Bitch
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There was a point in the late fifties and early sixties when what was really simple old-fashioned blandness in Doris Day and her cohort could actually be mistaken for virtue and goodness—for actual traits and not a lack thereof. There was even a time, a bit before that, when it almost seemed interesting—and it was surely profitable—to be the good girl. It was a time when Betty Grable’s million-dollar legs looked plumply wholesome even photographed from behind, when this St. Louis pinup girl could be the top female box office draw for eleven years straight (1941–52) and could find her Midwestern self, in 1942, earning more money than any woman on earth—raking it in by selling sex appeal that packed no wallop, by representing to our warring men abroad their innocent nonsyphilitic sweethearts at home. But at this point in time, it is no longer possible to fantasize a good girl who’s not also a bad girl, it is impossible to think of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary as anything other than one and the same, to understand that good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity. Even good old-fashioned Christianity seems to recognize the slippery slope of sin and saintliness: Saint Augustine was not beatified until after he lived out his Confessions; Pope John Paul II did not work his way up the Vatican without first spending his youth among the Warsaw theater crowd—and we all know about those actor types. Likewise, in Mary Magdalene, a whore becomes a devotee of Christ; in the Virgin Mary, an out-of-wedlock birth becomes an immaculate conception. Unless you are running for First Lady, no one wants to seem simply virtuous—of course, we all in fact want to be virtuous: We want to use our powers of persuasion to do evil to those who deserve our evil, we want to be Xena and Wonder Woman and Mata Hari and Judith, we want to be the hooker with the heart of gold who elbows the seducer and goes home with the hero. If a woman is good enough to be good, she is also good enough to be bad. The idea is always to tame the shrew, to turn decadence to devotion. Barbara Stanwyck is a murderous wife in Double Indemnity and a saintly mother in Stella Dallas; Joan Crawford could play both roles in a single film, going back and forth from terrifying to tragic in Mildred Pierce.
And with the complexities of the forties film star in mind, the cosmetics industry has helped paint the forbidding face and inviting body of the woman with trouble in mind, creating surface solutions so subtle that you don’t have to be cheap or tarty to carry them off, proferring bits of bad detailing to the otherwise well-behaved woman, like silky, sexy, lacy lingerie worn under a corporate, conservative gabardine suit. The trend began with the blood-black Chanel nail polish called Vamp that no store in the country could keep in stock when it debuted in 1994, and which has since been spun off into Metallic Vamp and Very Vamp, as well as Vamp-colored mascara, for that bloodshot, bloodless bad-girl look. In the wake of the Vamp phenomenon, in an effort to satisfy the desire for rouge-noir nails and a matching mouth, Estée Lauder has come up with a color called Midnight, Revlon makes a version called Vixen, Maybelline calls its gash-red varnish Seduction and the manicurists’ brand Essie gets right to the point with Wicked. In general, makeup makers, sensing that women may use lipstick to evoke outlaw images that their workaday world won’t abide, have taken to naming their shades not after, well, colors, but in suggestion of ideas and concepts: MAC’s deepest darkest lipstick is called Diva, Estée Lauder’s pure purple is called Naughty, its pinkish purple goes by Racy, its rich mauve is known as Fatale (also the name of a MAC sheer purple). Maybelline just introduced potent red lipstick and nail polish in a color called Rogue Vogue, and a cheap line of nail color called Temptress names its dark shades after legendary bad girls like Circe and Delilah.
But for most of us, there are some obvious associations with the word “bitch”: stiletto heels and dark, demimonde eyes on recent runways; the Gorgon-like horror produced by movies like Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the evil of bland ambition in To Die For and Disclosure, the chilly allure of films like Body Heat and Basic Instinct; the cool badness and icy manipulation of all of Sharon Stone’s roles, of her grande dame style, of her refusal to return the diamond necklace to Harry Winston after the Oscars; the calamitous onstage presence and offstage existence of Courtney Love, which have allowed her to realize in real life a character that Madonna in her mock bravado could only dream of; Roseanne’s habit of saying things like “All women should kill their husbands”; the icy young blondes of the Grand Old Party; the gabby and acerbic pundits (or “pundettes,” as they’ve been diminutively called) with long legs in short skirts and think-tank or law-clerk credentials, like Ann Coulter, Jennifer Grossman, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick and, arch-Conservative above all, Laura Ingraham, whose leopard-print mini helped get her stints as a commentator on CBS and MSNBC; Shannen Doherty’s reckless behavior and brattiness that caused an ex-fiancé to get a restraining order against her and some anti-fans to create the I Hate Brenda Newsletter; or the simple fact that the much-maligned model Naomi Campbell, dropped by Elite because “no money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed on [those she worked with],” simply said in response to her dismissal, “I’m a hardworking bitch. I do what I want to do. Life is too short—you have to go for it.”
You have to go for it.
After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, hut had girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home. Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man’s dollar. We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of thirty-five had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married (and even after Susan Faludi refuted the numbers, we still had to hear Rosie O’Donnell point out in Sleepless in Seattle that the study “feels true, even if it isn’t”). We still have to endure The Rules and learn never to accept a Saturday-night date if it’s after Wednesday. And we’re still stuck with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. So why be good? Anita Hill, a good girl if there ever was one, uptight and reticent, a woman who chooses to live in Norman, Oklahoma—and probably wanted nothing more than to just be left alone in her Valium-like calm—still had to listen to Orrin Hatch read to her from The Exorcist, still had to be asked by Senator Howell Heflin if she was a “scorned woman” and still had to have an entire book written about her by right-wing muckmaker David Brock. Like Anita Hill, Princess Diana behaved with perfect restraint and dignity for years—waving from the royal horse coach and giving her head over to millinery madness, all the while her husband carried on with Camilla Parker Bowles—and what good did it do her?
Women seem to be the repository of aeons of ages of bad blood, beginning with Eve, ending our stay in Eden with her curiosity and lust for strange fruit, and it has started to seem that even if we act like good girls, the world is still quite likely to find us bad. So to hell with dignity. Dignity has got nothing on Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda, and absolutely nothing on Mae West in anything. It seems far more exciting to be a Siren beckoning with her song or Calypso captivating on her island than to be Penelope, the archetype of female fidelity, weaving and unweaving at her loom, sending her suitors away, waiting for the errant Odysseus to return, waiting while he luxuriates in lotusland, waiting while, as one correspondent to The New York Times Book Review put it, he “commits adultery with various gorgeous, high-class women,” waiting for her husband like Lucy waits for Desi at the end of the day, or Alice waits for Ralph at the end of the night. Bad girls don’t wait around—one doesn’t get to go everywhere by sitting by the phone.
If fascination with fabulous women of great mischief were not a real phenomenon, the media probably would have invented it. In 1993, People put Sharon Stone on its cover next to the caption �
�HOLLYWOOD’S SEXY REBELS: SHARON STONE, SHANNEN DOHERTY, KIM BASINGER and a new breed of actress are playing by their own rules and making no apologies for taking charge of their lives.” A Village Voice “Female Trouble” column titled “Season of the Bitch” mused that Sharon Stone gets to play characters who kill men and say, “I wasn’t dating him; I was fucking him.” Novelist Katherine Dunn weighed in on bad girls in Vogue in 1995, pointing out, “It isn’t the ‘Fuck me’ pump anymore. Now it’s the ‘Fuck you’ shoe,” and also noted that “women who pay their own rent don’t have to be nice.” British Elle contemplated “The Rise and Rise of the Bad Girl.” Cosmopolitan covered the “Hollywood Brats.” In an article titled “Temper, Temper,” the September 1996 Allure noted an increase in the unabashed acting-out of celebrity rage, itemizing such incidents as photographer Annie Leibovitz’ balling out a cripple whose slow gait was slowing down her taxi, Maria Maples’ sidewalk tirade at a snoopy reporter while sapling Tiffany looked on, Lauren Bacall’s screaming so loud into her cellular phone that she made the limousine she was riding in shake, Raquel Welch’s scissoring a costume and throwing a mirror backstage during her engagement in Broadway’s Victor/Victoria, and bad book-tour behavior that has earned the best-selling author of My Mother, Myself the sobriquet Nancy Friday the Thirteenth. Amazingly, the article did not once mention Roseanne.
In April 1996 Esquire gave the subject of dangerous women perhaps the most thoughtful and serious attention when it put Nadja Auermann, sharply and coldly blonde, looking every inch the pinup girl for the Third Reich (the Allies had Betty Grable—I’m sure they must have had something), on a black-and-white cover with the headline “I’M SORRY I RUINED YOUR LIFE.” The accompanying essay by Ron Rosenbaum, “In Praise of Difficult Women,” seemed a triumph for her kind because it viewed those manipulative, heartbreaking wonders of wile precisely as they would like to see themselves: as trouble, trouble and more trouble—but worth every minute of hell. It did not surprise me when, several issues later, Esquire published an article called “The Return of the Alpha Male,” which seemed to in some way be about how to arm yourself against predatory women.
At the same time, British writer Julie Burchill came out in the Sunday Times of London—after having left her husband for a woman and then left that woman for her brother, all the while engaging in a transatlantic fight by fax with Camille Paglia—with an article titled “I’m a Bitch and I’m Proud.” Glamour published “22 occasions when you shouldn’t hesitate to be a bitch,” including the all-encompassing “When reason, negotiation and fury have failed.” A ’zine called Bitch with the tag line “Feminist Response to Pop Culture” appeared in 1996, and Bust, one of the more glossy house organs of female trouble, devoted a whole issue to bad girls, including an essay by Courtney Love called “Bad Like Me,” a manifesto that explained, “Bad girls fuck your boyfriends, yeah, but we feel shitty about it, sort of.” Rolling Stone, a magazine whose coverage of women’s music has been lax and late at best (a 1969 issue devoted completely to groupies seemed to indicate that editor-in-chief Jann Wenner advocated a rock and roll derivation of Stokely Carmichael’s assertion that “a woman’s position in SNCC is prone”), tried to redress a three-decade imbalance by devoting its thirtieth anniversary issue, delivered in autumn of 1997, to rockers of the second sex. The distaff trinity of Tina Turner, Madonna and Courtney Love seemed to float on the photo on the cover. Trumping the competition by a month, Spin magazine—which has found its niche as the affirmative-action arm of rock publications—offered “The Girl Issue” in November 1997, with Fiona Apple’s mischievous face on the front, highlighted by headlines promising that “SHE’S BEEN A BAD, BAD GIRL.” The New York Times Magazine gave an all-encompassing nod to womanhood in general by devoting a whole issue to “Heroine Chic,” and examining female icons from Gertrude Stein and Eleanor Roosevelt to Elizabeth Taylor and Greta Garbo to Martha Stewart and Coco Chanel. The issue’s focus was not on bitches per se, but it is safe to argue that anytime a woman projects the kind of intense personality that all these women do, she is somebody’s idea of a bitch. That may not actually be true about Eleanor Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein, but that is only because they were not pretty enough.
And these days putting out one’s pretty power, one’s pussy power, one’s sexual energy out there for popular consumption no longer makes you a bimbo—it makes you smart. So now, all of a sudden, actresses and models whose livelihoods aren’t in trouble take it all off for Playboy. The nude photographs—as likely to appear in Vanity Fair as elsewhere, especially if the subject is pregnant—are a career move, not a way to cash in, and it says: I’ve got it, and goddamnit, I’m gonna flaunt it, because anyone can think I’m a bimbo, but not just anyone can look this good naked. Sharon Stone and Cindy Crawford posed first in arty black-and-white in the late eighties and thereby made it safe for Drew Barrymore and Elle Macpherson to do the same thing in full color in the nineties. Farrah Fawcett, who first got naked for Playboy back when the mere sight of her unruly nipple puckering-up beneath an orange swimsuit made her hot stuff in the history of poster art, posed for the magazine once again at age fifty. For this half-century event, Farrah took the opportunity to demonstrate her artistic avocation, a kind of X-rated finger painting that involves covering her body with oil colors and impressing her flesh upon the canvas to produce abstract, amorphous results; a live-action pay-per-view special, with running commentary by Camille Paglia, accompanied the issue’s publication. On the forever-young front, Drew Barrymore, who never seems older than eleven to me, even if she is over twenty-one and even if she was already married for a whole twenty-five days, makes a career of kitty-cat sexy roles and stripteases on David Letterman.
Beyond sex, of course, there is violence, though it is better when both are combined, hopefully in a way that is more dignified than, say, female mud wrestling. Toward that end, Marie Claire printed an article about criminal women at large, portraying them as clever and comely, and reminding me of two of the most indelible images of American life in the last twenty-five years: the promotional poster for Bonnie and Clyde, with Faye Dunaway in beret and thirties maxiskirt, wielding a gun, glamorous and competent all at once, her fashion statement somewhere between Ché Guevara and Edith Head; the other of Patty Hearst, in her Symbionese Liberation Army garb—fatigues and semiautomatic gun are topped off once again with a beret—just before she told the arresting officer, when forced to give an occupation, that she was an “urban guerrilla.” I have no idea why it took so long thereafter for Thelma & Louise, for La Femme Nikita, for Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, for Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight or for the NRA to find a female president in a four-foot-eleven grandmother named Marion Hammer (thus giving the appearance that as many women as men are gun-toting maniacs, an idea that, while interesting in the movies, seems both unlikely and unsavory in real life).
Naturally, the difficult dame has made her presence felt on Madison Avenue as well. When an update of the classic fragrance Ciara was introduced, it was called Ciara Femme Fatale, and is promoted with glamorous black-and-white photo ads of model Yasmeen Ghauri in a seductive pose and a sequined gown with copy that assures us, “Because the female of the species is more dangerous than the male.” Van Cleef & Arpels, merchants of diamonds and rubies, played up the importance of giving the goods to the girl who plays hard to get with a series showing an elegantly groomed model coyly posed next to the ornate lettering of phrases like “She is the first woman who refused to take your phone calls” or “She is the woman men always wanted to run away with. You did.” And while there is nothing particularly cheeky about the campaigns themselves, when the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, became the spokeswoman for Weight Watchers and Ocean Spray, it prompted a New York Times advertising article on the wisdom of employing a controversial person like Fergie to pitch your product (the verdict: only Michael Jackson is absolutely verboten). Levi’s for women sell jeans with anti-Cinderella print ads whose swervy yellow background is a wall f
or graffiti-ish handwriting that reads: “the princess dream. the pony dream. the pretty bride dream. Ready for the kick butt dream?” Nike ads have for a long time implored, even us girls, to just do it. Lingerie, always selling sex anyway, recently decided to sell—what the hell—omnipotence, in a sultry black-and-white ad for Lilyette bras and panties with copy that read: “I’m his nightlight. I’m his heater. I’m his favorite channel. I’m his umbrella. I’m his blanket. I’m his weapon. I’m his little voice. I’m his painkiller. I’m his savior. I’m his pillow. Which I guess could also make me his worst nightmare.” Or mine—when, I have to wonder, does this woman find time to actually wear underwear? All this was reminiscent of an old television spot for an evanescent seventies scent called Enjoli, in which the model—who has got it going on in the bedroom and the boardroom—boasted that, among other things, “I can bring home the bacon / Fry it up in a pan / And never ever let you forget you’re a man / ’Cause I’m a woman …”
Tough and tender—or maybe just plain tough—still has a sufficiently strong hold on women’s hopes and dreams that we now, for the first time, appear to have a female boxing star, a West Virginia native named Christy Martin who’s already merited a profile in The New York Times Magazine. This fledgling professional sport lures pay-per-view subscribers with leather-and-lingerie tournaments, and no doubt Playboy would not be covering the women’s ring if the catfight fantasy were not part of the draw—but it should not be mistaken for male entertainment along the lines of female mud wrestling. Like the WNBA—whose sales and attendance in its 1997 debut season exceeded expectations by margins so large that the league is swiftly expanding—women’s boxing has attracted spectators sickened by the antics of Mike Tyson and millionaire male fighters who have substituted theatrics and hysterics for admirable athleticism. Rene Denfeld, in gloves and gear on the cover of the paperback version of her book The New Victorians, became the first woman author to appear on her book jacket in such attire, not as some joke, but because she’s a serious amateur contender. In 1997, the magazine Condé Nast Sports for Women was launched to serve both participants and observers of the boom in women’s athletic activity. At this point in time, it seems a good idea for feminists to bury the hatchet when it comes to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”: maybe it inadvertently advocates domestic violence—but maybe it’s just about getting in the ring. More and more, I notice women who don’t, at least physically, look like they are vulnerable to shit. Angela Bassett may spend most of Waiting to Exhale dissolving in tears and scotch, but her muscle tone makes her appearance anything but fragile.