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

by Lisa Jervis

  We’ve got Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s posse of how-to homos showing the straight men of New York how to be men, even spreading the gospel to the most hetero corners of culture with their recent makeovers of both Red Sox and rodeo stars. Then there’s Jonathan Antin, the unquestionably straight male hairstylist (don’t call him a barber), whose reality show Blow Out is propelled by equal parts aggressive posturing (when he doesn’t get his way) and emotionally charged weeping (when his new hair product line succeeds). And don’t forget those bumbling leading men and beta males populating the television and movie screens, from the drunken antiheroes of Sideways to the dim-bulb slobs of prime-time sitcoms like The King of Queens and According to Jim. Just what do these guys think they are doing with masculinity? And how did they get on my TV?

  Traditionally understood masculinity is still readily identifiable in pop culture, of course. To be a man, you’re expected to be a skosh insensitive, especially about things like Valentine’s Day and wedding plans. A taste for sports is important. Definitely no crying, you big sissy. Ditto for wearing dresses, barrettes, and mascara. You shouldn’t frighten easily. And if at all possible, be the breadwinner in your überhetero relationship—emphasis on the hetero.

  This is but a small sampling of the rules—or rather, “instincts,” because masculinity is supposed to come naturally. Recall that the rules of Fight Club didn’t include the requirement of being a dude. It was simply referenced in the fourth and fifth rules: Only two guys to a fight; only one fight at a time, fellas. The club itself was predicated on masculinity—a men-only rule would’ve been redundant.

  But despite this pompous certitude, mainstream rule violations like those mentioned above are exposing the myth behind this rulebook. There’s a growing recognition that anyone can perform traditionally male traits; the if-it-looks-smells-walks-and-talks-like test doesn’t work for men anymore. We’ve got butch women, drag kings, genderqueers, and trannies hijacking masculinity, and conversely, men who are far from hitting the target. It seems that we aren’t satisfied with what’s “natural,” and we’re stretching the concept to suit our needs.

  Witness former baseball star and steroid poster boy José Canseco enthusiastically modeling women’s lingerie on VH1’s train-wreck reality series The Surreal Life. Clinging to relevancy, masculinity has been reduced to caricaturing itself. He’s a Lady, another recent “reality” catastrophe, was devoted entirely to a fake drag queen competition among a dozen men. Not surprisingly, there was no subversive intent behind the show; it was an analysis-free exercise in reinforcing traditional masculinity by using it as a frame of reference. The show generates a reaction similar to watching a dog open a jar of peanut butter on America’s Funniest Home Videos: Dogs are dumb! They aren’t supposed to open jars! Ha-ha! Our laughter could come from a radical understanding (Dogs aren’t dumb! We’re silly for thinking they aren’t supposed to open jars! Ha-ha!), but most of us, still taking Bob Saget’s cue, are laughing because men aren’t supposed to shave their legs, not because we’re foolish for believing they shouldn’t.

  There are many different folks encompassed in this “we” and “us,” however, and we don’t all share the same vision for the dead dude’s place in our culture. Some hope to give masculinity its proper eulogy: a complete reorganization of society where the man/woman distinction no longer wields its power. Others recognize masculinity’s end but fear the hijinks that would ensue if manliness lost its significance as a societal organizer. You can hear their lamentations: How would people know whom to pick for kickball? Or ask to the prom? What if the only way to tell the boys from the girls was to peek at their private bits (and, geez, even that gets complicated)? Sex before marriage would become the eleventh commandment—just to be sure. If people can’t tell boys from girls, our whole society would come to a screeching halt.

  Our reaction to this vision of social chaos has not been to stage a proper funeral, but to hold on tighter to the dead concept. Even the “we” who are calling for the funeral are not RSVPing. Masculinity is enjoying a vibrant posthumous influence as we cling to its “necessity.” We’re setting the table for our dead father, making sure dinner’s ready by six. But why are we keeping a place for him?

  It could be suggested that, once people believe strongly enough in something, they are inclined to ignore any evidence that contradicts it. The plot of Weekend at Bernie’s is organized around this level of confusion: Since everyone expects Bernie to be alive, the protagonists’ game of reanimating the corpse is never uncovered. But that doesn’t quite work because, unlike the duped supporting cast of Bernie’s, we are already aware of masculinity’s ruse.

  But there’s another explanation: While masculinity is obviously still performed earnestly and dutifully by men every day (even by those who stray from the most well-worn areas along its path), those of us aware of the game are still playing along. We just add a spoonful of irony to make it go down easier. With a wink and a nudge, men can perform their masculine duties, making it clear they are aware it’s all an act. Irony allows us to admit, or at least refer to, masculinity’s passing and yet sustain the deceased concept (perhaps cryogenically freezing it, like Stallone in Demolition Man, in case we need it down the road). A man might open the door for a woman, but with one meaningful glance can communicate, “I know this is silly, but I want to do it anyway.” The woman, in turn, can silently reply, “I’m glad you’re smart enough to realize what you are doing, but I’m still glad you’re doing it.” And thus, masculinity is sustained despite, and by the very reference to, its death.

  To think about it another way, imagine that a script for a family TV show from the 1970s was produced today. Though it was written with perfect seriousness at the time, it would literally be impossible for the show to be anything but kitsch to us. The father figure could only be seen as ironic, mocking fatherhood. His masculine gestures would be overdone and hilarious because they are perfectly sincere. Expecting a laugh track, we’d hear only silence. One need look no farther than That ‘70s Show, which uses this historical shift for its comedic edge; its best humor emanates from the zealous masculine gestures of patriarch Red Forman—but with the anticipated laugh track accompaniment. We view sincere masculinity as either a sign of earnest youthfulness (“he’s so cute”) or aged backwardness (“he’s so old-fashioned”); both invite condescension. But our ironic assaults on masculinity aren’t as clever as they seem. Masculinity still has the last laugh, as we go on structuring our reality around its remains. And so we’ve resurrected the plot of Weekend at Bernie’s, toting around a dead guy so that our world doesn’t fall apart. Masculinity’s symbolic death won’t be complete until we’ve stopped organizing our society around it—until we’ve closed the casket. But we’re still holding up his arms and gesturing for him.

  It’s obvious that the artistic failure of Weekend at Bernie’s could’ve been avoided if the status of masculinity had actually been rendered in the body of Bernie. What a movie it would have been if, instead of pretending that Bernie’s limp corpse was alive, the protagonists had simply “pretended” he was dead, cracking jokes about how pallid and subdued he seemed—perhaps even enlisting the other characters in this masquerade. Bernie could “live” on forever—undead—just as masculinity is doing. After all, once everyone is joking about his lack of vitality, who would dare declare it for real? And what would it matter, anyway? Their assertion would just be absorbed by the joke. If everyone is already joking about the emperor’s “skimpy” new clothes, the boy who observes that he’s wearing nothing no longer matters. If only the cast of Bernie’s had the refined sense of irony that we do, it would’ve reached trilogy status.

  Our charade is, of course, functioning alongside the continued faithful performances of masculinity’s true believers. But masculinity’s death is now appearing in the very pop culture that helped build and sustain it for so long. It’s not a coincidence that reality TV has been the biggest source of this instability. Without scripts an
d multiple takes, people’s “complexities” (i.e., genders) are bound to break out.

  This gives those of us who want to bury the masculine corpse an unprecedented opportunity. And what are we doing with this opportunity we’ve said we want? We’re lounging around cracking jokes, pleased with our command of irony. It makes you wonder if we really desire what we’re demanding. It’s so much safer to make demands you never expect to be fulfilled.

  One problem, it seems, is our failure to recognize that gender is not synonymous with masculinity. Although masculinity couldn’t exist without gender—since the first is just one expression of the second—gender itself can survive masculinity’s demise. Failing to grasp this, we’re left thinking that if masculinity dies, then gender is buried with it. And because gender is leading a rather sprightly existence at this historical moment—gender identities are hatching everywhere—we mistakenly think that masculinity must also be a spring chicken. If we don’t want to kill off gender, we resign ourselves to masculinity.

  But if masculinity is like Bernie, gender is like Melrose Place. Almost the entire cast changed from beginning to end—yet the show kept on running. Melrose didn’t need any particular character (well, except maybe that evil Michael Mancini guy) to continue year after year. Gender can flourish without Billy or Allison, but masculinity doesn’t exist without Melrose Place. Conflating the characters with the show stops us from seeing this situation clearly. There can and will be other genders if masculinity is buried. The show will go on. In fact, it is inconceivable that gender, which essentially has its hands in the entire jar of human behaviors, appearances, and preferences, could disappear. But it can give way to a multiplicity of gender expressions, to a million ways of being a recognizable human—instead of just two.

  Of course, all the same could be said for femininity. But I wouldn’t know anything about that … being a guy and all.

  3

  The F Word

  LET’S RUN DOWN THE LIST: FEMINISTS ARE UGLY, HAIRY-LEGGED man-haters. Feminists are women who don’t resemble doormats. Feminism is, as Pat Robertson infamously put it, “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Feminism is dead because women have rejected its tenets. Feminism is dead because it has succeeded in all it set out to do.

  Feminism’s contentious position in the popular imagination is as old as feminism itself. Commentators both male and female, feminist and not, have tussled over its meanings, goals, intentions, and even its morals since well before the term even entered our lexicon. At the dawn of the woman suffrage movement, in June 1854, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (known to contemporary readers as Harper’s) gave his assessment of those who wanted to see women become full societal participants: “A woman such as ye would make her—teaching, preaching, voting, judging, commanding a man-of-war, and charging at the head of a battalion-would be simply an amorphorous monster … She might be very estimable as a human being, honorable, brave, and generous, but she would not be a woman.” (This anonymous man also conjured the hairy-legged manhater’s nineteenth-century foremother: “with horny hands covered with fiery red scars and blackened with tar, her voice hoarse and cracked, her language seasoned with nautical allusions and quarter-deck imagery, and her gait and stop the rollicking roll of a bluff Jack-tar.” His inspiration was a Scottish sea captain named Betsy Miller.)

  In the early ’70s, as the next phase of the movement bloomed, women’s liberation garnered national coverage every week, both negative and positive. Opponents pronounced the movement “absurd and destructive” (Midge Decter, author of 1972’s The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation) and its adherents “petty … and vindictive [women] who cannot solve their own problems and want the govenment to do it for them” (Phyllis Schlafly, leader of the STOP ERA campaign widely credited with torpedoing the Equal Rights Amendment). Major news outlets ran headlines referring to marches as “parades” and declaring, “Women’s Movement Is Seen as Leading to ‘Self-Hatred.’” They published observations that “the demonstrators were preponderantly attractive young women wearing miniskirts and boots” and articles about how President Nixon’s daughter Julie “says leaders of the women’s liberation movement are ‘alienating a lot of women and most of the men.’” Columnists insisted that although “a sensible case exists that women as a group are subject to certain unjust exploitations,” they’re not “oppressed” because they’re not “slaves toiling hopelessly for Pharaoh with no hope this side of death.”

  Newspapers also devoted miles of column inches to feminist activities, most notably the fight for the ERA, often noting that the majority of Americans supported it and publishing editorials urging its ratification. The New York Times published articles by Susan Brownmiller, Betty Friedan, Robin Morgan, and others. There seemed to be at least a glimmer of understanding that the stereotype of the hirsute harpy was just that—a stereotype. An October 1971 poll conducted by Louis Harris Associates asked three thousand women and one thousand men what came to mind in response to the term “women’s liberation.” Twenty-five percent answered in the category “Women working for equal rights—opportunities—equality with men” and another fifteen in “Women wanting better jobs—pay—equal jobs—pay with men.” Six percent chose “Bunch of frustrated, insecure, ugly, hysterical, masculine type women.”

  The nonnews media landscape was also transformed by feminism, from Mary Richards’s independent career-girl ways (and, less subtly, Maude’s abortion) to an Enjoli perfume ad featuring a dressed-for-success babe shedding her work clothes for a slinky ensemble. (The soundtrack was a lyrically retooled version of the Peggy Lee classic “I’m a Woman”: “I can bring home the bacon / Fry it up in a pan / And never let you forget you’re a man.”) Charlie’s Angels may have been a jigglefest featuring glamorous gals taking direction from an invisible and all-powerful father figure, but without feminism, a trio of female undercover detectives would never have made it past the first network meeting.

  The ’80s are usually what comes to mind when someone says “backlash,” and, as Susan Faludi’s landmark work amply demonstrated, that decade was full of breast implants and tales of unhappy professional women whose empty personal lives belied earlier feminist promises of “having it all.” But the ’90s also saw an explosion of work by a whole slew of backlash feminists, women who felt free to claim the label “feminist” even as their books accused the movement of ruining women’s lives and ruining everyone else’s fun. Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Christina Hoff Sommers got tons of press and were anointed as feminist spokeswomen, while folks like Peggy Orenstein, bell hooks, Paula Kamen, and Katha Pollitt were writing actual feminist—rather than just feminist-baiting—work on many of the same issues and getting way less attention.

  After more than three decades, pop culture continues to suffer from a bad case of simultaneous progress and backlash—and the longer it’s been around, the more complicated the symptoms get. Ginia Bellafante’s infamous June 29, 1998, Time cover story, touted by the oh-so-original cover line “Is Feminism Dead?” declared that the movement had abandoned its social change roots to be “wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession.” Bellafante’s tone suggested that she longed for more activism, but had she done any substantive research, she could have reported on a whole lot. To give just a few examples, the Third Wave Foundation had been funding feminist organizing among women under thirty for more than a year when she wrote her article; Sista II Sista’s Freedom School began training young women of color in community organizing in 1996. Antisweatshop organizing was gaining momentum on campus, fueled in large part by female students putting their feminist principles into action. But instead, Bellafante took the mainstream’s word for it and anointed Ally McBeal and the Spice Girls as feminism’s flailing poster children. (As a Salon commentator quipped
at the time, “Sure, ‘Ally McBeal’ is a popular show—but so was ‘Three’s Company’ in the 1970s, and no one ever accused Suzanne Somers of being a feminist icon.”)

  Bellafante, unfortunately, is far from alone in her severe misunderstanding. The backlash years found feminists defending clinics against anti-choice protesters, staffing rape-crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, marching against U.S. intervention in Central America, flocking to women’s studies classes, familiarizing the culture with the term “sexual harassment,” agitating for lesbian rights, and much more—while most of the mainstream media was busy reporting that feminism was irrelevant to the average woman. Today, in the face of the oft-repeated cliché that young people aren’t interested in feminism, young feminists of all genders have been protesting the IMF, the School of the Americas, and the war on Iraq; they have been working to dismantle the prison-industrial complex and to secure living wages for tomato pickers; they have been organizing against human trafficking and for trans visibility. As Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin put it in the introduction to their 2004 anthology, The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, “People wonder who is carrying on the legacy of the women’s movement, and they look to the same old haunts to find the answers. The problem is, they are looking in the wrong places.” Those old haunts may not be entirely empty—folks under twenty-five reportedly made up at least one-third of the million people who marched on Washington for reproductive freedom in April 2004—but they’re just a small part of the neighborhood now.