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

by Lisa Jervis

  Male-focused makeover shows like Queer Eye have brought the term “manscaping” into the pop lexicon with segments about back waxing and eyebrow plucking, suggesting that there’s nothing strictly girly about men curbing their body and facial hair in order to enhance the overall package. But there’s no female correlative, no suggestion that a little extra underbrush on the ladies is okay, too; if anything, the body-grooming imperative has intensified for women as it has been normalized for men. So it’s hardly surprising that a masculine/feminine dichotomy still plagues the topic of facial hair, and for women this means a barrage of assumptions about power, sexuality, and—most of all—“normal” femininity.

  During World War II, American women gave up their stockings to save silk material for the war effort, leading to a widespread appeal for bare, hairless legs. This look, which emphasized women’s skin, and hence their femininity, also emerged at a time when women were entering the workplace and adopting traditionally male roles. These days, women’s removal of their facial hair is just another concession in the militarized zones of masculine and feminine, where women must still conform or confront considerable judgment and ridicule.

  A study conducted in 1998 by Susan A. Basow and Amie C. Braman asked 195 undergraduate men and women to watch two videos of a woman drying off after a swim. In one video, the woman’s legs and armpits are hairy, and in the other, her body is shaved. The hairy woman was seen as significantly “less friendly, moral, and relaxed,” and “more aggressive, unsociable, strong, nonconformist, dominant, assertive, independent, and in better physical condition.” While the positive and negative meanings of these descriptors depends on individual perceptions, their gendered connotations cannot be mistaken.

  But it doesn’t take a social scientist to document the social disapprobation—from disgusted looks to job discrimination to outright violence—accorded to women who, by refusing the pressure to remove their body hair, dare to transgress into “masculine” territory. A small but growing subculture of lesbians and transgendered persons are proudly embracing facial hair as a marker of desired female masculinity, but homophobic confusion and ignorance in the larger culture have reinforced perceptions of this follicular reclamation as haplessly unfeminine rather than purposefully subversive. And in mainstream pop culture, especially as typified in shows like The L Word, lesbians are just as prone to normative femininity as straight girls.

  Still, for some women, facial hair is simply a proudly revealed part of the female, even feminine, experience. Teresa Carr, a fifty-year-old consultant and poet, has not shaved since 1973, when she discovered hairs growing on her chin. Strangers regularly inquire about her beard—which she describes as a Ho Chi Minh-style goatee—with questions that are genuinely inquisitive and sometimes rude. Jennifer Miller, forty-four, director of Circus Amok, a politically progressive circus that addresses current events through age-old acts, has reinvented the tradition of the bearded lady, developing the persona of the “bearded woman,” which she wears proudly both in the circus and in her day job as an adjunct professor at several colleges and universities. The bearded woman doesn’t wear hyperfeminine clothing as former bearded ladies did, nor does she cloister herself within the circus sideshow tents; instead, she offers a positive, unapologetic image of bearded women in a world of the plucked, shaved, and waxed.

  Miller recognizes the pressure women feel about facial hair growth—“women have fear of not being seen as women, fear of not being cleanskinned, fear of being a freak,” she notes—but for both her and Carr, growing their substantial facial hair sends a message to others about the realities of women’s bodies and personal freedom. “Socially,” Carr states, “the discrimination is meant to proscribe the footsteps of women who choose to walk an alternative, self-determined path. I think that wearing your facial hair is an announcement of that self-determination.”

  Our culture sees too few women like Carr and Miller who choose to draw attention to their “abnormal” facial hair—and even when it recognizes them, does so in the service of further marginalization. An article on Miller that appeared in The New York Times almost a decade ago was titled “Step Right Up! See the Bearded Person!” and, though it quotes Miller as saying that she doesn’t see her beard as a problem and doesn’t care what caused it, the article makes no effort to position female facial hair growth as a common experience. We’re even willing to revise history: Deeply carnal, famously mustachioed Frida Kahlo, for instance, was literally cleaned up for her transition to the big screen in 2002’S biopic, the mustache she immortalized in so many self-portraits nowhere in sight.

  If the recent normalization of cosmetic surgery has shown us anything, it’s that people will go to great lengths and take big medical risks in order to conform to cultural beauty standards, and that women in particular seem sadly susceptible to the shame marketing that characterizes electrolysis, waxing, and laser hair-removal services. And though ideas of normative masculinity and femininity are questioned more consistently now than they were when doctors were scarring women with painful follicle cauterizations, the standard of hairlessness has a particularly tenacious hold on many cultures that, for lots of women, may never loosen.

  But there are those who challenge it. Carr and Miller are joining women like Trish Morrissey, an artist whose photos of women with facial hair function as a direct confrontation with the idea of femininity, hair, and power. Her subjects stare unflinchingly into the camera; neither sideshow characters nor politically motivated facial-hair activists, they simply are—and by simply being, are a challenge.

  Then there’s Intermission’s Sally, who, after overcoming the denial of her Ronnie, tells a man to whom she is obviously attracted that she is going to have the mustache waxed at a spa. In this moment, when Sally is starting to recover her emotional strength, the fellow says, “What mustache?” Although he finally admits that he can see the facial hair, his kindness makes a big difference to the fragile woman. The audience doesn’t get to see Sally remove the Ronnie—although she does—but, as for many women, knowing that some people accept her natural hair makes the plucking and prodding far less painful.

  7

  Confronting the Mainstream

  AFTER A DECADE OF SURVEYING THE POP LANDSCAPE, WE’RE constantly reminded of what has changed since Bitch began. Pop culture critique, considered mere fluff journalism in the mid-’90S, has become commonplace in such formerly lofty organs as The Wall Street journal and The New Yorker. The Internet, once a thrilling-yet-nebulous curiosity, has become an info mecca for culture junkies, a place where you can cross-reference actors on the Internet Movie Database, read blisteringly funny recaps of The Apprentice and The Sopranos on Television Without Pity, and suck hours out of each workday perusing thousands of political, artistic, and satiric web publications and blogs. Pop culture might even be making us smarter. Steven Johnson, in his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, argues that increasingly sharp, complex writing in television, video games, and beyond challenges us to flex our problem-solving and abstract-reasoning skills—and in the process offers pop obsessives an ironclad rationalization for their avocation.

  But if the critique of pop culture, as well as its perceived social value, has improved, why hasn’t the culture itself evolved more? This is the question at the heart of Bitch. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched as women’s soccer and basketball held young girls in their well-muscled thrall only to falter or even fold due to lack of funding, as weedy little Ally McBeal stamped her foot and pouted, as fashion mavens declared that Jennifer Lopez’s keister made her “full-figured,” and as the Spice Girls came and went on a sugary wave of girl power. We’ve puzzled over films like Fat Girl and book sensations like He’s Just Not That Into You, survived an improbable number of dating-and-mating reality shows (Married by America, anyone?), and watched in bemusement as celebrity tabloids reproduced like especially trashy rabbits. But what we haven’t seen is any meaningful, validating change in the mainstream perception and re
presentation of women.

  Loving pop culture comes at a price, and for many women that price is most often a deep sense of betrayal at being told the lives that we’re shown onscreen, in books, and in advertising are accurate, important, and charmingly quirky reflections of our own. The stereotypes and limitations of popular representations of women haunt us everywhere from talk radio to chick lit, and the common language such products use when they discuss and define the world of women is often maddening. Though newspapers no longer feature condescendingly titled “women’s pages,” there’s still a clear-cut separation between what’s shaped for our cultural consumption and what isn’t. We’ve got blocks of TV commercials that run during Oprah and Desperate Housewives (cleaning products, diapers, and tampons ahoy!); women’s mags advertise “decadent” scented shaving gel, their language implying that each woman lives in a diet-obsessed Cathy comic; and news organs feel free to frame politics as a “women’s issue” only when it involves abortion. The condescension may no longer be spelled out in twenty-four-point type, but it’s loud and clear.

  And it seems as though the more fantastical our would-be mass-market doppelgängers become, the more persistently they are held up as evidence of real women’s selfishness, unrealistic expectations, or, hell, feminist failure. Never before have so many fictional women been asked to symbolize their generation: We thought it was bad back in 1992, when Dan Quayle got his Brooks Brothers shorts in a bunch over baby mama Murphy Brown. But who could predict the supposed role models that would slowly stack up? First there was Ally McBeal, fawned over in women’s magazines as the working woman’s alter ego but lambasted on the cover of Time as an emblem of feminism’s failure. Hot on her bitsy heels was Bridget Jones, celebrated as the new voice of the man-crazed single woman. Then came Carrie Bradshaw and her potty-mouthed girl posse, anointed as the real new voice of the man-fatigued, shoe-crazed somewhat-single woman—empowered, we were told, by their shocking nondependence on men and the economic freedom they enjoyed. And then there were the Desperate Housewives, the new new voices of the crazed single and/or married woman—also empowered, we were reminded, by their independence and even their sneaky secrets. See a pattern?

  It’s really not fair to blame the people who created these characters for how they were snapped up by the mainstream as paragons of modern—and empowered, of course!—womanhood. It’s not as if Helen Fielding ever represented Bridget Jones as anything other than the bumbling disaster she so cartoonishly is. The problem with Bridget is the problem with Ally is the problem with Carrie is the problem with the ladies of Wisteria Lane: As much as we’d like our most visible, quotable, merchandise-moving pop icons to be women we would want to be—rather than those we cross our fingers and hope we’re not—the market seems to seize on endless variations on insecurity, incompetence, competition, and frivolity and then tries to pass them off to us as versions of feminism.

  The pop culture world, as limited as it often seems, isn’t lacking in multifaceted, thoughtful females—from smart-mouthed cops and doctors on prime-time procedural dramas to nuanced characters in contemporary fiction to real-life icons like Kate Winslet and Queen Latifah and Tina Fey. So seeing the women who pout over men, catfight with women, solve every ill with shopping, and perpetuate antifeminist cant heralded as those who, in fact, embody the modern female mind-set just won’t work anymore.

  That said, we know change is incremental. Ten years ago, for example, it was hard enough to find one lesbian character on TV; the fact that there’s now a cable show like The L Word can’t be dismissed as progress. But each step demands further steps: In this case, the next would be a show about lesbians where the characters look like they stepped out of somewhere other than the letters section of Penthouse. It doesn’t mean that feminists, as so often rumored, just can’t be happy with what the culture deigns to bestow upon us—what it means is that we have a right to lobby the culture (including the self-proclaimed feminists who are responsible for creating shows like The L Word, say) for more and better representations of who we know we are. The point is not to wipe all the bookstore shelves clean of those pastel-covered chick-lit novels, each with a shoe or martini glass on the cover, or to bully all the Kings of Queens off the TV networks, or to fill every single billboard and advertising page with models who look more like the actual girl next door than like wholesome fantasy neighbor Heidi Klum. What’s important is to have a diversity of everything: people, viewpoints, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and ideals within pop culture and accessible to everyone.

  People have often wondered why Bitch is so devoted to pop culture when pop culture has proved over and over again how completely nondevoted it is to giving feminism its props. (We love Maude like she’s our own mother, but you just can’t argue that she was created to make feminism look attractive to either women or men.) What we say in response is this: Mainstream pop culture can’t be ignored, but, more important, it shouldn’t be—that’s where we all find our ideals and our cultural beliefs played out and reflected, and it’s only going to continue. If politicians and the news media are going to treat fictional characters as stand-ins for real women, it’s up to us to figure out how to make those stand-ins more lifelike. Women and girls need to arm themselves with media literacy like it’s Wonder Woman’s magic bracelets, because there are life-zapping consequences to letting mainstream dispatches about What Women Do go unchallenged. We might not be able to stop teenage girls from, say, taking their cues about personal worth from America’s Next Top Model or The Real World, but we can ask them—loudly and repeatedly—to look at the machinations behind that “reality.” Political idealism and activism are crucial, but pop culture has the juice to bring it to the people. We wouldn’t believe in Bitch if we didn’t believe in the power of pop to change minds, inspire lives, and put the need for action into words and images that last.—A.Z.

  Pratt-fall

  Ten Things to Hate About Jane

  Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler,

  with special guest vitriol by Rita Hao / WINTER 1999

  WHEN WE HEARD THAT JANE PRATT, THE FORMER EDITOR OF Sassy—the sharp, celebrated teen mag that was staunchly unwilling to pull its readers into the spiral of insecurity and product consumption so endemic to the genre—was launching a new grown-up glossy, we, along with other feminist pop culture junkies nationwide, squealed with excitement. Then Jane launched, and we weren’t excited anymore. Here’s why.

  1. Its fake, sanctimonious, look-how-we-encourage-you-not-to-be-obsessive-and-negative-about-your-body tone, combined with models even skinnier than Vogue’s, constant reminders of all the beauty tasks you absolutely must do, and plugs for an endless array of products to help you at it. After August 1998’s smug and self-satisfied proclamation that “We’re so against boot-camp tactics of body toning and the pressure to skinny up for summer,” the mag encourages you to “make a good thing better” with exercises to get rid of your “Jell-O thighs,” “Buddha belly,” and other problem spots. The editors think they’re touting self-esteem, but they’re really just reinforcing the idea that you can change the way you feel about yourself simply by changing the way you look: “We want you to be kissing that bathroom mirror—even if your stomach makes it difficult to reach over the sink … [But] if you’re not that liberated yet, take baby steps and focus on your favorite peeve.” Um, here’s a better idea: Why not take a huge step and forget your favorite peeve instead of letting some magazine writer sell you an exercise regimen under the guise of uncritical self-acceptance and distaste for exercise regimens?

  Take Jane’s shot of the skinniest girl you ever saw. “A chubby tummy is sexy and an empty tummy is so not,” gushes the accompanying hypocrisy … I mean, copy. Well, if you actually think so, then why not put your photo editor where your copywriter is and actually print a picture (gasp!) of a chubby, or even unemaciated, bod? I don’t care if “[fashion director] Sciascia swears that Anne-Catherine, our model here, is a healthy eater with a healthy body.” She c
ould just as easily be illustrating a story about anorexia, so stop with the defensiveness and get new models already.

  2. Never has a magazine been so self-obsessed as this one, under the auspices of reaching out to its audience. At first it’s easy to believe that the Jane staff wants to be your friend. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t publish pictures of themselves in the editor’s note—insouciantly titled “Jane’s Diary”—so you’re sure to notice how cute and stylish they all are, and so you won’t overlook how wacky life around the office can be. And who else but your friends tell you when they get their periods and give themselves goofy little nicknames like “Granny Fanny”?

  The fact that every page of the magazine has been injected with irrelevant personal tidbits is precisely what’s supposed to make Jane more accessible than women’s glossies like Elle or Glamour, ones in which you don’t turn every page to discover that this editor was dumped badly or that writer was feeling bloated on the day of a big interview. This device was also much of what set Sassy apart from the teen magazines of its day, but the informative, girls’-room chattiness that permeated Sassy turns, in the context of Jane, into egregious narcissism. The difference can perhaps be attributed to the age gap between the writers and their audience; since the staff of Jane are ostensibly around the same age as its readers, their in-jokes and self-congratulatory tone aren’t so much about reaching out to their audience in an effort to make them feel comfortable and understood as about holding themselves above said audience. To make a high-school analogy—which is the kind that seems most appropriate in this case—Jane is like the girl in your homeroom who chats with you pleasantly enough, but always manages to mention that her skirt cost more than yours.