Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Using the work of Gilligan and Brown it is easy to understand Amy Fisher as well as the many other good girls gone bad—the recent roster of drunk and disorderly athletes like Oksana Baiul, Tonya Harding and Jennifer Capriati, along with the more anonymous middle-class prostitutes and shoplifters and scofflaws—and to see them as the usual array of victims who become defendants. In objective terms, of course, they are not victims at all, but psychologically they must have experienced themselves as suffocated, strangled, stymied and just desperate for air, intoxicated from not breathing, unable to judge, to see, to feel, to imagine what was right. These are the young women who felt the world closing in on them and fought back—and they did it in terrifically unfortunate ways. (The nice thing about these particular examples is that no one can say to them, Why don’t you take up a sport?)

  Amy’s weapon of choice seems to have been sex. Of course, it’s not a choice so much as a fallback position: just as some girls figure out that their ticket will be a talent for biochemistry or composing villanelles while others sew beautiful curtains and bake delicious devil’s food cake, sex is the thing that any woman who lies down and spreads her legs can do. That some girls try to elevate it to an art form—fooled, I think, by the way we celebrate sex objects like Cindy Crawford and Pamela Anderson, and not quite realizing that the neighborhood tramp is still just a slut—doesn’t account for the way that the role attaches itself to them. Girls who try to turn sex into a weapon (I’m tempted to say that this would be like Iraq deciding to welcome SCUD missiles) are only making a virtue of necessity. Hot and bothered is not a cultivated state—it’s more like climbing ivy or a weed run rampant or dandelions everywhere, more like something meant to be evoked by the title The Girl Can’t Help It. Later on, a woman can learn the rules of the game, but a twelve-year-old engaged in wildly seductive behavior is just needy and complaisant.

  And still, it happens: Some girls are more attuned to how the world is responding to them—usually in the absence of fathers or big brothers—and have been manipulating and putting the make on any potential protectors almost forever; while others—blessed with uncommon comeliness and a superannuated sense of their own sex appeal—cannot help noticing that men notice, that catcalls and cars follow them wherever they walk, that men mistake them for nineteen or twenty even though they are just thirteen, that friends’ older brothers offer to drive them home, offer to pick them up, offer to do anything at all. They discover pussy power. Knowing she can get her way with her wiles—that, for instance, the mechanic down the block will repair the dents in her new convertible for free and Dad will never have to know that half the time she drives like she’s asleep at the wheel—she will use flirtatiousness, her feigned naïve helplessness and whatever other effects she has learned from the movies, to get what she wants. Nothing wrong with this. Nothing at all. If you can get through life batting your lashes, it beats the hell out of carrying your own bags.

  But then there is the part of this Faustian bargain that is not so savory, and it seems to me it is Amy’s story. You see, Amy is not, I don’t think, one of those girls who would have inevitably become a sex object, a wild thing. She was apparently shy—all the news accounts seem to agree on these few facts—and she was not one to play with alcohol or drugs. But more to the point—and I feel like somebody needs to say this—she is no great beauty. In the reports that followed Amy’s arrest, the media played up her purported pulchritude, perhaps in an unconscious effort to burden her with blame: as Columbia journalism professor Helen Benedict points out in her book Virgin or Vamp, “when a sex crime victim is considered attractive, she receives less sympathy.” But Amy is not like Brooke Shields or Drew Barrymore, two such comely, contained children that people would project adult notions of sexuality onto them no matter what they did. Amy looks pretty enough in pictures, but more than anything she is just cute—cute and boppy, a girl who in an alternate scenario would have made the cheerleading squad, but would never have been voted homecoming queen.

  But the sexual strategy imposed itself on Amy because of something that happened when she was thirteen years old, which, by Brown and Gilligan’s reckoning is the most vulnerable point in a girl’s life, the moment when she first begins to lose track of herself and instead starts to fall into society’s sleepwalk, to consent to the brainwash of whatever is around. At this time, Amy and her family moved from homey Wantagh to the more upscale Merrick, and she was quite apprehensive about the change. One day while she was home alone, sleeping in on a Saturday morning in the new house, several men were doing renovations downstairs, laying down the kitchen floor, mixing cement. One of them raped Amy. She says that she never told her parents because she was afraid she would be punished. According to one of her friends, who sold this anecdote during the media feeding frenzy that descended all over Merrick after the shooting, Amy later told her, “I fucked the tile man.” Amy claims that she never said any such thing, that she always described this event as a rape. But I am inclined to believe the friend. Because that is something a child would do: take a traumatic experience, one where she lost control, where she was frightened—in fact, I would guess, very frightened—and claim that it was a choice, it was seduction, it was humping the help. (For whatever reason, many gay men I know were raped by uncles or family friends as children, and now say that they don’t remember the experience as a violation, that they only recall the various ways that it felt nice—and point to their current sexual preference as proof, never considering the possibility that their psyches may be accommodating an uncomfortable trauma by turning it into a triumph.) Who has not practiced this form of alchemy, converting painful experiences into interesting stories, entertaining anecdotes, cocktail party banter? Sooner or later it all comes out in the wash, or it all shows up on Jerry Springer, everything accumulates in packaged, processed words to become a pat, pathetic imitation of life. We all know that memory is basically a construct, that we revise and rewrite history all the time, and most of the time we don’t even notice we are doing it. It must have been a reasonable coping mechanism for Amy, at age thirteen, to take on sex, make it her weapon, decide to use her body to take men before they took her.

  The trouble is, sex is not a weapon. It’s a reproductive act that God in his infinite generosity has made quite pleasurable. So much more has been attached to it, both by puritanical zealots and overzealous pornographers, not to mention by Jewish mothers, Catholic fathers, diseases we didn’t ask for, dangers we want to defy, and of course, finally, by our own unavoidable knowledge that it is the life force, that our sexuality is so essentially bound up with what we are, what we are made of, it is our mettle, it is the finest and most delicate and most damaged thing about us.

  And still, sex itself, in a workaday sort of way, is just sex. And if you try to use it as a weapon, the only person you will wound is yourself.

  You don’t have to be Amy Fisher to find this out the hard way. Adolescence for girls in almost any circumstance is a nightmare unmitigated. As William Inge tried to show with the Kim Novak role in Picnic, it is a horror even for the homecoming queen—or Miss Neewollah (Halloween backwards), the title of honor with which Novak is crowned at a Labor Day picnic in a small town in Kansas, all the while she tries to explain her desire to run away with a dissipated drifter played by William Holden, because she is just so sick of always being just pretty. And, of course, another homecoming queen from Orange County named Nicole Brown ran off with O.J. Simpson when she was just seventeen, seemingly hoping to escape from herself.

  Of course, teenage years are a tough time for guys too, but it is not because they are pushed and pulled every which way: it is in fact because the trajectory for boys is so much more direct. You want to be a man, you want to be stronger, you want to be richer, you want to lay as many babes as possible. The propulsion for the male of the species is utterly forward—more women, more muscles, more money, more power, more scores. There is pressure involved in all this demand for acquisition and accumulation, b
ut at least the rules are straightforward and obvious—if you’re going farther, faster, harder and higher, then unless you wind up in a car wreck, you are doing the right thing. Which is why when an adult woman seduces an underage boy—as was the case in the recent episode that found Mary Kay LeTourneau, a married second-grade teacher in a Seattle suburb, already the mother of four, giving birth to a child by a thirteen-year-old former student—it is not the same, not even comparable, to any instance of a grown man messing with a teenage girl. Those who thought this teacher-molestress was let off easy with a minimal sentence and some counseling—those who believed that this Sophocles-worthy sexual tragedy (travesty?) should be treated like any Humbert-Lolita statutory rape case—failed to recognize that girls and boys develop differently, and it’s moronic to pretend otherwise. (For what it’s worth, we barely ever prosecute any episodes of “consensual” rape regardless of gender permutations—witness Michael Kennedy’s clean getaway from his teenage babysitter, which allowed him to walk free and finally ski to his death.) But more to the point, this makes the idiotic presumption that boys and girls are the same, that sex means the same things to both, that they are socialized with the same expectations. Regardless of what the law says, most thirteen-year-old boys would consider any female willing to have sex with them a gift from above; that attitude may not be good or healthy, but there it is. The male body must consent to sex in a way his partner’s does not quite have to; the simple fact that the woman ended up pregnant means that he achieved the only tangible measure of sexual enjoyment that we know of at least once. Yes, there is the new expectation of sensitivity and caring, but that’s just a footnote, a brief break in the forward march—and it does nothing to change the notion that there is no such thing as a loose man, but the world is full of loose women. Consider the foolhardy futility of attempting to attach the moniker “slut” to a man when what we really mean is “stud.”

  Informed by this realpolitik, a girl’s development into the feminine personality is complicated, her desire is bound up in questions of morality and propriety, with physical arousal not much more than a sideshow to the central emotional issues about what sex really means (and not, as would be the case with boys, how it really feels). The rules, despite the valiant efforts of Ms. and Cosmopolitan combined, never really change: boys like girls who are sexy, but not slutty—so a little restraint is called for at the same time as one puts out a bit. While the boys can focus solely on their pleasure, getting to first base, then to second, then to third, and maybe even a home run—girls must still temper their desires. If they get lost in abandon, then they will not remember to keep doing the twisted tango, the one step up and two steps back that is a requirement of any girl who wants to have her fun but still maintain her femininity by playing keeper of the gate. In her short story “Lust,” a catalogue of the terrible sadness of teenage sexuality, Susan Minot illustrates the inequity: “The more girls a boy has, the better. He has a bright look, having reaped fruits, blooming. He stalks around, sure-shouldered, and you have the feeling he’s got more in him, a fatter heart, more stories to tell. For a girl, with each boy it’s as though a petal gets plucked each time.”

  This oddly contradictory approach to the socialization of girls is the reason that date rape has become such a vexed issue. Sometimes I think that one of the problems that both sides—or perhaps I should say all sides—to this issue forget is that many women—and to a greater extent, college girls—don’t know how to say no because they don’t know how to say yes. They cannot for the life of them register what their desire level is against what they think they should or shouldn’t do. How many girls are taught that if it feels nice, don’t think twice? How many are told by anyone other than Nike to just do it? How many are lovingly instructed, as Anne Sexton wrote in a poem addressed to her preteen daughter, that “there is nothing in your body that lies”? How many believe in their bodies? Men want or don’t want. Women think they maybe want to, but only if he feels the way she hopes he feels, and blah blah blah. Even though I am approaching thirty—and I’m afraid that I am quite typical in this sense—I still never know what I want or why I am doing whatever it is that I’m doing with men. I still, with anachronistic dismay, don’t have sex early in a relationship even though that’s when I really feel like it because of all the usual reasons that you’re not supposed to; but later on, I’ll find myself having sex whether I want to or not because it just seems like the thing to do, or something like that. I wish I could get a grip on something as simple as desire, but it is so shrouded in other motives, in what I’m trying to prove, in whether or not I’m trying to accelerate emotional intimacy through sexual contact, in messages playing on an open-loop tape—by now in the extended dance remix version—that won’t stop reverberating through the back of my brain. Sometimes I do things that I don’t want to because I want to be bold—I want to see what it’s like to fuck someone on a barstool or on a therapist’s couch, or on my desk in my office at The New Yorker—and sometimes I say no when I want to because I don’t want to be easy.

  I realize my assessment of women’s sexual situation as we approach the millennium might seem dated or old-fashioned—just as I also realize that there are women with such equanimity, women who were raised by unneurotic mothers and adoring, dependable fathers, women who know their own self-worth, who know what sex is worth, and can take it all at face value. And it is my hope that the next generation of girls is reared with the freedom to register desire and pursue pleasure and not be afraid to want, to need, to demand, to delight. But in the meantime, rare women like Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe, blessed with such a sense of certainty in the sexual arena, need to be made more sensitive to the confusion girls feel about their right to erotic abandon and the concomitant right to forgo it. They need to understand that when girls misuse or abuse the term “date rape” it is only because the taxonomy of women’s sexual experience has not yet classified all the different perfectly legal and easily avoidable ways that these women-in-training feel themselves being violated—they have no language to express how they had no idea what they wanted until they got what they didn’t want. And, I might add, all these confused girls would do themselves a favor by avoiding doing things like taking all their clothes off and then realizing they just want to flee (which I have done many times, so I know the impulse well) until they get clear about what they want and expect from sex. Because the current morass—well, one Antioch College is enough.

  In the case of Amy Fisher, you have a girl who figured out that men like sex, and they like it with her, but did not absorb the lesson about displaying her sense of self by putting the brakes on things once in a while. Her pursuit of pleasure was not pure—she always wanted something else, like attention or love. She didn’t seem to understand that the men she slept with were in fact in it for the enjoyment and that’s all. They had no ulterior motives, they were not looking for Daddy or searching for salvation. During a postpartum and pre-Evita interview on Oprah, Madonna said that she planned to teach her daughter Lourdes to have self-respect. An audience member then asked what she would teach the little girl about men. Madonna snapped back: “If I teach her to have self-respect, then I won’t need to teach her about men.” She got that right. Amy Fisher was bereft of any dignity, and because she was completely unschooled in the seesaw of sexual gamesmanship a girl must play—thinking she could just thrust forward like the men—she lost out big time.

  It’s not that a woman cannot be a sexual adventuress, cannot have escapades and dalliances: of course she can. But if you live by the sword, you must die by the sword, which is to say you cannot expect anything from sex but sex. Even the vamps of film noir, the women who sleep with men to get them to kill their husbands or to help them in some such scheme or to serve home and country by extracting state secrets—even these women wanted something for the carnal acts they committed. But did you ever hear of a man sleeping with a woman to get something out of her? It just seems the way of things that women ba
rgain with their bodies and men don’t. The lessons in how all this works are rarely imparted to teenage girls beyond the occasional adage about not buying the cow when you can get the milk for free. But when you’re seventeen, you don’t want to get married anyway. Teenage years for girls tend to be marked by much regrettable sexual activity, and it often mars their dealings with men in adulthood. The whole situation seems baffling: boys want to have sex with them, will do anything, say anything, to get inside their pants, and then they don’t want them anymore. It makes no sense: give them what they want and you get punished.

  Susan Minot captures this confusion very eloquently in “Lust”: “Then comes after. After when they don’t look at you. They scratch their balls, stare at the ceiling. Or if they do turn, their gaze is altogether changed. They are surprised. They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise. You’re gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.” In the August 1996 issue of Harper’s, this same sentiment was echoed by Kathy Dobie in “The Only Girl in the Car,” a beautifully rendered memoir of the horror of being a promiscuous girl in seventies suburbia, a chronicle of the way she was punished, ostracized—and ultimately gang-raped—for daring to be so bold as to want the same thing all the boys wanted: to get laid whenever she felt like it. “Almost all of my early sexual experiences were with boys who wanted me and hated me for it, boys who thought their desires were dirty and were quick to put that dirtiness on me,” Dobie writes. “That peculiar mix of lust and loathing, the light in their eyes, the brusqueness of their hands, the begging and then sneering, the whimpering and then boasting—that was sex as I knew it.”