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

by Lisa Jervis

  I wanted to do something louder than just writing Calvin Klein a letter. I took a picture of the ad and changed the text to read, “Emaciation Stinks—Stop Starvation Imagery.” I made posters and conned friends and family into helping me plaster the city with them. About-Face’s goal in postering is to use public space as a forum to challenge our culture’s messages and remind people that they too can make a stink.

  Our new poster has a brightly colored circus cage and in it are fashion models lounging about in various poses. It says, “Please don’t feed the models.”

  11:00 A.M. DROVE TO WORK IN A TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR TO check my e-mail. Coworkers are giving me the ol’ “guess you can’t do it tonight, huh?” looks, with concerned eyebrows and squinched-up mouths. “Scattered showers by evening,” I tell them. I am in a total panic. If we cancel, we won’t have the number of people we need to really cover the city when we reschedule. If we don’t cancel, we risk people coming out and being sent home if it’s still too wet.

  I think it’s illegal to poster the streets. I am not absolutely positive about this because I didn’t come right out and ask the police department about it. (“Excuse me, officer, I wonder if you would help me with something. If someone were to, hypothetically, hang posters in city streets with wallpaper paste …”) If you live in a city, it’s normal to see posters plastered all over pedestrian walkways. Everything from B movies to antiwar rallies is advertised through posters pasted to construction sites. We have postered San Francisco twice before and I have been tracked down and screamed at by construction managers both times. “We have seventeen posters on our brand-new pedestrian walkway,” one man rightfully yelled. “Ugh,” I thought as a knot formed in my stomach. I am a hyperresponsible person, the classic “good girl.” Do I do what I think in my gut is right even if I might get in trouble or piss someone off? I believe every individual ought to have the right to create imagery and put her ideas out in the public sphere, but without the resources to do it, you can’t reach many people. Without a lot of money to buy your own billboards, your ideas and images are relegated to photocopies stuck under windshield wipers and passed out at parades—hardly the great societal impact you were hoping for. We don’t set out to anger construction managers or create more work for them, but guerrilla tactics are a perfect way to reach people on the same level that billboards do.

  1:00 P.M. SAN FRANCISCO BROKE THE RECORD FOR FEBRUARY rainfall: 12.7 inches. I fear that volunteers are already psychologically jumping ship and making other plans.

  4:30 P.M. I CALL KT, OUR WEBMISTRESS, FOR A PEP TALK AND she thinks we should do it. So does my fiancé, Frank, who’s a weather fanatic. We figure we’ll just do as much as we can.

  6:00 P.M. I GET A MILKSHAKE FOR MY NERVOUS STOMACH ON the way to the warehouse. Miftah and Marcella, two About-Face members, arrive first. We stand aghast as hail roars down. A few other volunteers arrive. We are all feeling excited and determined to go, regardless of the weather.

  Postering is thrilling. It’s a rare event that can bring such kidlike excitement to a bunch of cynical city dwellers, but the combination of doing something that is potentially illegal and that we feel so strongly about is too compelling to resist. It makes you feel powerful and righteous and brave; it makes you think you can effect real change in the world if you just decide to do it.

  7:00 P.M. TWENTY-THREE PEOPLE SHOW UP. WE DIVIDE INTO nine teams. Each team gets a map with a specific section of the city, a can of paste, two rollers, and a damp rag. It is lightly drizzling as we set out.

  9:00 P.M. THE TEAMS COME BACK WITH PASTE IN THEIR HAIR and on their clothes, and stories to tell. “We totally plastered this site near the park.” “People were stopping and asking about the posters, so we gave them some.” “We ran out of paste and bought some flour to make more.” (To make your own wheat paste, mix three tablespoons of wheat flour with a small amount of cold water. Stir into one cup of very hot water. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens.) Frank and I collect the goopy rollers, rags, and cans and load up the cars. By tomorrow, many of the posters will already be torn down by annoyed construction workers, but some will stay up for months. In total, we hung about four hundred posters throughout the city. While they won’t be as noticed as a Calvin Klein billboard, they will still produce a reaction in people. For those of us who went out postering tonight, there is an amazing experience still to come. In a month or so, you may find yourself on a crosstown bus. You’ll look out the window and see some of the posters hanging on a plywood wall. A sense of pride will well up in you. You participated in something big. You took a stand instead of being complacent. Thousands of other people will have seen the posters. Maybe someone will be inspired to make a loud statement of her own.

  Refuse and Resist with Jean Kilbourne

  How to Counteract Ad Messages

  Laura Barcella / WINTER 2001

  JEAN KILBOURNE KNOWS ACTIVISM ALMOST AS WELL AS SHE knows advertising. Best known for the documentary Killing Us Softly (now in its third edition), Kilbourne is an expert in analyzing advertisers’ exploitation of female desires and insecurities for profit, and the ways corporate power has come to dominate our lives through marketing. “In this culture, the real authorities are huge corporations—the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry—and we tend to be unaware of that,” she says. “We have a great deal more to fear from corporate power than from the government, yet it’s kind of invisible because they’re so smooth. We have a lot of kids these days who are drinking and smoking because they think they’re rebelling, but what they’re really doing is following orders from these corporations.”

  Her most recent book, Can’t Buy My Love, takes this analysis a step further, exploring the advertising industry’s inculcation of an addictive mentality—one that persuades us that low-fat cookies are a perfect substitute for self-love and that even if men don’t respect us, our ultraslim cigarettes always will. Kilbourne’s extensive experience with advertising’s psyche-invading images makes her the perfect woman to dole out a few handy antiadvertising tips to you. Here’s what she has to say:

  • The first thing is to pay attention. We all believe we’re not influenced by advertising. The longer we believe we’re not influenced, the more likely we are to be influenced, because we don’t pay conscious attention. We need to really focus and look at the TV commercials and the print ads, and ask ourselves, “What’s really being sold here?”

  • We [must] get advertising out of our schools. There is no excuse for allowing corporations to control our kids’ attention and time at school. That means getting rid of Channel One and other media that encroach on education. Young kids don’t have the cognitive abilities to process advertising, so they’re sitting ducks. [We need] to have a comprehensive media-literacy program in our schools, to help kids become critical viewers starting in kindergarten. The United States is one of the few developed nations in the world that doesn’t do this.

  • When you’re reading a magazine and those irritating subscription cards fall into your lap, write on the card something like “stop exploiting women” or “feed your models” and mail it. It costs them something like 30 cents for every one that’s sent back. It takes about 10 seconds, and it cleans up litter.

  • Try not to buy products that are advertised in ways you find offensive. I try not to buy products from the tobacco industry, which doesn’t just include cigarettes (for example, Philip Morris owns Kraft). [Research the business practices of the companies you’re buying from] and you can put your money where your values are.

  • Work for political measures. For example, the European Union will be debating a bill to ban all advertising directed at children—wouldn’t that be wonderful? Write to congressional representatives and take part in such activities as a protest of the Golden Marble Awards, which is what the advertisers give to each other for their success in targeting children.

  • Counter-advertising can be extraordinarily effective, whether it’s an individua
l writing something on an ad, or a group such as the ones in Massachusetts, Florida, and California that have come out with phenomenally effective antitobacco advertising. The smoking rates in those states are way below the national average, and part of the reason is the counter-advertising. That’s very effective because it’s a way of getting us to look at advertising with new eyes.

  Full Frontal Offense

  Bringing Abortion Rights to the Ts

  Rebecca Hyman / WINTER 2005

  THERE’S A NEW FRONT IN THE BATTLE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS—the literal front, that is, of a T-shirt designed by writer and feminist activist Jennifer Baumgardner. It proclaims, “I had an abortion.” The shirt, initially for sale on Planned Parenthood’s national website and now available on Clamor magazine’s website, has generated controversy among antiabortion folks and pro-choice feminists alike.

  Inspired in part by the bold irreverence of second-wave feminists, who circulated a petition proclaiming the fact of their own abortions and published it in the first issue of Ms., Baumgardner created the T-shirt to combat the stigma that still shames and silences those who have had an abortion. The shirt is one component of a multipart project she conceived to document the history of abortion through personal stories, including a film featuring interviews with women who have had abortions, a guidebook to busting through the gridlock on the abortion debate, and resource cards to help women locate abortion services and obtain postabortion counseling.

  The shirt has certainly fulfilled Baumgardner’s hope that it would start a conversation about abortion, but the very brevity of its message has had an unanticipated consequence. Although it’s no surprise that individuals such as Jim Sedlak, executive director of the American Life League’s STOPP International, think the shirt “celebrates an act of violence” and demonstrates that Planned Parenthood “lacks any sense of integrity, tact, and compassion,” it’s interesting to note that many pro-choice feminists are ambivalent about—or even angered by—the shirt’s message. Why, they ask, is the abortion fight taking place on something as public and casual as a T-shirt?

  In one respect, using a T-shirt to proclaim the reality of abortion in plain language is the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that informs the ongoing battle for women’s reproductive rights. The Bush administration’s attack on sex education and prenatal care, as well as abortion, is taking place in multiple arenas: the gag rule, limits on stem-cell research funds, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban’s vague and overbroad language, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (which creates a precedent in which the fetus is granted the legal status of a person).

  In the face of such a far-reaching anti-choice agenda, T-shirts proclaiming abortion histories would seem a forceful response. As Barbara Ehrenreich recently reminded readers in a New York Times editorial, “Abortion is legal—it’s just not supposed to be mentioned or acknowledged as an acceptable option.” Since Roe v. Wade, she writes, “at least 30 million American women” have had abortions, “a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women.” Yet according to a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice organization, “only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice.” Ehrenreich logically surmises that many women who refuse to state publicly that they are pro-choice have nevertheless obtained safe, legal abortions. To be vocal about abortion—not by supporting an abstract “freedom of choice” but instead by naming abortion as a fact of women’s experience—is thus to break the dual threat of political and private shaming that keeps women silent.

  Like Ehrenreich, who called for women to “take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights,” Baumgardner sees a direct correlation between the increase in women’s speech and the increase in their rights. “When women were most vocal about their experiences of abortion,” she says, “Roe v. Wade was enacted. Now that women are silent about their experiences of abortion, we are seeing a decline in their reproductive rights.” Given this history, it’s no surprise that Planned Parenthood, which initially agreed to sell two hundred shirts on its website, sold out so quickly that it had to refer potential customers to Baumgardner’s site to meet the demand. Ehrenreich wears her shirt to the gym; Ani DiFranco wore hers to an interview with Inc., an apolitical business magazine. When the photograph of DiFranco sporting the shirt and holding her guitar appeared, readers wrote to the editors to protest, sparking an extended dialogue about abortion rights on Fresh Inc., the magazine’s blog.

  I spoke with many women in the Atlanta area about the shirt, most of whom were pro-choice feminists, and heard it called tacky, cavalier, simplistic, arrogant, cool, shameful, and brave. One twenty-four-year-old woman found the shirt offensive because it returns the abortion debate to the public realm. “The whole purpose of abortion rights,” she told me, “is to ensure that a woman can make her own decision about her body, in private, without having to seek permission from anyone else—not even her partner.” A woman wearing the T-shirt, she explained, is asking for comments of approval or disapproval from men and women. “My body is mine,” she said, “and I shouldn’t have to justify or announce my decisions to anyone else.”

  Another woman told me that, though she’s pro-choice herself, she couldn’t understand why a woman would announce her abortion unless she was doing so as a matter of pride. “Does she want me to think about the fact that she had an abortion every time I see her?” she wondered. “Because if I saw her wearing the shirt, that is what would stay with me, even if she never wore it again.” I asked why she was associating a factual statement with the sentiment of boastfulness. “Because it’s on a T-shirt,” her friend chimed in. “Like the one I have that says, ‘No One Knows I’m a Lesbian.’” Her statement was greeted by nods of approval from the other women who were listening to our conversation.

  And what about the shirt as a fashion statement? If a woman wears the shirt because she likes it but hasn’t had an abortion herself, she could be seen as an ally in the struggle, or she could be faulted for appropriating another woman’s experience—or, worse, disregarding it altogether. It all depends on the way others perceive her. An activist from California told me that she wants to see as many women as possible wearing the shirt, regardless of whether they’ve had an abortion, to “participate in the collective destigmatizing of the procedure.” To represent the fact of abortion, as the shirt certainly does, is not equivalent to representing experience. It’s only an opening line.

  The negative reaction many feminists have to the shirt reveals a fundamental contradiction in the current state of pro-choice politics—or, more precisely, the extent to which those who are pro-choice feel ashamed, at some level, to support abortion. The fact that so many women read a simple statement as a “celebration” of the procedure speaks volumes about the feelings women have internalized as a consequence of the conservative assault on women’s rights. Although most of the women I spoke with were uneasy about their response to the shirt, repeatedly insisting that they were pro-choice even as they told me they would never wear it, some reacted to a photograph of the shirt with anger.

  “The only reason anyone would wear such a shirt would be to piss people off,” one nineteen-year-old woman snorted. “No one who was serious about supporting abortion rights would wear it.” Those who saw the shirt as an aggressive tactic also thought it was perfect ammunition for the antiabortion movement, playing into the propaganda that paints pro-choice women as glorying in the selfish taking of a life. And judging from the comments on conservative blogs like Outside the Beltway and Baby Center, this argument has some merit. Amid the usual vitriol and sardonic humor (one person wrote that the back of the shirt should say “Roe v. Wade—Eliminating Future Democrats One Choice at a Time”) is a sense that, by creating a T-shirt so many would see as offensive, the pro-choice movement had intentionally sought to outrage the Christian right.

  In fact, the fear that the shirt could inflame the existing passions of the anti-choice movement has led some Planned Parenthood affiliates to co
ndemn it. Leola Reis, Planned Parenthood of Georgia’s vice president of communications, education, and outreach, told me the chapter had not been consulted about the national organization’s decision to sell the shirts. “Women have enough trouble trying to secure safe and legal abortions without having to become the unwitting victims of pro-life wrath,” she says. Though she understands the intention behind the shirt, she’s not sure it will have a positive effect on the actual experience of women trying to attain abortions in such a conservative time. Chapters of Planned Parenthood in Idaho, North Carolina, and South Carolina have criticized the shirt outright, and Planned Parenthood Canada distanced itself from the controversy by saying, via its website, that it “cannot comment on the approach” taken by Planned Parenthood of America.

  It’s important to recognize the extent to which the attention of the pro-choice movement has shifted away from the bodies and lives of women who need abortions and toward those who aim to strip women of the right to control their reproductive lives. So it’s not surprising that a large part of the movement is plagued by the notion that anti-choicers riled up by the sight of women proclaiming their abortions on their chests will want to step up their efforts to deny them this power. Given this fear, it would seem a smart strategy to keep quiet, stay under the radar, and hope that women will vote anti-choice legislators out of office. Such a focus, however, ignores the effect pro-choice speech, including the shirt, might have on a woman feeling isolated and ashamed because she had an abortion or is considering it. A public sisterhood of those who have chosen abortion, for a variety of personal reasons, could do a lot to counteract the hateful rhetoric of the anti-choice movement.