Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  By comparison, Autumn Jackson, an obviously very troubled teenage girl who was raised by an obviously unstable mother to believe that Bill Cosby was her father (the DNA flies!), was convicted of extortion in Federal Court for feebly and unsuccessfully blackmailing her putative paternal unit into giving her money to prevent her from selling the story of her secret sire to the tabloid weekly The Globe. Ms. Jackson may well get twelve years in prison for a crime that ultimately harmed no one and that can, in some ways, be seen as no more than just a pathetic and pathological response to being fatherless, or of disputed paternity, and a product of misdirected parenting. Meanwhile, Melissa Drexler, the nineteen-year-old better known as the “prom mom”—she gave birth in a stall of the ladies’ room during her senior soirée and either killed or left the baby for dead—has been indicted for first-degree murder in Monmouth County, an offense that carries a thirty-year minimum sentence—even though it’s obvious that what the girl really needs is some serious therapy, probably a stay in a locked ward, and a junior high level course in sex education. In the same vein, in a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, prosecutors made much fuss about the fact that they would not seek the death penalty against Amy Grossberg—another adolescent in denial about her pregnancy until her baby burst forth in a motel room one day and was found dead in a Dumpster the next—as if it were a sign of their reason or mercy or compassion, or whatever.

  I can only interpret the severity with which punishment and the attendant moralizing are meted out—or, at any rate, spoken of—when it comes to these very young, very harmless and completely clueless girls as a particular strain of extreme misogyny that can only be directed at women whose sexuality is still just beginning—just barely—to bloom. It seems like some societal attempt to stamp and stomp this burgeoning sexual energy into a vapid, stolid anemia before it has even an opportunity to be enjoyed by its rightful owner, by the girl on trial. Perhaps the cheer that I could not help feeling when nineteen-year-old English au pair Louise Woodward was set free in Middlesex County after being given a sentence of time served for the accidental death of the infant in her charge was simply in that for once a teenage girl—a thoroughly homely one, it seems worth noting, and one who projected only the dankest, dingiest bit of sexual verve—was given the state’s unswerving, unconditional support in her own pursuit of happiness (even if that meant, in Ms. Woodward’s case, going to see the touring company of the Broadway show Rent twenty times during its Boston engagement). Here, in Judge Hiller B. Zobel’s court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a justice of the Commonwealth was siding with the girl, backing up her version of events as no one had ever offered to do for Amy.

  In Amy’s case, not even her own parents or attorneys seemed to be with her all the way. The decision for Amy to plea-bargain, which was wise considering there was a grandstanding prosecutor and such a fervid, rabid victim (it is hard to remember that Mary Jo, not Amy, is technically the victim) to contend with, still in some way showed a lack of faith in Amy’s essential innocence. Remember, almost all of the Kennedy clan came out to support William Kennedy Smith when he was charged with rape in Palm Beach in 1991. And Alex Kelly, an accused rapist when he was still a high school senior in Darien, Connecticut, was secreted out of the country by his parents before the state had a chance to try him; by the time he returned to face the law in 1996, after several years on a European sojourn, he was completely at ease, his girlfriend and family flanking him supportively on his way into court, their faith in him unshaken. And, of course, there were the Simpson women—two sisters, an octogenarian and wheelchair-bound mother, not to mention his daughter Arnelle and even his ex-wife Marguerite—who stood by O.J. so resolutely, creating a barricade of tough, no-nonsense guardian angels, bolstering their man like a scaffold holding up a crumbling edifice.

  In not one of these three cases was the accused convicted. (Alex Kelly’s trial ended in a hung jury, and it was considered a miracle—as well as a much-needed opportunity for the state of Connecticut’s legal forces to learn from its mistakes, just as the attorneys in Simpson’s civil trial learned from the loopholes in the criminal prosecution—that the second time around, after some well-publicized drunk-driving episodes, Kelly was finally convicted. Even then, after the verdict, he was released on bail to await sentencing—an oddity when, by comparison, Mary Kay LeTourneau in Seattle was in jail awaiting trial for a lesser crime.)

  No one, it seemed, was willing to jump without reservation to Amy Fisher’s defense. When I think of the strange spectacle of folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie speaking out on behalf of Richard Secord during the Iran-Contra hearings, insisting that he was the “Universal Soldier” of her one hit song, a footman in other people’s larger designs, it seems incongruous that no one championed Amy’s cause until she was safely locked away in prison. An unlikely crusader—Tammy Wynette, say, or Phyllis Schlafly—surely should have shown up. Finally Madonna, on Saturday Night Live in January 1993, ripped up a picture of Joey and said, “Fight the real enemy.” This made her the only prominent feminist to speak out in any way on Amy’s behalf. While Gloria Steinem and company were getting all huffy about Anita Hill, who was mostly just being irritated by her former boss, no one was coming forward for Amy. Anna Quindlen, where are you? Earth to Katha Pollitt—hello? The world needed your wit and reason (I say that about Pollitt, not Quindlen, who has had neither for quite some time). Only Amy Pagnozzi, writing in the definitely down-market New York Post, came out on Amy’s side—and even befriended Amy a bit, finding common ground with the teenager because she was married to Clive Barnes, the newspaper’s theater critic and a much older man.

  But the feminist movement’s mum response to Ms. Fisher did nothing so much as reveal its own vulnerabilities and defenses—into which, by the mid-nineties, several younger women like Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfeld and even Naomi Wolf would eagerly puncture big holes, as part of a sex-positive wave that came to be known as “do me” feminism. Amy Fisher made us see that the desexed persona of the proper feminist—which made it impossible for feminism to take up her cause—meant that a number of women who wanted to walk on the wild side that was supposed to be part of the promise of liberation had nowhere to turn.

  Anita Hill—she was easy to defend, the poor sharecropper’s daughter made good, the Yale Law grad who, with so many of her siblings beside her as she spoke at her Senate hearing, was the modern incarnation of the house nigger, the person that every bigot means when he says some of my best friends are black, the one you point to in contrast to inner-city mayhem to prove that stupidity and moral bankruptcy—not racism and poverty—are the reason that those people are stuck in Harlem, in East St. Louis, in Compton, in prison, in hell. She was the virtue meltdown. She’s the one who—unlike the recalcitrant Jane Roe or the unpleasant and unbecoming Paula Jones—makes the moral fault lines so easy to define.

  But what can the women’s movement offer Amy, who really needs them? The challenge that someone like Ms. Fisher poses to feminism is the obverse of the trouble that men like Bob Packwood and Arlen Specter—two senators whose private behavior and icky personalities are reprehensible but who have always been good supporters of women’s rights and issues when it really counts—cause us: nothing Amy does or says is particularly good for the cause, but she is a grim and healthy reminder of what the women’s movement must do for her, how it needs to make the world safe for Amy Fisher and for so many girls who have gotten the worst of the promises of liberation—promiscuity, pornography, prostitution in the suburbs—without the knowledge of how to use sex as a weapon before the Joey Buttafuocos of the world turn their rapiers against them.

  It is amazing how many women’s memoirs of teenage disaster in the still of suburbia have appeared in recent years—Beverly Donofrio’s Riding in Cars with Boys, Betsy Israel’s Grown Up Fast, Susan Gordon Lydon’s tale of twenty years of heroin addiction titled Take the Long Way Home, the now-classic anonymous diary of a juvenile junkie called Go Ask Alice, among others. The fictional rend
itions of the same source material—Joyce Carol Oates’ Foxfire, Alice McDermott’s That Night, Susan Taylor Chehak’s Smithereens, Joyce Maynard’s ambitious novelization of the Pam Smart case, To Die For—are never-ending. While most of these books don’t become best-sellers, they are literary staples, constants. City-girl stories are never quite so gothic, the pregnancy scares and peyote incidents never quite so brutal, the botched abortions and crime scenes never quite so bloody—possibly because the dreary, dull suburban landscape is fallow ground for a teenage wasteland. Which reminds us why it is the fifties, when everyone migrated out to their subdivisions, and not the sixties, when everyone went nuts because of those same subdivisions, that mark the decline of American life.

  All these narratives of suburban girlhood seem to revolve around a simple set of plot points: a boredom, almost from birth, that would appear to be depression but is soon mistaken for mischief; a desire, at an early age, to be seductive; a belief, at a later age, that acting on this desire can be fun; and finally watching as it all comes back in haunting horror; followed by a realization that the ghastly consequences—unwanted pregnancy, disease, crime, prison—will be paid for by the girls alone, and the guys are not even going to be supportive. In fact, many of them won’t even be around to be supportive. And the boys who have not fled in horror will often turn on them: they’ll sell stories to Inside Edition, they’ll pretend they don’t know her, they’ll be the first in school to spray-paint “SLUT” in scarlet letters across her locker. Parents are always far too far away to notice what is going on until a pregnancy starts to show or a syringe punctures a hole in a trash bag—and even then they try not to notice. Loneliness is the leitmotif, and it hardly seems surprising that sex or drugs become the frenzy in which all this isolation gets lost. But in a strange turn of exuberance, the loneliness that these remedies ultimately only serve to magnify seems an acceptable price to pay for the brief freedom they allow. “There was the daytime world, the public world, in which we all had families, went to school, took directions from adults, and lied all the time without even thinking about it,” Kathy Dobie writes in her Harper’s essay. “Sex blew this world open …”

  One of the truest, most upsetting and oddly literary portraits of suburbia as hidden hell is actually a movie. Smooth Talk is a creepy, unsettling adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates short story “Do You Know Where You’re Going? Do You Know Where You’ve Been?” Put on film by Joyce Chopra, one of the rare female directors at that time (whose reputation was later destroyed when she was one in a series of people at the helm of Bright Lights, Big City, a mistake of a movie for reasons beyond mere misdirection), the 1985 release is mostly about Laura Dern’s obnoxious, awkward sexual awakening in small-town California at age fifteen. There is so much in the movie that is so accurate, painfully so—Dern’s gawkiness, her poor posture and, above all, her obvious discomfort in her own body that gives a sense of a girl who was not a real cutie pie through childhood, but is now blonde and leggy and not quite able to handle the attention she gets from boys at the mall, boys at the soda-pop joint, boys everywhere. She is mystified by her sudden power at the same time that it makes her feel superior to her plain, homely family (Mary Kay Place plays the mom, if that gives you some idea); it makes her feel that she’s got a secret that is too significant to be interrupted by her mother’s concern with painting the house or her sister’s interest in her dolls.

  And, of course, that’s the nature of the cleft that occurs at adolescence: the family can’t see what the world has started to notice—or, more likely, they willfully ignore it, pretend that sex has not invaded their space with the suddenness of a bad odor—so there’s no way for a girl to be a comfortable, integrated person at home. The constant jones to get out of the house is all about going to a place where it’s possible for authenticity—or, failing that, the mall, the drive-in and worse—but that too is disappointing because the boys you neck with or the ones who buy you milk shakes cannot recognize you for the sweet little girl you are, they can’t see that only an hour before you were washing the dinner dishes or refurnishing your dollhouse. A terrible, sinking personality split becomes inevitable, as Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown document so well in Meeting at the Crossroads, and the result, as portrayed in Smooth Talk, is a lack of conviction that makes Dern’s character easy to hate. The loneliness Dern feels when she’s trying to talk to her mom, paired with the antsiness she feels out on a date, should inspire sympathy, but instead just meets with our disgust. The audience starts to hope that this girl gets what’s coming.

  And in this, too, Smooth Talk is unusually accurate. Teenage girls, who more than at any other time in a woman’s life perhaps, really just need someone to talk to, often sabotage themselves by giving off so many mixed messages that no one around them knows what to do, and everyone is just so sick of the sulleness and snideness. They are like starving stray cats, and all you want to do is bring them some leftover marrow bones and rub them behind the ears because they are so pretty and fuzzy—but all they want to do is scratch your hand and give you rabies because you might be the same person who threw stones at them earlier. The discomfort of watching Dern’s act is almost too much, and yet it’s one of the few truthful adolescent portraits I have seen at the movies, one of the few where the girl is not a vapid sex kitten or a mother murderer, where she is not sexy and seventeen or acne-scarred and dangerous; Dern comes across as just plain old confused. It is a spectacular performance.

  The red-hot center of Smooth Talk involves an older greaser, played by Treat Williams, talking his way into the girl’s house while the family is away for the afternoon—Dern, cranky and cross as usual, can’t be bothered to join them. After about an hour of obnoxious cajoling through the screen door, when Williams finally gets the girl into his car and onto her back for the classic American sexual initiation in the wheat fields, it’s hard to know if it’s rape or seduction or what. There’s a lot of symbolism bound up in the doorway, which gets locked and unlocked and fidgeted with as Williams’ harangue goes on and on. It’s the movie’s one heavy-handed, graceless moment: the house, which is the universal symbol of family, is safe; once Dern walks out the door, she’s basically consenting to whatever. And yet, the tribulations of adolescence are honestly stated: Laura Dern played with halters and short shorts and cutoffs and fire and other raw, rough attempts at sexy because she thought boys were fun; the real consequences of sexy—the men who may not be so fun—no one warned her about, because a conspiracy of silence surrounds the grimy thought of what happens to any girl who goes out looking for it, looking for anything. This girl was definitely out there looking for trouble, but no one bothered to tell her that trouble shows up the way it wants to, that it doesn’t stop when you say stop, that men read sexual innuendo any which way they like, that as jailbait you can go fishing but you can’t know if you’ll catch a fluke or a shark, that you’ve got to expect to be eaten alive. Brooke Shields may not have known what she meant about nothing coming between her and her Calvins, but zillions of men knew just what she didn’t know she meant—the pubescent virgin of those ads sums up nicely what post-structuralists mean when they say that the signifier and signified do not have to have a meeting of minds—and this is why parents wish they could just keep their teenage daughters locked up in the house. Meanwhile, Treat Williams is able to achieve his own version of breaking and entering just by smooth talking the girl into going for a ride with him because she doesn’t know what else to do.

  Hey little girl is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? Mm-hmm I got a bad desire

  Without particularly meaning to, Smooth Talk explains why date rape is so troublesome: she didn’t say no, she didn’t say yes, she could have refused, she didn’t refuse—and yet it seems certain that a real violation has occurred. But the movie doesn’t deal with that. That’s not really the point. This isn’t a movie about the law or personal politics—it’s about a girl learning her lot in life as a woman, learning the l
esson of Dinah and Tamar, learning that no one really cares how she feels. It ends with Dern, her sister and her mother dancing in the living room while James Taylor sings “Handyman.” It’s stark and awful, the two sisters doing a box step like an awkward couple during “Beth” or “Endless Love” at the senior prom, both of them seem lonely for company and comfort, and the mother seems relieved, for the moment, to have her little girls back. The father is nowhere to be found—he’s out fixing the car or getting the barbecue going, doing some guy thing.

  I fix broken hearts I Baby I’m your handyman

  It’s hard not to be flooded with images of the perfect high school crush, of James Taylor the way he was in Two-Lane Blacktop, the sweet preppy boy of unhappy Mnemsha, a blue-eyed beauty with long dark hair, a junkie, a McLean’s refugee, a man who would never do what the guy in Smooth Talk did, he is the perfect image of the boy Laura Dern went out looking for, someone romantic and off-kilter and tongue-tied with a pretty, pretty voice and an acoustic guitar that he bought from a guy who said it once belonged to Jaco Pastorius. Or something like that. James Taylor, such as he was in the early seventies, is the boy every girl should have lost her virginity to.