Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  It’s not that a college education makes a woman safe from a wife-batterer or even less likely to end up dancing topless, but, well, it does at least teach you that you’ve got choices, that your value is all your own, that no one can bestow it upon you or take it away. It is not for no reason that the masters don’t teach the slaves to read. Just because “knowledge is power” is the annoying slogan used by every conspiracy-theory crank and every paranoid grass-roots movement doesn’t make it any less true. When Nicole filed for divorce on February 25, 1992, she claimed in her statement: “By the time I was 19 years of age, we were living together most of the time. I traveled back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco to be with him … [Respondent required me to be available to travel with him whenever his career required him to go to a new location, even if it was for a short period of time.” After a brief allusion to courses she began to take at a junior college when she had some free time after hooking up with O.J.—all of which were interrupted before completion—Nicole concludes, “I have had no other college education, and I hold no college degrees. I worked as a waitress for two months. Prior to that, I was a sales clerk in a boutique. These two jobs are the sum total of my employment experience. I worked on my own as an interior decorator, mostly for respondent and his friends. I no longer have that opportunity.” Of course, being denied the daily drudgery of a desk job seems a small price to pay to live in a mansion “with a full staff to assist us,” including nutritionist and personal trainer, and to have residences to escape to in Laguna Beach, in San Francisco and on East 65th Street in New York. In a world in which the majority of married women work outside the home, perhaps the awesomeness of Nicole’s situation was best summed up by Jeff Keller, a friend of Ron Goldman, who figured Nicole and her girlfriends enjoyed hanging out at the local Starbucks with the young men of pluck and aspiration who waited tables to pay bills because of this poverty novelty. “They had nothing to do but shop and hang out with their kids,” Keller told The New York Times of Ms. Brown’s crowd. “[Nicole] liked us.”

  Just the same, Nicole’s doll’s life is really an updated version of Henrik Ibsen’s Nora—with the play’s indeterminate ending recast into a bloody tabloid mess. And the door-slamming and accusations that offer such satisfaction and payback at the sloping close of A Doll’s House’s dramatic arc provide a precise text of the kind of cool, clean break Nicole could never quite make. “You and Papa have committed a great sin against me,” Nora says unequivocally to her baffled husband, adding that, as Nicole’s divorce filings merely imply, “it is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.” Nora claims as she walks out on Torvald that she is going to educate herself out of her hausfrau ignorance, to “try and get some sense.” How much better off Nicole would have been as a curvy coed with classes to attend, how good it would have been if every time O.J. demanded she hew to his schedule, she could just tell him that she had homework, and football bored her anyway, and she wouldn’t know a halfback from a half-wit, and she can see him when he gets home. Learning is emboldening. Not every educated woman is going to translate her degrees into a life in which she behaves as if she feels the principles of self-sufficiency and self-respect rule, but at least it’s possible. At least when you behave like an idiot, you’ll know it’s your own damn fault.

  No means no. Against her will is against the law. And all that stuff. All those slogans that all of us have heard, any of us who have gone to college in the last ten or twenty years anyway.

  And of course it is all true, it is all good advice, and of course everyone I know in a healthy, happy relationship is not getting beaten and bashed around, is not living with strange forms of manipulative behavior, with the threat of abandonment and the specter of violence hanging over their love like the Sword of Damocles, always one step away from becoming a reality. I know right from wrong, I know that you shouldn’t have to pay for your love with your bones and flesh, I know that, for the most part, there is no good reason ever for a man to hit a woman, I know it, I believe it, I understand that the alluring drama of sick and twisted relationships—Samson and Delilah, O.J. and Nicole, Catherine and Heathcliff—have left behind casualties, murders, suicides, overdoses, severed heads, broken bones. I know I don’t want that for myself, I know I want to be involved with one of those men who’ve read Andrea Dworkin when even I think she’s nuts and who wants to take paternity leave and even likes listening to the Indigo Girls and asks me how my day was, every day, as if he cares. I know better to love an ACLU lawyer than an Ultimate Fighter. I may even know that it’s better to go for Ted Baxter than Ted Hughes. Certainly better to not be Sylvia Plath, head in the oven, better to not have despaired myself right to death with the disappointment of Ted’s infidelity and inconstancy, better to never lament the instability of crazy love. “The strong, passionate, sensitive Heathcliff had turned around and now appeared to Sylvia as a massive, crude, oafish peasant, who could not protect her from herself or from the consequences of having grasped at womanhood,” Plath’s friend Clarissa Roche wrote, remembering the poet’s state of mind shortly before her suicide, at a time when she was separated from Hughes, freezing cold from winter, feverish from hysteria. “She cursed and mocked him for his weakness, and she called him a traitor.”

  I read this, I think how awful to be in London in the cold winter, to be writing poetry in a house once occupied by Yeats, to have your husband somewhere else with someone else, and still, I think: She got her Heath cliff. She had her moment of great, big, gigantic love. And Ted Hughes, too, may have found enough drama in that relationship to satisfy the lust in his blood for the rest of his life. “He loved her and she loved him,” wrote Hughes in “Lovesong,” from perhaps his best-known collection, Crow. “Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows / He gripped her hard so that life / Should not drag her from that moment / He wanted all future to cease.” As a caveat measure, telling the story of how this relationship—any of these relationships—all went wrong is worse than silence, its aphrodisiac effect on behalf of crazy love is more potent than just keeping quiet: it’s like a public service announcement cautioning against heroin with pictures of River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain flashing by; it’s like a lecture warning about the dangers of cigarettes, delivered while watching Casablanca or To Have and Have Not. Maybe it’s boredom, maybe I read too many eighteenth-century British novels of desperate passion in distant quarters, but somehow I feel socially programmed to be drawn in and desirous of these great and disastrous romances. I mean, why would I have to be told that no means no if there weren’t some reason for me to think otherwise?

  And there is a reason. It’s called pop culture, which is the thing I love the most, though it is a vast, totalizing machine that overwhelms everything we think, that offers us so much excitement and lawlessness and deceit on the big screen and on the jukebox and everywhere else that it might as well just scream out the subliminal messages that say Leave your marriage! Cheat on your husband! Beat up your wife! Rape your teenage niece! Come on, give it a try! It is pop culture that brought us the General Hospital story line that had Laura marry Luke even though he raped her, it is pop culture that had Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton duking it out in the drunken stupor and rage of a bad marriage in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it is pop culture that produced The Getaway with its atmosphere of suspicion and persistent possibility of murder between the fugitive couple Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen—who are somehow going to live happily ever after in Mexico just the same—and it is pop culture that gave us the Crystals’ hit single, produced by alleged wife-beater Phil Spector and co-written by feminist Carole King, which had the catchy refrain “He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.”

  In fact, everything you need to know about the pursuit of art and commerce in postwar America—and the mass-marketing of manufactured sincerity—is contained within Mr. Spector’s career. Because somehow, many of the songs written in the assembly-line atmosphere of the Brill Building and recorded by voices
anonymous and unknown (Does anyone really know the difference between the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles?) against the drowning downpour of Spector’s symphonic “wall of sound,” are—despite a factory formula that defines them all—often alarming in their emotional evocativeness. They were also treacly and romantic, even though Spector himself was supposed to be nasty, dark, difficult and completely abusive to his wife Ronnie, lead Ronette, lead voice behind his sweetest anthem, “Be My Baby.”

  It is a perverse and beautiful peculiarity of American capitalism that people can profit greatly by creating products that celebrate feelings that they themselves are only marginally familiar with. And the law of unintended consequences means that many emotions are cross-referenced, or surface where they should not be: “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” was actually a rather sweet song until somebody noticed it wasn’t; and “Be My Baby,” with its bloated orchestral production, is rather more desperate, pleading and obsessive than it should be—this woman who promises “for every kiss you give me / I’ll give you three,” may be the girl of your dreams, but she may be an overzealous stalker in the making.

  Far beyond all that is pop; in the military base that is the rest of America, there are two things that our culture reveres and romanticizes, in both cases with varying degrees of discomfort: the first is male violence and the second is female beauty. I don’t even have to explain this statement very much because it is quite obvious what I mean. In movies, male machine-gun shoot-’em-up machismo is considered dopey at the hands of Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, family entertainment as done by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and high art and utterly respectable as executed by Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. But beyond the big budgets of big studios, in the mid-nineties gruesomeness enjoyed an art-house renaissance with young filmmakers and their white-trash, killing-spree road flicks doing all that they possibly could with Drew Barrymore and lone Skye, exhausting every permutation of titles containing the words “gun” or “.45” or “doom” or “convenience store” (it was only natural for Oliver Stone to do a well-financed version like Natural Born Killers, where the lack of budgetary constraints allowed for a more plentiful blood flow). Even with all this independent, hipster activity, there’s still a whole subset of intellectual types who actually like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal movies, perhaps for their comical smarminess, perhaps for the same reason that I like Merle Haggard, perhaps because, as we approach the millennium, even our guilty pleasures are as laborious and dull as acquired tastes. Of course, the really smart people were into Jackie Chan and Hong Kong martial-arts movies when they were still in Chinese, when they were still without subtitles.

  Off the silver screen, where we know the red stuff isn’t catsup, many otherwise sane people—even writer Joyce Carol Oates—find the unadorned brutality of boxing or the bloody violence of Ultimate Fighting rather gorgeous. In 1997, not only did When We Were Kings, the documentary about Muhammad Ali, win an Oscar for Best Documentary, but Mike Tyson was barred from the ring for biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear (which, in all the commotion, was almost lost, until a nice young usher found the shard of cartilage and put it in a bag to be reattached) during the third round of a Las Vegas bout, with the end result of all the media attention meaning that the professional pugilists were hard to ignore, whether you were a fan or not. Meanwhile, while erstwhile Naval Academy boxer Senator John McCain was making all kinds of motions to outlaw Ultimate Fighting—where the two men go at it until somebody surrenders or a doctor intervenes, and where biting off someone’s ear would be well within your rights—on the 1997 season of the sitcom Friends, one of the subplots involved Courtney Cox/Monica’s boyfriend deciding to take up the grisly sport. But even if Ultimate Fighting is sickening enough to have been banned in several states, the respectability of the Super Bowl pretty much proves that we don’t even question the merits of gladiator-style entertainment, since, as far as I can tell, football is just so much headbutting, justified only by the occasional requirement that the ball be thrown around.

  If the cumulative effect of this list of violent and suggestive entertainment does not convincingly indicate a strange fascination with blood-as-fun-stuff in this country, keep in mind that the American Medical Association now considers gunshot wounds to be an epidemic (as opposed to a series of unrelated accidents) and that in Japan some citizens started a gun-control movement to get weapons banned in the United States after several Japanese nationals were shot—mostly by mistake—while they were here.

  If our love of violence is self-evident, there’s even less that needs to be said to be convincing about our outsize love of women’s gorgeousness. We truly are by beauty bound. It’s a truism that little girls want to grow up to be Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, that supermodels are now our superstars and role models—even before they’ve made some sad attempt at acting, or whatever (what Ms. Crawford did in Fair Game qualifies as whatever)—and that as female movie stars have ceased to be the creatures of glamour they were back in the forties, a strange new premium has been put on beauty and beauty only.

  Consider this: If Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Audrey Hepburn were alive and working today, they would be considered useless ornaments. Directors would think: Give her a lampshade, give her a lightbulb, stand her on an end table, and let’s ignore her like we would any old reading light. Not because they couldn’t act—they certainly could—but confronted by reality, by the tawdriness of life without an updo and an Hermes scarf and a Chanel suit and an Edith Head gown, they’d have no reason to act. To them, to not be glamorous was to not be. They wouldn’t do car chases—if Grace Kelly wanted to show that she was “game,” she’d pack a complete overnight bag into a Mark Cross pocketbook to prove that a true lady never needs more than a toothbrush and a La Perla negligee. Kelly and these others were cool with elegance. Which is why they were big stars, which is why they could “open” a movie, which is why their male co-stars were treated virtually as accessories, and no man got a bigger billing than they did (well, maybe Cary Grant). Laura had for its star Gene Tierney, not Dana Andrews (I know it’s hard to guess but Gene is the girl and Dana is the boy), Cover Girl is about Rita Hayworth, not Gene Kelly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s belongs to Audrey Hepburn, and not, heaven forfend, the swishy George Peppard. Who was in Babyface besides Barbara Stanwyck? In Red-Headed Woman besides the usually platinum blonde Jean Harlow? In Blonde Venus besides Marlene Dietrich?

  Of course, today, female movie stars (insofar as any exist) have ceded all that is foxy and fabulous to the likes of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford. It is they who open movies, it is they whom Barbara Walters interviews—while women today can only command the occasional sitcom on NBC and the overwrought suds of nighttime soaps on Fox (none of the three original networks even have their Dynasty- or Dallas-type shows any longer; it’s just all Dateline all the time, health insurance exposés and investigative reports on crooked diamond dealers—all this froth where there once were vamps and whores who didn’t need hidden cameras to prove they meant business). Somehow women have become footmen on the silver screen. I can’t figure out how we allowed this to happen: women are more naturally sex objects, we have more accessible visual allure—we were the incumbent icons! It was our seat to lose. We are like the Democrats voted out of Congress in the ’94 election, we have lost a long-held advantage that is rightfully ours. Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Veronica Lake—so many Hollywood women established the Divine Right of Queens through years of aggressive casting-couch tactics and backhanded backstage backstabbing, and it surely was not so Tom Hanks could contemplate a box of chocolates on a bench in Savannah!

  Nevertheless, such is the predicament we now find ourselves in, and suddenly our glamour quotient—to which we are entitled, especially those women who work, have kids, cook coq au vin for dinner and still find the energy for tantric sex during David Letterman—is suddenly provided by Naomi, Linda, Kate, Shalom, Claudia, the rest. Whereas at one
time, I think, it was considered a limitation or a detriment that, say, Amber Valletta is this gorgeous thing without a talent, it seems now that beauty for its own sake has new virtue. How else to explain that the actress Elizabeth Hurley was only too willing to take a step backward and become a model for Estée Lauder first, and a thespian (well, of sorts) in her spare time? It seems impossible to have imagined even as recently as twenty years ago—even after Blowup, even after The Eyes of Laura Mars, even after the sexualized hipster displaced the fey fashion plate as the dominant style statement—that a girl could be an aspiring model, that it could be a dream you pursued while waiting on tables and mixing martinis for portfolio money. It used to be that you posed along the catwalk to pay for art school, or if you were Lauren Hutton you used Revlon to support a safari habit, and if you were Jessica Lange it was an embarrassing way to underwrite your Stanislavski Method. It was maybe even something to do until you got married, had kids and settled down. It is only the most recent phenomenon that finds being a professional beauty its own apotheosis.

  But the minute actresses started calling themselves “actors” and started to think it was okay to not have plastic surgery, something like this was bound to happen, there was sure to be a greater premium placed on beauty than on talent. Obviously, Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer and many other actresses are gorgeous and elegant, but they don’t carry stardom comfortably—when they claim to spend Saturday nights at home playing Pictionary with friends, I’m inclined to believe them. As the only high-style movie star at the moment, Sharon Stone, no matter how many bad movies she manages to do, will remain a star because she actually bothers to cultivate this old-fashioned fabulousness and fascination around her, and because she always looks done up in public and doesn’t do this deliberately dowdy schmattes-and-glasses thing that Julia Roberts insists upon. Not only does Sharon Stone look great in Valentino, but she can also wear a Gap T-shirt to the Oscars and make it look like Valentino. Other than Ms. Stone, just as almost every field of endeavor has become more specific and specialized, to do beauty and beauty alone has become perfectly respectable.