BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  Anti-mean-girls rhetoric sounds feminist because it’s nominally about empowering girls; but, once filtered through popular media, it doesn’t ask girls to explore their anger or aggression, nor does it address why they’re expected to be “nice”—and, more important, how being nice doesn’t always leave room for being smart, strong, capable, independent, or adventurous. What could’ve been a teen feminist movement, touching on some of the great unrecognized truths about life as a girl, ultimately became nothing more than a tired recapitulation of the good girl/bad girl game, with all its attendant moralism. The mean-girls debates could have helped transform the way teenage girls are encouraged to think and act toward each other. But in the end, all we got was another catfight.

  2

  Ladies and Gentlemen

  FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, AND IDENTITY

  IT’S NOT MUCH OF A STRETCH TO MAKE THE CASE THAT MOST of the pop culture landscape, no matter what the ostensible plot or supposed topic at hand, is actually devoted to limning our expectations of men and women, girls and boys, and exploring the tensions therein. Magazines like Glamour, Redbook, Men’s Health, and Maxim are nothing if not instruction manuals for gender-appropriate behavior. Both Survivor and The Apprentice saw fit to structure entire seasons around a “battle of the sexes” gimmick. The Chicago Sun-Times headlined a July 2005 story “‘Guy roles for women’ on CBS this fall.” (Just what would those “guy roles” be? Why, doctors and lawyers, and, you know, “leaders in charge of large responsibilities and their own complex lives,” according to the paper.) Makeover shows from the mild What Not to Wear to the surgitastic likes of Extreme Makeover often focus on “correcting” gendered traits: On the former, women are forced to trade their baggy shirts and ratty sneakers for, as hostess Stacy put it on at least one occasion, “some clothes that are actually made for women”; on the latter, men with “weak” chins get implants and women with flat chests or, God forbid, facial hair get properly ladyfied. (Putting butch women in prom dresses is also a favorite of daytime talk shows.)

  When gender expectations are being reversed, the reversal itself becomes the focus, again demonstrating loud and clear how central gender is to our understanding of the world around us: The pivotal scene of G.I. Jane came when Demi Moore kicked her drill instructor in the nuts and said, “Suck my dick.” Commander in Chief is built around the novelty of a person with tits occupying the Oval Office. Even nature films get in on the act—wasn’t March of the Penguins as much about the supposed novelty of dad warming the egg for months while mom is off eating as it was about the resourcefulness of adorable flightless birds in the brutal Antarctic winter?

  A reliable category of punch lines has always been the transgression and/or maintenance of gender and sexuality’s boundaries: Think Ross and Joey’s naptime snuggling habit on Friends, the 2004 Chevy commercial in which a truck passenger sows discomfort among his friends by singing along to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle’s title characters catching each other singing along to Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On,” 2005 Emmy presenter Conan O’Brien’s quip that “every young girl dreams of winning an Emmy—and I am no exception.”

  There’s a lot going on in this little cultural obsession with gender. There’s the superficial stuff like the division of multiplex fare into chick flicks and, well, everything else; at the bookstore, it’s chick lit versus regular ol’ fiction. This is just one of the many cultural hangovers of the age-old notion that the concerns of mankind are universal but stories about women are just, you know, about women; the result is a persistent belief among culture makers and marketers that women (and girls) will happily consume stories about men (and boys), but the guys won’t do the reverse. Its corollary is the assumption that lack of a Y chromosome means an automatic affection for sappy sisterhoods (think Ya-Ya or Traveling Pants, not Is Powerful). Then there’s slightly deeper stuff like the whims of advertisers and the circular arguments of their commercial imperatives. They like our tastes—both in media and in products—divided into pink and blue camps, because it’s so much easier to figure out what to advertise where.

  But that’s far from the end of the story. Gendered identities are more than simply male or female, masculine or feminine. The tomboy and the sensitive guy have been with us as long as the delicate flower and the manly man, and the feminist and queer movements have made room for many more. Title IX brought women onto the playing fields in droves, carving out a female athletic identity far more nuanced and enduring than the tomboy. Organizations as diverse as the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, whose mission is “to end discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes by changing public attitudes, educating elected officials and expanding human rights”; the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides services to queer youth; and Camp Trans, the protest-cum-alternative festival that developed in response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s womyn-born-womyn-only policy are loosening the gender binary’s stranglehold on our popular imagination. A decade ago, drag queens and high femmes started making it onto the mainstream radar: Bound; Friends’ Carol and Susan; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; RuPaul. These days, a memoir of male-to-female transition can become a modest bestseller, and its author can be treated with respect on Oprah. Butch dykes, tranny bois, intersex folks, and the wide range of genderqueers who refuse to check either the M or the F box are moving in—however slowly—from the subcultural fringe: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Transamerica, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer prize—winning Middlesex are only the most mainstream manifestations of a new awareness of gender’s infinite complications.

  But most of us looking to celluloid for a reflection of ourselves will be sorely disappointed, no matter what our gender (even if we see ourselves as pretty standard males or females—Hollywood archetypes are limited about plenty more than the strict boy/girl thang). When nontraditional identities do make it onscreen, they tend to become confining and one-dimensional. Think Will & Grace’s Jack, who was prime time’s first out-and-proud flaming fag, or Sex and the City’s unabashedly slutty (and always satisfied) Samantha: Both started off as interesting departures for TV but became insufferable caricatures when writers neglected character development in favor of recycled punch lines.

  But there’s meaning beyond the obvious in our quest to use our pop-culture screens as mirrors. We can’t ignore the fact that lack of cultural visibility often translates into political erasure; more important, this gender obsession clues us in to how our culture has dealt with the complex changes and pressure brought by the aforementioned feminist and queer agitation. And it’s mostly by playing up clear-cut versions of masculinity and femininity whose boundaries blur only for comic effect, or struggling against change with more and more lad mags, dating rulebooks, and other attempts at keeping us all in our “proper” place.

  Bitch has always been concerned with this struggle, arguing loudly for critical examination of how pop culture seeks to define us and for whose purposes—and how we in turn push back to define ourselves.—L.J.

  Urinalysis

  On Standing Up to Pee

  Leigh Shoemaker / FALL 1997

  AH … URINATION. BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY OR SOCIAL DETERMINANT? And you thought it was just something we all have to do six or seven times a day in direct proportion to how much and what types of fluid we consume. However, according to Camille Paglia, urination surpasses its mundane function of relieving the body of fluid wastes and becomes something entirely different. As she writes in Sexual Personae: “Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of male anatomy’s most efficient compartmentalizations … Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance [sic]. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on … There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self.”

  Of course, this judgment is based not on the mere act itself, but on the how of the process, the performance involved in the relief. It’s not just what you have
, it’s what you do with it that counts. But are men of necessity arcshooters and wall-sprayers and women lowly puddle-makers? What are we to make of all this? Paglia has certainly added a new facet to good ol’ penis envy.

  Using Paglia’s logic, anyone who can shoot a stream of bodily fluid a few inches or a few feet away from one’s corpus is somehow superior, touched by the hand of God. All you need is a fleshly hose in order to transcend the horrors of embodiment. I am only assuming that she is choosing to ignore lactating women, whose postpregnancy breasts are so laden with milk that one good squeeze could take out any person in the room. Perhaps superiority should be determined not by the ability to shoot a stream of bodily fluid, but by the type of fluid composing the stream. Personally, I believe the ability to spray milk to be on a higher level than the ability to spray urine. Perhaps this is merely my bias as a woman. However, I think that all those good Catholic artists who depicted the baby Jesus feeding at his mother Mary’s breast would agree: None of these pictures showed the holy infant with his mouth greedily slurping at the nipple; rather, he is shown kicked back at a distance, mouth open, a thin stream of white fluid coursing through the air toward the blessed mouth, propelled by the hand of Mary—the first popular documentation of a milk-squirting woman. Arc of transcendence, indeed—you don’t see any streams of urine headed toward the mouth of God.

  Yet this logic clearly never occurred to Paglia, committed as she is to male superiority. Witness: “The cumbersome, solipsistic character of female physiology is tediously evident at sports events and rock concerts, where fifty women wait in line for admission to the sequestered cells of the toilet. Meanwhile, their male friends zip in and out (in every sense) and stand around looking at their watches and rolling their eyes.”

  One must wonder: Has this woman never heard of the concept of “potty parity”? It’s not that women take that long to pee, though I have stood in line behind some of the slowest—but one must factor in many other variables. Society has urged women to conceal and restrain their physiques in layers of strange undergarments, hose, girdles, etc., which are as difficult to remove as they are to reassemble. Who says that women don’t have to concentrate and extend the mind to spatial analysis in order to pee? Also, most women actually wash their hands, even though they don’t have to manually direct and position any flesh in order to accomplish the great feat of urination.

  On to the matter of toilet type—let’s uncover the great mystery of the men’s room. Men’s rooms typically have two types of urine-receiving vessels: the traditional toilet that you find in your own home, and the urinal, a freestanding porcelain hole in the wall. Some men’s rooms expand on the urinal idea to the trough, which, true to its name, can accommodate several excreting fellows shoulder to shoulder. One trough may be the equivalent of ten to twelve traditional toilets. Zip, flip, whiz, shake, tuck, zip, and you’re outta there. Superiority based on biology or superior bathroom planning? You make the call.

  Of course, the man’s ability to zip and flip, coupled with the indiscreet placement of urinals and troughs and rampant societal homophobia, makes the male of the species subject to a much more touchy issue: urinal etiquette. I have been informed by those in the know that talking is out, glancing is out, looking down is out, meticulous shaking is out, bumping is out; in fact, any kind of personal contact or comment is out of the question. Peeing on the cake, however, is accepted and perhaps lauded as an accomplishment—however, since this involves looking down, better do it only when alone or with close friends. Brag about it later. Paying too much attention to your penis or anyone else’s while in the bathroom is a sure sign of deviance. Is this the concentration to which Paglia so enviously refers?

  While men are ushered into the realm of the public pissoir at young and tender ages (but not too young, because they will look and they will comment: “Yours is so big!” a friend’s young nephew was reported to exclaim to a man at a urinal in a public restroom), women are cloistered off into those sequestered cells to do our business discreetly and quietly, with a minimum of muss and fuss. We wait our turn in line for entrance into one of those private cubicles, and upon gaining admittance, turn and lock the door behind us, shutting out all those who would dare to enter and intrude upon our most private moments. Within the stall lies the toilet, the toilet paper dispenser, a hook for hanging loose articles, and another small box, the cell within the cell, for the disposal of that most private of items, the “sanitary” napkin and/or tampon. Bathroom etiquette consists of waiting your turn respectfully, not splashing on the seat, and not taking too much time in the stall. But ah, the freedom that one enjoys in the sweet privacy of the claustrophobic retreat: One’s eyes can wander freely, one can smile, chat with one’s friends waiting in line, and why, one can even touch oneself without feeling too transgressive.

  Compare this sanctimonious confessional with the men’s room stall: same basic equipment, but no door, and often, no toilet paper. Imagine the chagrin experienced by the male as he enters the public restroom to take care of business. Suppose he doesn’t want to join his comrades at the trough or urinal line—can he attain his dreams of privacy from within the confines of a stall? What if he wants to deny his “natural” superiority by sitting down? Some guys do, you know. The men’s bathroom becomes for many a sort of proving ground of machismo, a killing field from which only the most superior may emerge, a site of systematic desensitization through a lack of privacy and forced public urination (and defecation). The message is one that would make Darwin proud: Stand up and piss, or be pissed upon. Could this lack of sensitivity in bathroom design be one factor that is reinforcing stereotypical masculine behavior?

  To continue along that stream of thought, what effect does this “camaraderie” at the trough have on the men who experience it continually throughout their lives? What effect does urination in a small sequestered cell have on the women who experience such cloistering in their public and private lives? Are men more comfortable with their body image due to the public parading of their most “private” parts? Or do they learn, again and again, upon entering the men’s room, that they must be able to prove themselves physically in order to attain success as a male in society? Do women internalize the message that their excretions are dirty and shameful, something to be hidden from other women and the world? Is the sequestered cell complicit in serving to further the fragmentation of women? Does it, as Paglia states, imply a “solipsistic” women’s nature? Do men really gather in public restrooms to create directed streams of urine and contemplate their consequential domination of society? Is it a worthwhile feminist project to create public restrooms that enable women to gather and excrete in the visible presence of one another?

  Perhaps Paglia was on the right track, but, as usual, busily engaged in savagely missing the point. Urination as metaphor for natural male superiority? No. Urination as metaphor for the propagation of stereotypes and perceptions of male superiority? Mayyyybe. Urination as concrete example of what we assume about gender and how we reinforce those assumptions—about man’s ability to perform under pressure, about man’s “transcendence,” about woman’s unwieldy and inconvenient embodiment? Ah, yes. What might be the implications of an entire generation of men trained to pee sitting down? What might be the implications of a worldwide potty parity law with amendments built in to ensure plenty of good, fresh t.p. and doors for all stalls, men’s and women’s? Perhaps the revolution must begin not at home, not in the streets, but in the bathrooms of America, for it is there that we learn to deal with some of the most personal interactions we will ever experience. Whether we take it sitting down or standing up is an important issue indeed.

  The Collapsible Woman

  Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse

  Vanessa Veselka / WINTER 1999

  ONE IN THREE. ONE IN FOUR. ONE IN TEN. THAT’S HOW MANY women will be raped in their lifetime, depending on which statistic you believe. As disturbing as the numbers are, almost equally disturbing is the fa
ct that, while each woman is unique, we seem to accept only one response from a rape or abuse victim: total collapse.

  The collapsible woman—one model of mental health for an uncountable number of individuals. She is fragile, humorless, and diluted, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the sickly Victorian “angel of the house.” Now, like then, when a model of total fragility is held aloft as virtue, women live up to the image out of a lack of alternatives. “Break yourself,” we whisper. “We’ll be there to catch you.” And if you don’t, call us when you’re ready. Every major media piece on the subject of rape or abuse presents us with the same vision of this collapsible woman. We see the same fight for sanity and purity and the same picture of life after the cathartic process of renewal. This can be seen as support for violated women, or as victim culture—but neither stance offers us much worth striving for. There has to be something better than the toaster prize of being called a survivor, an alternative to the role of the forever-scarred, pain-haunted neurotic.

  This deification of fragility offers us nothing but a religion in which the pinnacle of holiness is the ability to break down at any moment, over anything, and call it a return to sanity. I’m not questioning real emotions, nightmares, tears, and pain; they are the inviolable right of every human. How, though, from this, have we come to portray the ideal “recovering” woman as someone who can’t go to the grocery store without having her “issues” “triggered”? Sure, there are days, sometimes months, in the life of anybody who has been violated when the need to protect oneself from the callousness of the outside world is absolute. We need, however, to hold up more than a skinless existence as an endpoint. With all the media coverage and attention paid to rape victims in recent years, we still lack models that praise women for getting on with their lives rather than just getting through them.