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

by Lisa Jervis

  It’s here that the true nature of fat-suit humor is revealed in all its glory. See, it’s fairly acceptable to satirize a group of people we envy. Movies like Legally Blonde and Clueless work because we’re laughing at rich white girls. Their problems are supposedly our fantasies—which boy to date, which pair of Manolos looks better with the Versace dress, which color SUV to drive—and these comedies treat them with the utmost affection. But when the punch line is a group euphemistically (and often erroneously) called a minority, things start to get dicey. Over the past several decades, comedy has gradually become less broad and more sensitive to overt racism (and to a lesser extent, to sexism and homophobia). Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker may trade black and Asian jokes in the Rush Hour series, but we’ve come a long way since Peter Sellers was cast as bucktoothed Chinese sleuth Sidney Wang in Murder by Death. By now, the cardinal rule of humor—you can make fun of a group only if you’re part of it—is familiar enough to be a punch line itself. (Remember Jerry Seinfeld’s outrage over his Catholic dentist’s Jewish jokes?) But fat people are the last remaining exception.

  In the spring and summer of 2001 alone, we were inundated with images of thin actors playing fat. It’s not like there’s a dearth of fat actresses out there, as if some casting director is saying, “We’ve been searching for a fat girl to star in the next Farrelly brothers film, but so far there are no takers.” (Camryn Manheim and I aren’t friends, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t offered Gwyneth’s Shallow Hal part.) With a real fat woman in the lead, the movie wouldn’t be funny—it would just be uncomfortable. Watching actual fat people on the big screen would be so authentically painful—because fat hatred is still deeply entrenched in American culture—that audiences would be unable to laugh. It’s not just the exaggerated dimply thighs and manboobs that keep us buying tickets; the crux of the joke is not the latex suit’s physical fakeness but the ephemeral nature of the thin actor posing as fat. We all know that Julia, Goldie, and Gwyneth (and Martin, Mike, and Eddie) will return to their slender glory for the next part, and that’s comforting—because otherwise we would have to confront the mean-spiritedness behind our giggles.

  Such virulence makes all this faux fat seem very old-fashioned; it reeks of our country’s less-than-perfect past. After all, it seems like a long time ago—although it was not—that great white actors of the twentieth century performed in blackface. The closing credits of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled display a parade of them. There they are: Shirley Temple, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and more, totally oblivious to the true meaning of their actions. Someday you’ll see footage of Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow trundling along in their fat suits. It’ll be depressing and pathetic, but it won’t, in the end, be funny.

  Busting the Beige Barrier

  The Limits of “Ethnic” Cosmetics

  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha / FALL 2004

  I HAVE ONE OF THE MOST COMMON SKIN TONES IN THE WORLD: dark olive, browning to café au lait in summer. Ginger bronze, honey almond, whatever you want to call it, I’ve seen it on thousands of women—on the subway, working in the next cubicle over, and onstage at poetry night. I also have vivid memories of standing with my best friend in a Shoppers Drug Mart as a salesgirl smeared beige crap from a jar onto her berrybrown hand and insisted, “Oh, don’t worry, it’ll blend right in.” How come we had to wait ’til we were in our twenties to find foundation that actually matched our skin? And how come that involved a trip to the MAC counter and shelling out $20 for a bottle of StudioFix, not dropping $5.99 at the drugstore?

  But damn, maybe there’s hope. “Find your True Match!” exults L’Oréal’s life-size cardboard display in my local megapharmacy. “At last, a formula that precisely matches your skin’s texture and tone,” coos text accompanied by a row of multicolored cuties, one of whom is even rocking baby dreads and all of whom are darker than usual. Every bit of the marketing is designed to appeal to me and other women of color—from the Asian, Latina, South Asian, and black women on their promo to their subtle acknowledgment that we’re all stressed out from years of staring at a wall of products in “flesh tones” that ain’t ours and never will be.

  Visiting the L’Oréal website, however, bursts my bubble fast. I’m greeted by the same “Find your True Match!” spiel, but now it’s coming from a very pale lady flanked by a row of different, lighter girls than those in the in-store display. Using L’Oréal’s “shade and application advice” tool, I answer the “What is your skin tone?” query with a click on the “deepest” option, and select “cool” for undertone. And my match is … Tawny Beige? Oh, no no nooooo. Let’s try that again. “Deep and warm” gets me Sun Beige, and “neutral and deep” gets me Honey Beige. Needless to say, there is no oak, copper, bronze, dark chocolate, or indigo shade listed in the results.

  This isn’t the first time a mainstream makeup company has made a half-assed attempt to capture the women-of-color market. From Maybelline’s Shades of You line in the ’80s to more recent efforts (and sometimes more successful ones—Revlon’s ColorStay goes as deep as Mocha; the trick is finding a drugstore that actually stocks it), boy, have they tried. But either their shades don’t go dark enough or they’re just plain off. In this respect, True Match is nothing new.

  The budget-conscious femme of color does have some options—if she’s diligent. Black Opal, which debuted to much fanfare a few years ago, is the first line of cosmetics for women of color to be carried at national chains like Duane Reade and Walgreens. Unfortunately, distribution is patchy, and while their sixteen different shades of foundation are a godsend for darkerskinned women, lighter- and medium-skinned ladies may find them too deep to work. Real Cosmetics, founded by Pakistani former model Lubna Khalid, is still my favorite. She names her foundations after cities and offers colors for girls from San Juan to Harlem, Mumbai to Havana—but you can get her products only online, at some Sephora locations, or at smaller Afrocentric stores in New York. So until Real comes to my town, you’ll probably find me back at the MAC counter … or at the drugstore, kicking over the True Match display.

  Your Stomach’s the Size of a Peanut, So Shut Up, Already

  An Open Letter to Carnie Wilson

  Beth Bernstein and Matilda St. John / FALL 2003

  Dear Carnie,

  As fat women, we were seized by morbid curiosity when we heard that you would be posing in the August issue of Playboy. We assumed that, like other celebrities-gone-nude, you were either attempting to maximize your bound-to-be-fleeting fame (see Jessica Hahn) or creating an airbrushed monument to your vanity (see Belinda Carlisle). Imagine how surprised we were to learn that you were doing it for us. In your second weight-loss chronicle, I’m Still Hungry, you wrote of the Playboy pictorial, “It would be my way of telling women out there that they could change their entire physical body, be the best they could be, and tell their detractors, Ha-ha!”

  On behalf of ourselves and other women supposedly suffering from the “disease” of obesity, we beg you, please, stop trying to inspire, redeem, and instruct us by example. We kinda liked you in the early ’90s—it was encouraging to see a fat woman on MTV, even if they did hide you behind a rock in all the Wilson Phillips videos. You made an attempt to address fatphobia and promote size acceptance with appearances in fat-focused magazines such as BBW and Radiance.

  Then you went away for a while, and we must confess we really didn’t notice. In 1999 came the news that instead of being just a garden-variety fat person, you had become afflicted with the tragic disease of morbid obesity. Claiming that your size was threatening your health, you underwent a radical, complication-prone surgery that reduced your stomach to the size of your thumb and connected it directly to your lower intestine. As a public service to educate us about our shared disease, you let your surgery be broadcast on the Internet.

  This wasn’t a publicity stunt or a calculated marketing opportunity (even though it was sponsored by a clinic and a surgical-equipment maker). You told A
BC News that you’re “not the gastric-bypass girl.” You don’t like it that People refers to you as a “famous weight-loser.” To help clear up the confusion, we suggest that you talk to Spotlight Health, the company that broadcast your surgery and cowrote your first book, Gut Feelings: From Fear and Despair to Health and Hope, about changing its website: It’s hard not to think of you as the poster girl for weight-loss surgery when a keyword search for “morbid obesity” brings up your smiling face. Also, you might have considered keeping it to just one book about your surgically engineered transformation. Oh, and not releasing any creative work and focusing solely on your body in interviews may have further muddied the waters as to the reason for your fame.

  But you must think it’s worth it to be known more for what’s not there than for what is. Or are you taking all the praise and pats on your newly slim back for us, too? As your latest book tells us, the Playboy feature is an “inspiration” for us fat gals; it’s your “final redemption.” And as you told ABC News, “This is for all the women who are ashamed … I’m saying, ‘You can do it. You can let go and be free.’”

  Let’s get this straight. You have to strictly monitor your food intake forever to avoid pain, malnutrition, and “dumping syndrome” (cramps, nausea, diarrhea, and more). Your skin can’t keep up with such a rapid and unnatural weight loss and starts hanging on you like a too-big suit, so you have to head over to the surgical tailor to get it taken in. But that’s just the beginning. In addition to having seven pounds of excess skin removed, you also have to undergo a tummy tuck, a breast lift, liposuction, and a repositioning of your belly button. Then more dieting and that thrilling call from Playboy—which leads to yet more dieting, because they want you to lose another ten pounds before you pose.

  At the shoot, you go through six hours of full-body makeup to cover your scars, then squeeze yourself into corset after corset, showing off your surgeon’s supposed genius with your boobs. In a rare act of modesty, you don’t display your much-operated-on abdomen. (What’s up, not feeling so free?) Finally, your pictures are subjected to Playboy’s requisite heavyhanded airbrushing software.

  So break it down for us: Exactly how does following in your footsteps allow us to “let go and be free”? Between the initial surgery, the stringent dieting, and more reconstruction than the post-Civil War South, it smells more like constriction than freedom to us. In I’m Still Hungry, you tell us about celebrating the close of this shoot: “Everyone clapped, and I rewarded myself in my favorite way: I ate exactly three peanut M&Ms.” Girlfriend, no wonder you’re still hungry.

  The fawning response to your extreme physical transformation is an interesting contrast to, say, the public’s incredulity at Michael Jackson’s. While you’ve both subjected yourself to an alarming number of procedures, Michael seems to be striving for an ideal to which he alone subscribes. (Even those who argue that Jackson wants to look as white as possible would be hardpressed to fully explain the cartoonish results.) In contrast, fatphobia makes your procedures and the results appear agreeable. So we can certainly understand why you’re milking this approval for all it’s worth. Americans have so many conflicts about fat—as a country, we hate our heft yet keep getting fatter—and you offer a tidy external resolution. In today’s bizarre medicalized lexicon, “freedom” now means surgical installation of a radical behaviorist, one who responds with swift punishment when you eat more than your allotted two ounces.

  You’ve presented your tale of transformation as something triumphant and radical, but its apparent denouement is the same tired image of the airbrushed blonde with her mouth hanging open. And your tragic attempt at rebellion through extreme conformity is even sadder considering you got bumped from the cover of Playboy by the younger women of Survivor (“Jenna and Heidi! Their clothes got voted off!”), not even meriting a cover line. Posing nude may give you the stamp of sexy approval, but as a thirty-five-year-old former fat woman, you’re still marginalized.

  Which leads us to the dilemma of people’s need to see themselves reflected in celebrities so they’re assured they have a place in the world. As fat women, our choices are getting slimmer all the time, as celebs from Oprah to Ricki Lake to Missy Elliott have trimmed down and renounced their former fat following. But if we find ourselves in need of inspiration, we would rather look to Kathy Bates, who has refused to make her body the cornerstone of her life’s work or her fame. (And if we need to be redeemed by someone’s nudity, we’ll take Bates’s hot-tub scene in About Schmidt, which showed her fleshy, fiftysomething body without comment.)

  You could have used your new thin privilege to agitate for better treatment of fat people, but you elected instead to become an advocate for weight loss by any means, at any price. By spouting the company line that fat is unhealthy, ugly, and deadly, you’ve chosen to strengthen the forces that once made you so unhappy rather than work to disable them. So we release you, Carnie Wilson, from the burden of trying to save us fat women from ourselves. Perhaps you can find another group in need of your inspiration and leadership. We hear that Gunnar and Matthew Nelson have resigned as cochairs of the Los Angeles chapter of Narcissistic Children of ’60S Rock Stars in Need of Attention but Unable to Produce Enduring Work of Their Own, leaving a void that surely you fit into at any size.

  Love,

  Beth and Matilda

  Beyond the Bearded Lady

  Outgrowing the Shame of Female Facial Hair

  Aimée Dowl / SPRING 2005

  IN JOHN CROWLEY’S 2003 IRISH ENSEMBLE FILM INTERMISSION, twentysomething Sally has an atrocity on her upper lip: a modest but noticeable mustache. The furry growth incites her mother’s consternation and symbolizes the extent to which the brokenhearted character has allowed herself to fall apart. After enduring her mother’s exhortations to remove the unsightly dark hair, Sally asks a bus driver if she has a “Ronnie,” Irish slang for mustache. When he replies in the affirmative, but adds that she’s no Tom Selleck, Sally retreats even further into her shell. It’s not until Sally sees herself interviewed on television that she acknowledges the Ronnie. “I didn’t see it,” she explains as she weeps in her mother’s arms.

  Sally’s facial hair is meant as a symbol of her character’s emotional state, yet it also highlights the reality of many women who do not recognize their “excess” facial hair until it becomes glaringly apparent in a photograph or in the comments of others. For other women, the scene acknowledges an equally uncomfortable reality—that the removal of facial hair has become a bona fide female rite of passage.

  According to a 1999 Bristol-Myers Squibb study, forty-one million American women between the ages of fifteen and seventy-four have removed unwanted facial hair within the past six months, and approximately twenty-two million American women remove facial hair at least once a week. Whether it’s the translucent, downy hairs that appear on women’s upper lips during adolescence or the darker, coarser hairs that ebb and flow with hormonal adjustments in their twenties and thirties, if it’s there, it’s “unsightly”; if it’s unsightly, it’s gone. But these numbers bring up another question: If so many women have facial hair, why is it considered abnormal? And if so many women are removing their facial hair, then isn’t facial hair as genuine a part of the female experience as it is of the male experience?

  When humans first walked across the plains in all our hairy glory, the fight for daily survival—to say nothing of the lack of reflective surfaces—presumably superseded the desire to present a soft, smooth countenance. Somewhere along the evolutionary way, women lost much more of their hair than men, and what some women didn’t lose, they were eventually compelled to remove themselves. Since at least the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, women, beauticians, and doctors have devised methods to remedy the “problem” of facial hair: shaving, waxing, plucking, trimming, bleaching, and even scraping. It was in nineteenth-century France that a doctor first wrote about the procedure of cauterizing follicles with hot needles in order to remove unwanted hair—a procedure th
at may sound masochistic by current standards but was the antecedent to today’s electrolysis.

  Although many cultures across the ages have idealized hairlessness in women, modern American culture has perhaps more than others maniacally sought the hairless ideal through the relentless application of facial- and body-hair removal techniques. In the 1930S, upper-class women were so distraught about their “superfluous” facial hair that they fell victim to quacks who sometimes subjected them to carcinogenic X-rays that resulted in burns, scars, and death.

  During this time, female hirsutes—defined as women with heavy hair growth on the face and body—removed their unwanted beards and mustaches; those who allowed their hair to grow often ended up in circuses, where they were displayed in sideshows as bearded ladies. These days, women sporting overt facial hair may not be confined to a tent, but they are still considered a freak show. The many ways women bleach, tweeze, and pluck their hair out of existence are more often than not played for either laughs or pity. In Reality Bites, we’re treated to Winona Ryder’s character Lelaina hurriedly bleaching her mustache before a date; Rosie O’Donnell, back in the days of her talk show, joked about stringing beads onto her chin hair. On the pity end of things, makeover subjects on Extreme Makeover and The Swan are shown in “before” montages staring morosely at their mustaches or wispy goatees in the mirror while a voice-over details their daily shame. Advertising for hair-removal methods both high-tech and old-school (laser hair removal has become increasingly widespread, while in some urban areas, the traditional Indian process of threading has come into vogue) urgently targets women, with occasionally brazen insults. (One recent advertisement for hair-removal services in a San Diego weekly newspaper used a photograph of a gorilla.)