanted from her, and was “created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation,” the magazine observed.
Curiously, the media blamed the onslaught of Britney, Christina Aguilera, and the Spice Girls on kids and teens, who were said to be driving the purchasing culture. But they weren’t industry executives, A&R guys, or MTV producers. They were cultural consumers buying what was sold. . . . Baby One More Time became a top-selling album, and Spears took two categories in The Guinness Book of World Records—Best Selling Album by a Teenage Solo Artist and Best Selling Album in the US by a Female Artist. Any remaining Riot Grrrls vomited into their combat boots. Even watered-down Girl Power had all but evaporated, and in its place was the blatant selling of sex. Britney wasn’t performing girlhood and challenging it for accolades, like Stefani. She was submitting to it, whole cloth, because it gave her wealth and power.
RAUNCH CULTURE
Girl Power transitioned seamlessly—or, rather, devolved horribly—into the raunch culture of the late 90s and early 2000s, in all of its stripper-pole workout, belly-button piercing, Playboy Bunny–iconographed glory. Women performers had perfected branding themselves as Playmates and lad mag cover models so well that “women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes,” wrote Maureen Dowd. “So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it.”
Nothing symbolized raunch culture more than the Girls Gone Wild franchise, which launched in 1997. Producers famously trained cameras on college parties, spring break, and Mardi Gras, begging regular girls to go wild by flashing their breasts, making out with other women, or masturbating for the camera. These acts would later appear in Girls Gone Wild films for sale, and late-night infomercials selling them. Becoming overtly sexual could earn women cultural capital, the series promised. “Our mothers were ‘burning their bras’ and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation,” wrote Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs, her meticulous 2005 account of raunch culture. As Levy documents, women participated actively in this movement. They were editors at Maxim, took striptease classes, and bought vampy stilettos. In 2007, the Spice Girls performed at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, reinforcing that what Girl Power was actually about was girls’ freedom to exploit themselves.
As raunch reigned and Spears swayed in her shrunken clothes, an epidemic of total pubic hair removal was sweeping the country’s young women. The Brazilian bikini wax appeared as yet another solution to marketers’ profligate assertions that women were too fat, smelly, and hairy. It was also the seeming preference of pornographers. Unsurprisingly, young women had internalized that pubic hair was unclean and unsightly. Even though it was something most people never saw, instead of just hiding it in shame, young women were offered a fix: get rid of it altogether. What differentiated the Brazilian from prior bikini wax types was the removal of not only all pubic hair, but also all buttocks hair. Eve Ensler’s feminist celebration of women’s anatomy, the 1996 play The Vagina Monologues, was particularly critical of men who requested that women remove their pubic hair. But women began to report that they weren’t doing it for men, but for themselves. It was yet another market manifestation of Girl Power—the backward slide of women enduring great pain and paying good money to look like little girls.
The seven Brazilian Padilha sisters opened the iconic J Sisters salon in Midtown Manhattan in 1987, which is by many accounts the first practical and ideological home of the Brazilian bikini wax in America. The New York Times first mentioned it in 1998, when a reporter sought out the most painful of beauty treatments. Salon covered the procedure’s popularity among celebrities in 1999. Kirstie Alley said of her wax, “It feels like a baby’s butt, only all over,” and Gwyneth Paltrow thanked the J Sisters by simply saying, “You’ve changed my life.” In 2000, Carrie Bradshaw felt in charge when she waxed it all off in Sex and the City, which made the “Manolo Blahnik demographic sit up and take notice.” Brazilian waxing soon became compulsory for coeds and young women.
Fear of pubic hair and the desire to remove it persists. By 2011, Indiana University sex researchers Debby Herbenick and Vanessa Schick found 60 percent of women eighteen to twenty-four went bald eagle. Women under thirty were two to three times as likely to do it as women over thirty. A 2016 study found that of the women who removed all of their pubic hair, 59 percent claimed they did so for hygienic reasons. The idea that pubic hair is unclean is a complete fallacy, according to doctors consulted about the study.
Indeed, over the course of the 90s, the Riot Grrrl insurrection was similarly ripped out at the roots—slowly at first, then steadily, then rapidly—by Girl Power marketing. By the end of the millennium, however, being girly was out, and in its place was the promise to girls and women that they could be empowered only by turning themselves into sex objects. The media, society, and Hollywood no longer needed to do it for them. They could do it to themselves. And also to their children.
In 2002, controversy-loving mall staple Abercrombie & Fitch introduced thongs into its children’s clothing line. Christian and family groups protested the underwear, which read “wink wink” and “eye candy,” and were made to fit seven- to fourteen-year-olds. Abercrombie & Fitch would not be dissuaded from marketing sex to prepubescent girls and their families, however, and refused to pull the thongs from shelves. President Mike Jeffries has since defended his thongs for children this way: “People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls. But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls. And I think anybody who gets on a bandwagon about thongs for little girls is crazy.”
Epilogue
I started researching 90s Bitch within days of Hillary Rodham Clinton announcing her second bid for the US presidency, in April 2015. In contrast to her 2008 campaign, Clinton was the undisputed front-runner—not only for her party’s nomination, but for the presidency itself. Throughout the course of the 2016 election cycle, it was widely believed that the first woman to ascend to the White House—to break that “highest, hardest glass ceiling”—would propel all women forward. Once again, a new era of gender parity was promised by the fact of Clinton’s historic candidacy and assumed victory, and also in the themes and talking points of her campaign. Whereas Clinton addressed gender inequality somewhat cautiously in 2008—and played down the significance of a woman running for the presidency—she confronted it head-on in 2016. Clinton was often heard on the campaign trail saying, “If playing the gender card means fighting for equal pay and women’s healthcare . . . Deal! Me! In!”
Many thought 2016 would be different—that society had changed dramatically since the 1990s, when Clinton was first pilloried for her comments about baking cookies and Tammy Wynette, and even since her 2008 presidential bid. Indeed, much had changed. By 2016, women accounted for nearly half of the American workforce, and their median hourly wage had climbed 25 percent in the previous thirty years. Millennial women bested their male counterparts in higher education—more women than men were likely to enter college, and more women than men ages twenty-five to thirty-two held bachelor’s degrees. These and other markers led a 2013 Pew Research Center study to declare, “Today’s young women are the first in modern history to start their work lives at near parity with men.” Even on Capitol Hill, more women are running for and winning political office today than ever before. In 2017, a total of 104 women served in the United States Congress—twenty in the Senate and eighty-four in the House of Representatives—up from just four and twenty-nine respectively during the Year of the Woman in 1992.
Girls’ lives have undoubtedly improved, as well. After peaking in the 90s, rates of teen pregnancy, bir
th, and abortion have plummeted to historic lows thanks to expanded access to birth control, among other factors. In 2016, a monumental study from Massachusetts General Hospital that followed women diagnosed with eating disorders for twenty years or more found two-thirds of them get better. These difficult-to-treat diseases might not be the “life sentence” clinicians once thought they were.
The rise of the feminist internet has elevated new voices and issues, and turned a magnifying glass on mainstream inequities and institutional oppression in ways unthinkable during the 90s. Know Your IX educates students about how to report sex crimes. Hollaback! combats street harassment. Awareness campaigns like #GirlsLikeUs promote transgender recognition. #YesAllWomen highlights gender violence. #MeToo unites victims of sexual harassment and assault, and #TimesUp established a legal defense fund for victims. Black Lives Matter, the movement to end systemic racism, was founded by women. All of these efforts have grown and thrived online. Leading entertainers and politicians have identified with feminism loudly and proudly, signaling that fighting for gender equality is not only vital but vogue. And, of course, a majority of Americans voted for a woman president.
I finished writing this book just as Clinton conceded the presidential campaign to Donald Trump. Clinton’s loss was caused by a multitude of factors, but it delivered an undeniable blow to American women. Many likened the feeling to grieving for a loved one. Indeed, the mood at Clinton’s election night party at the Javits Center’s River Pavilion in Manhattan resembled a funeral. The campaign chose the venue because of its 81-foot high glass ceiling, which Clinton planned to metaphorically shatter that night. The evening of returns-watching began with gaiety, excitement, and jolly drinking. It ended with increasingly heavy drinking dampened by tears and sobs. A couple of lucky little girls were peppered throughout the room packed shoulder to shoulder with adults. One of them, probably seven or eight years old, clung to her mom’s pant leg. Another wrapped herself in her father’s arms. They both studied the grown-ups’ faces, the television screens, and the dirty carpet for some indication of what was going on. This was supposed to be a happy, history-making night. Men and women huddled in corners and on the floor, making the space feel even more cavernous, the ceiling even further from reach.
Trump’s victory and his presidency not only shocked a nation convinced that Clinton would win—it shocked those who were certain that gender parity might finally be at hand. Maybe that was always wishful thinking. But the misogynistic tenor of the election and what passes muster in the current administration shouldn’t have surprised us. History merely repeated itself, as it so often does. Just as the sparkling promise of women’s accomplishments in the 80s faded in the bitchified 90s, Hillary Clinton, the front-runner and herald of gender parity, was stopped by a rival campaign of crude sexism. Today more than ever, many wonder whether anything fundamental has changed for American women since the 90s or, like the mirage of a woman president, it just appeared as though it had.
Since the 90s, some positive trends have actually come to a halt, or reversed themselves. The US maternal mortality rate—the number of women dying during pregnancy, childbirth, and the early weeks postpartum—is rising. Women have made progress at work but still fall short of parity on many levels. One study of women working in film showed no growth at all. Women were only 17 percent of writers, directors, producers, and cinematographers of the 250 top-grossing movies in both 2016 and 1998. More women work in television today than in the 90s, but their ranks are still small. The percentage of women who work behind the scenes in broadcast programs has grown only six percentage points in eighteen years. Teen births have decreased markedly, but the United States still has among the highest rates in the developed world.
Women today are dogged at every turn by sexism. The gender wage gap still exists. While women’s median hourly wage has risen, it’s only 84 percent of men’s. America is the only industrialized nation lacking mandatory paid parental leave. Moreover, women are hired and promoted at lower rates than men, according to a 2016 study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company that looked at data from 132 companies employing more than 4.6 million people. For every 100 women promoted, 130 men rise in the ranks. Sexism’s economic impact on women is only beginning to be discussed and understood.
Access to quality healthcare and family planning services are increasingly stymied, particularly hindering low-income, minority, and rural women. College campuses are where women can feel the most equal to men, but they can also be dangerous places—43 percent of dating college women report violence or abusive behavior from those they date, while 19 percent of college women report being sexually assaulted. These figures are inherently conservative, since rape and sexual assault are notoriously underreported no matter where they occur. And they occur everywhere.
In our increasingly pornified culture, misogynistic stunts and talk are the norm. We see and hear them nightly on reality television and cable news, or online. They pervade mainstream advertising and Hollywood, where women’s bodies are blatantly for sale. “Locker room talk” and attitudes underpin the rape culture typified by the Toronto police officer who, in 2011, counseled women that to avoid rape they should not dress like “sluts,” and the father who, when his son was accused of rape in 2016, defended him by insisting he should not to go to prison for “twenty minutes of action.” Male entitlement to sex with women fueled Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger’s slaughter of six people. Powerful men in media and Hollywood like Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and countless others who shape societal narratives and decide what’s news have preyed on women with impunity for years. Eighty-one percent of women have experienced sexual harassment according to a report released in early 2018. Sixty-six percent said it occurred in public spaces and 38 percent said it happened at work. Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that the blatant and lewd sexism woven into the fabric of our society finally emerged unabashed in a modern presidential campaign, and in the White House itself.
Putting aside the obvious differences, the 1990s and the 2010s actually have much in common. In the 1990s, the onset of the twenty-four-hour news cycle changed American politics and culture forever. It also negated hard-fought gains made by pioneering women and undermined feminism at large. As this book documents, the glaring commonality shared by 90s women who sought influence is that, instead, they became infamous. They were perpetually, incessantly bitchified for threatening established male power, or for simply showing up in public.
In the 2010s, American politics and culture have been upended once again by a communications revolution—social media—and women remain in the crosshairs. This time, however, they are targeted not only by content publishers, but also by anyone in America with an itchy trigger finger. Forty-one percent of American women have been sexually harassed online. Women experience a wider and more dangerous variety of harassing behaviors online than men, and are more likely to self-censor what they post in hopes of avoiding abuse. We hardly need studies to alert us to this fact. Indeed, the established norm is not so much online harassment as rampant chauvinism, which is as evident online as in real life.
The 90s was a decade obsessed with sex, and women who came of age in that decade internalized a culture of sexism, both blatant and subtle, social and commercial. We didn’t question the frame because we didn’t know that we should. But now we do—and that’s one thing that has changed since the 90s. We now know not to be surprised by today’s misogyny, because it was seeded and cultivated decades ago when bitchifying any woman, every woman, was just the way things were. Knowing this history is how we stop it from repeating. We can actually put our 90s nostalgia to potent use.
Let’s no longer assume, as we did in the 90s, that more women attending college, marrying later, running companies, and holding major government positions is enough to ensure our humanity alongside men. Instead, let’s reexamine the stories that are told and sold about women—that we tell and sell ourselves. Probing the failed promise of gender
equality for truth and meaning is the first, essential step in confronting the sexism that suffuses women’s lives today—and to prevent it from suffusing the lives of our daughters and sons in decades to come.
Acknowledgments
90s Bitch is a social, political, and cultural history, but it was unquestionably shaped by my own reckoning with the misogyny and gender inequality that I saw, felt, and breathed in like air growing up. This book is my attempt to set the record straight, and to rewrite not just the history of women and girls in the 90s, but my own history. I’m indebted to many people for this opportunity and gift.
Thank you Hannah Wood for telling Monika Woods that there should be a book about women in the 90s. I’m grateful to you two for believing in me first, and for encouraging me to run with this. Thank you Richard Pine and Eliza Rothstein for expertly and patiently guiding me through all aspects of the publishing process, and for your high standards, good ideas, and friendship.
Thank you to the crackerjack team of women at Harper Perennial who brought this book into the world, including Stephanie Hitchcock, Amy Baker, Sarah Ried, Megan Looney, Emily Vanderwerken, Trina Hunn, and Suzette Lam. I’m grateful to Becca Giles, Rena Behar, Dori Carlson, Mary Sasso, and Ariel Jicha for their research. I appreciate Mary Beth Constant’s copy editing. This book was improved by the expert fact-checking of Matt Savener and Jordan Larson. Thank you thoughtful readers and commenters Frank Flaherty, Corynne Cirilli, Hannah Steiman, Jim Gaudet, and Joby Gaudet. Thank you to all my interview subjects—on and off the record. I’m grateful to those who spoke to me about their experiences in the 90s, and to the women whose stories are shared here in an attempt to reconsider them. Sending gratitude to the many patient and generous editors of my writing, but especially Harry Siegel and Gabrielle Birkner.
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