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

by Lisa Jervis

  The Globe quotes Stewart on the breakup of her marriage: “I never thought this would happen to me … Maybe I didn’t spend enough time polishing [my husband’s] shoes.” Trunzo uses this to validate her own thesis that Martha Stewart should strive to be more feminine (read: slavish and willing to coddle a man) in order to get remarried, but—hello in there—do you think Stewart was being sarcastic? Just maybe? I can see the headlines now: “Top Marriage Secrets Revealed! Shoe Polish! Turn to Page Three!”

  Trunzo also depicts Stewart as an airheaded socialite who frequents trendy Manhattan restaurants with a never-ending stream of gentlemen. “Since her nasty divorce from Andy Stewart in 1991,” explains the reporter, “Martha, 54, has been playing the field with a stable of men—and fielding the plays from prospective suitors to keep them at arm’s length, say pals.” The purposeful mention of her age here reinforces the urgency Stewart, and a reader who finds herself in the same circumstance, must feel at being single at such an advanced age. That “stable of men” must be made up of potential grooms, right?—because a fifty-four-year-old single woman could never just have some male friends.

  The Globe, like 60 Minutes, assumes that Stewart’s career negatively affects her private life. Trunzo quotes a New York psychotherapist who claims to know why Stewart hasn’t married again: “She’s an ambitious woman who may only become involved with men who can further her career.” The therapist implies either that Stewart is acting like a man might—seeking a trophy husband to make her look good in the public eye—and, since she’s not a man, having no success, or she’s looking for some guy in publishing or TV to help her out. The shrink conveniently ignores the fact that Stewart’s career doesn’t need any furthering—she’s done just fine on her own. We’re also treated to an oh-so-psychologically-sound theory about why men might not want to marry Stewart: She “may be a control freak who likes to do things her way. Publicly, she doesn’t seem to exude that warmth and caring nature men enjoy.”

  The Globe’s feminine message: A woman cannot be happy without a man to validate her existence. Men don’t marry women who display masculine characteristics and/or are more powerful than they are. (Here, the Globe’s perspective carries over into the assumption that no man wants an achieving wife.) Therefore, if you want to be married—and of course you do—try your damnedest not to make $200 million a year and try to be sweet, gracious, and meek. Otherwise, you’ll end up lonely and bitter. Gee, what’s a woman to do?

  ISN’T THERE ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT THIS? DESPITE THE gripping analysis by these two media giants, it seems that Martha Stewart is a woman who’s better off unmarried. Only after trying and “failing” at a traditional marriage was she able to successfully infiltrate traditional male power centers and become a prosperous and powerful media force. Even Morley Safer admits it; he notes that the breakup of her marriage “was just about the time Martha Stewart became Martha Stewart.” Divorce, it seems, has been good to her. Yes, she’s rumored to be a bitch: She’s impulsive, insulting, and demanding, and she takes credit for other people’s work. But even if we believe the buzz, it just means that she’s doing the same things men have always done—and gotten away with.

  Even though some see her as the ultimate feminine überwoman, a cook, decorator, and hostess-with-the-mostest, Martha Stewart may also be the ultimate feminist antihousewife. Why? She demonstrates that a woman’s existence does not need to be justified, completed, or otherwise muddled by a conventional heterosexual marriage. The timing of her success even suggests that marriage is bad for women.

  Furthermore, Stewart’s empire brings a little refinement and allure to the chores previously deemed excruciating to the homemaker. Married women, as everyone knows, are not the only people who perform these tasks. She shows her fans—male, female, straight, gay, married, or single—that daily household tasks can be enjoyable, and maybe even a little glamorous. So why not let Martha Stewart be an example to all of us lured by the notion that marriage is a requirement for a happy and fulfilled life? If we’re paying attention, we can all learn something other than the proper way to vacuum.

  Double Life

  Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts—Until Your Baby Needs Them

  Lisa Moricoli Latham / FALL 2002

  FROM EARLIEST PUBERTY, A WOMAN MUST FACE THE PUBLIC nature of two of her most personal body parts. Trading in her cotton undershirt for a training bra is only the beginning: Between strap-snapping classmates, sadistic bra salesladies who insist on leaving the fitting-room door ajar, and relatives who chuckle over how she’s grown, the first growing pain is the start of a lifelong push-and-pull between the public and the private appearance of a woman’s breasts. From then on, cleavage depth, shirt transparency, bra-strap show-through, and nipple outlines are a daily concern—and that’s not even getting into the unsolicited daily commentary a woman’s breasts receive on the street, on the bus, and at the office.

  But when the advent of motherhood transforms a woman’s breasts once again, she is caught in an even deeper and more troubling conflict between the private and the public breast. From Playboy to the St. Pauli Girl, American culture declares that while breasts as a signifier of available sexuality should be flaunted, breasts doing the job nature assigned them are taboo. Right when a woman needs her breasts the most, she’s told to cover up and move on.

  The antagonism between the sexual and the working breast arises almost as soon as a woman discovers that she’s pregnant. Publicly apparent changes such as substantial—even alarming—breast growth early in pregnancy increase the visual allure of breasts while, at the same time, private changes like tenderness and pain significantly decrease their actual potential to offer sexual pleasure to their owner.

  In a culture where men on the street feel free to comment on the ta-tas of otherwise anonymous passersby, it follows that friends and relatives of a pregnant woman are unlikely to hold their peace when new developments occur on her chest. Nearly every mother I know has gotten a repeat dose of adolescent embarrassment early in her pregnancy with remarks like “My, how you’ve grown (again)!” which pretend to approve even as they seek to humiliate. Even more annoying are winking variations on “Your husband must be thrilled,” which are not merely impolite but reinforce the idea that a woman’s breasts are somehow not her own.

  Once her baby is born, a mother’s rack becomes even less private. Strangers are prone to asking whether she’s bottle- or breastfeeding her newborn. Breastfeeding puts a mother’s breasts out in public even more, because sooner or later, she’ll need to feed her baby around other people. And while Americans gladly tolerate extensive sexual displays of cleavage, we demand that nursing breasts stay completely hidden—an impossible task, especially for the mother new to nursing, given the sometimes gymnastic efforts she must undertake to teach a newborn to latch on properly. Trying to cover herself while struggling with a squirming, wobbly-necked neonate can be like fighting a cat inside a tent: not pretty, and liable to cause injury.

  In A History of the Breast, the definitive source on all things mammarian, the historian Marilyn Yalom points out that even in notoriously buttoned-up Victorian times, women could breastfeed in church without notice or comment; these days, the merest sliver of lactating nipple can be less welcome than a public nosepicking. A baby’s fumble to latch on can inspire friends and relatives to leap up and shield a nursing mother with coats and tablecloths, like she’s an adolescent changing clothes at the beach. That this comic spectacle is supposedly less embarrassing than the possibility that someone might glimpse a patch of flesh somewhere beneath the folds of a lifted blouse indicates that a normalized working breast is far, far off.

  Even television, our great cultural leveler, has only recently begun to explore the conflict between the sexual and the working breast—and it always seems to be resolved in favor of the sexual. HBO’s woman-centric touchstone Sex and the City found itself in a position of judgment when lead character Miranda had a baby. In one episode, Carrie spies M
iranda’s breasts as she tries in vain to nurse her newborn son. Carrie is visibly disturbed and looks everywhere but at the offending appendages before blurting out, “Oh my God, your breasts are huge!” She then admits with more than a hint of disgust that she was “totally unprepared” for the size of Miranda’s nursing nipples and adds that she’ll “have to find some sort of trauma counseling” to deal with the impact. For a character who checks men out head-to-toe in the show’s title sequence, Carrie’s reaction to a good friend’s breastfeeding is a powerful demonstration of the shock—and indeed, betrayal—many feel when confronted with a working breast instead of the sexual one we’re expecting.

  Carrie’s seemingly disproportionate discomfort mirrors that of our culture at large: Because we are so used to thinking of breasts as sexual, we are unable to conceive of anything breast-related as truly free from sexual overtones. Thus, puritanical disapproval becomes extreme when we are confronted with breasts in what can be argued is their most natural, decidedly nonsexual state. Nursing mothers are routinely kicked out of public places, harassed into covering up, and generally looked upon as deviants bent on an exhibitionist thrill, rather than mothers simply trying to feed their offspring. Publicly nursing a toddler or a preschooler is likely to subject a mother to accusations of child abuse. Even women who joyfully nursed babies will admonish, “When he’s old enough to ask for it by name, he’s too old to nurse,” as if the comfort value of suckling (not to mention its continued immunological benefits) were confined to the preverbal child. Because toddlers can be nourished by other food, the logic goes, they should be, because any use of the breast beyond what’s absolutely necessary must have a dubious sexual element.

  Indeed, exposing the public to a nursing mother has become tantamount to exposing the public to sex. Lawyer Nancy Solomon, of the California Women’s Law Center (CWLC), has represented nursing mothers who were told to stop breastfeeding in parks because “children might see” (never mind that a child was the one doing the nursing). In 1999, a Los Angeles woman sued Borders when she was kicked out of the chain store for nursing her baby. In June 2002, seventy mothers gathered for a nurse-in at the Santa Monica Place mall after a woman was harassed by a security guard for nursing.

  The 1999 Right to Breastfeed Act, which guarantees a woman’s right to breastfeed on federal property, was precipitated by several complaints about the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Although the gallery reverently houses paintings of the Madonna nursing the Christ child, several women were kicked out for nursing actual babies—an appropriate illustration of America’s simultaneous veneration of and contempt for mothers’ roles.

  States still have their own policies on breastfeeding in public places, though, and it can make for some bizarre demonstrations of the either/or nature of the sexual and working breast. In one of CWLC’s particularly galling cases, a patron at a restaurant in Las Vegas—a city whose nude revues make it the undisputed champion of the visible breast—was informed by the management (incorrectly, by the way) that breastfeeding a baby at the table constituted a health-code violation.

  The cognitive disjunction between the sexual breast and the working breast amounts to a vicious circle: Without more acceptance of nursing breasts as normal and necessary, acceptably decorative breasts are ever more divorced from the reality of their nonsexual functions, and working mammaries remain, in public perception, stubbornly sexual and therefore not fit for the literal public consumption babies demand. CWLC’s Solomon, who makes regular media appearances on breastfeeding issues, recalls appearing on a Los Angeles radio station discussing a nurse-in she helped coordinate. Callers’ reactions to nursing in public varied, but one man’s opinion—“If she were hot, it’d be okay”—showed a loud-and-clear tolerance for nursing only as long as it also carries sexual gratification for the witness.

  Motherhood itself, however, is considered beyond sex, if not actually antisex; mothers and breasts must not be associated if breasts are to retain their ability to arouse. Coincident with a new mother’s sudden, purely practical need of her breasts, our culture desexualizes her. (Just try, for instance, to find a sexy nursing bra in a marketplace that only recently began offering them in the most opaque black cotton.)

  With all the breasts used to sell out there, it’s also notable how few belong to pregnant or nursing mothers. The fact that maternal breasts don’t have the kind of immediately understood currency of, say, those of a teenage model means that Americans can go their entire lives without seeing pregnant, nursing, or postchildbearing breasts depicted as either beautiful or sexual (for adults, not children)—and that does a disservice to the full spectrum of meaning contained in women’s roles.

  The problem is not the dual nature of our breasts but a cultural unwillingness to understand or accept that this nature is fluid. Men who ogle breasts on the street and grandparents who object to public nursing represent two sides of the same coin: Both confine breasts in public to the realm of sexuality and tolerate no alternatives. If more American women face down these naysayers and adjust the exclusivity of that confinement, who knows where the social advantages might end. Nursing bras that acknowledge that mothers don’t lose their libido when they gain an offspring are a step in the right direction; more widespread respect for the reduced cancer rates and lower incidence of childhood ear infections that result from increased breastfeeding would be even more so. But the understanding that working breasts and their bearer’s sexuality are decidedly separate yet need not be mutually exclusive, and the understanding that a woman’s breasts in public are nobody’s business but her own—and sometimes her baby’s—will benefit all women, from pubescent girls to mothers of five, whether they choose to keep their breasts public, private, or a little of both.

  Queer and Pleasant Danger

  What’s Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?

  Margaret Price / FALL 2003

  FIVE YEARS AGO, I WROTE AN INDIGNANT LETTER TO THE NEW York Times Magazine because it had just published a special issue on motherhood and had failed to include any representations of queer moms. Surely, I argued, in an entire issue they could have found space for just one nonstraight mom. Well, be careful what you wish for.

  Now queer parents are all over the media: Custody disputes in Florida. Adoption documentaries on PBS and Cinemax. Smiling, sweaty dykes giving birth on Friends and Queer As Folk. And with the recent progress toward the legalization of gay marriage, we can expect even more queering of the crib in the months and years to come.

  This surge of attention to queer parents mirrors a rise in actual numbers. According to the nonprofit Adoption Family Center, in 1976 there were only about five hundred thousand biological children of gay and lesbian parents. But by 2002, as noted by Suzanne Johnson and Elizabeth O’Connor in The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood, as many as fourteen million kids (biological, foster, and adoptive) have at least one gay or lesbian parent. In a 2001 Washington Post article headlined “Lesbians Find Haven in Suburbs,” David Elliott of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says proudly, “We are indeed everywhere.”

  But who is this “we,” and how are we represented? If you refer to available media images of queer parents, what do you see? I’ve spent the last couple of months reading magazines, searching the web, and watching innumerable episodes of Queer As Folk on DVD. And from where I sit, it seems that queer parents—in both fictional and nonfictional representations—are an awfully Brady-like bunch. They’re predominantly white, middle- or upper-class, and partnered; moreover, they usually don’t push boundaries of gender or sexuality. For example, a Washington Post article headlined “Lesbians Find Haven in Suburbs” eagerly documents the ways one pair of lesbians are discovering their inner soccer moms: “They’re active in the PTA of their daughter’s school. They drive a minivan and help at block parties. Neighborhood children flock to the huge trampoline in their backyard.” Now, there’s nothing diabolical about helping at block parties or having a trampoli
ne, but the real point of the article seems to be to underscore what these moms are not doing: namely, shaking things up.

  Queer parents tend to be portrayed in ways that play up their normativity. “We’re just like you” is the rallying cry—or, depending upon who’s producing the images, “They’re just like us.” Author and columnist Dan Savage, who adopted a son with his partner, Terry, has commented on the pressure that’s placed on queer parents to seem as uncontroversial as possible. “Some [gays and lesbians] felt that Terry and I—young, urban types—weren’t the ‘right’ kind of gay couple to be adopting,” he explained in an online interview with ABC News. “They felt that, due to the political controversy surrounding gay men and lesbians adopting, that older, ‘safer,’ cozier gay couples should adopt.” Although in that interview Savage didn’t elaborate on what “safer” and “cozier” might mean, he does say more in his 1999 book, The Kid, which details his and Terry’s experience. One objection came from a queer activist who argued, in Savage’s words, that gay adoptive parents should be “men in their forties, together at least eight years, monogamous, professional, irreproachable, and unassailable.” Dan and Terry failed to meet the specs of this hypervirtuous profile on a number of counts, particularly given Savage’s career as a sex columnist. Writing about bondage and anal fisting, apparently, does not mix with parenting. Or isn’t supposed to.