Elizabeth Wurtzel’s
BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN
Bitch Gets People Talking …
The Good
“One of the more honest, insightful, and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The Courtney Love of letters … extraordinarily thought-provoking, absorbing, wise, often poignant. You can disagree with Wurtzel, but at least she always has a definite point of view.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Wurtzel … is truly a Wunderkind. She’s brilliant, original, outspoken … This is a big, brash, and bountiful book.” —Booklist (starred review)
“It’s got the preposterous energy of a great, drunken tantrum, and a voluptuous, sprawling style, with lots of good, zinging jokes …” —The Village Voice Literary Supplement
“This promiscuous rampage through the raw stuff of popular culture … is as outrageous, suggestive and difficult as the post-feminist role-model it takes as its subject. A vastly entertaining, at times virtuosic rant …” —Esquire (U.K.)
“The history of female manipulation as told by the baddest, brainiest babe from Generation X … for all her bitchy poses and sassy one-liners, she still comes across as someone who is generous, fun, thoughtful and—irony of ironies—nice.” —The Express (London)
“Wurtzel is an intelligent writer … fast-paced and convincing.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Bitch is a brilliant feminist manifesto in the great tradition that stretches from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer.” —Elaine Showalter in The Guardian (London)
“[Wurtzel] drops phrases that are surgically funny in their incisiveness. Depending on the occasion, Wurtzel can be catty, opinionated, empathetic or scurrilous, but always with a backbone of solid research.” —Publishers Weekly
“Bitch is a show-stopping, name-dropping, gossip-dishing, wild rock-n-roll performance … [Wurtzel’s] analogies, similes and metaphors are wildly exuberant, and exciting … This is a bitch of a book.” —Washington Post
“Thoughtful analysis, a lot of entertaining information, and a good deal of clever writing … Wurtzel’s talent for provocative prose and sexy subjects perfectly lends itself to a screed on female power.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Certainly, Wurtzel has her finger, even her middle one, on something here.” —USA Today
The Bad
“ ‘The Blonde in the Bleachers’ takes Hillary Clinton over the sticks for underachieving. A tiring read.” —Time Out (London)
“It is unclear why Wurtzel, a prodigiously gifted, if outrageously self-involved, writer, believes that this tawdry story, which has long since been picked clean of any insights, merits yet more parsing.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Her aggressively chatty book reads like a dorm-room bull session, rambling from Delilah to Anne Sexton to Courtney Love to Nicole Brown Simpson—all difficult women ‘of extremely different sorts’—without really presenting a definition or an argument … Along with the old feminism she has so gladly jettisoned, she has abandoned any attempt at polite sisterhood.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The next installment in The World According to Liz … puts Wurtzel in serious contention to usurp Camille Paglia as the loudmouthed loose cannon of pseudo-intellectual, quasi-feminist cultural criticism.” —New Times Los Angeles
“Wurtzel’s reductive theorizing, coupled with her penchant for posing in half-naked states of repose, established her mainly as hot damaged goods … self-flagellation, as Wurtzel can attest, is a hell of a career move.” —Spin
“Prozac Nation established Wurtzel as the voice of all self-centered, self-pitying own-worst-enemies. Her new book is that much more proof that she’s the right woman for the job.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Bitch is, more or less, a meandering lamentation on the fate of irrepressible women, those too angry, too tormented, too selfish … While Wurtzel’s plaint is heartfelt, it isn’t more than that. The book is all shapeless feeling.” —Time
“One wants to say: Please shut up, because Wurtzel rambles endlessly, making points and then abandoning them, piling up plots and song lyrics and media detritus, pausing now and then to opine on various things … These struttings and preenings suggest that she prefers her audience prone, passive and awestruck. When I finally put this book down, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief at having been released from such a confining role.” —The Nation
“The book’s glimpses of truth are unnerving, mostly because they close the distance between themselves and Bitch’s exceedingly distraught author.” —Time Out New York
“Wurtzel’s second book, Bitch, is not a good book … After the introduction, Bitch disintegrates quickly into a rant. In most of the book there is no method to Wurtzel’s affected madness.” —New York Press
“Hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed. In her defense, Wurtzel has taken on a huge project, and every now and again she introduces a startling insight about how women manipulate situations to control their lives … Recommended only as catalyst for debate.” —Library Journal
The Bitchy
“What follows can ultimately be judged by its cover: saucy, sassy, but ultimately rather silly … Wow—what a bitch.” —The Wall Street Journal
“One wants to scream at the cover picture, ‘Damn, honey, no one’s gonna confuse you with a beauty queen, either.’ Bitch begets bitchiness.” —Salon
“Ostensibly a book about bitchy women throughout history, it is really a bitchy book about one woman: the author herself.” —Swing
“Bottom line: Rambling, self-important dog of a book.” —People
“I find myself flip-flopping between sympathizing with and wanting to muzzle the mercurial Wurtzel.” —Louisa Kamps, Mirabella
The Bottom Line
“Like demanding women, pathbreaking and impossible to dismiss.” —Ms.
“It will absolutely make you furious. Yet while you may want to bash Bitch or burn it, I dare you to put it down for long. There’s something about it—so bold, so bald?—that’s just so good.” —Hartford Courant
“Wurtzel is insouciant. And that’s the reason many loathe and others like her book.” —Boston Globe
Also by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Prozac Nation
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Elizabeth Wurtzel
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1998.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition as follows:
Wurtzel, Elizabeth.
Bitch : in praise of difficult women / Elizabeth Wurtzel. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Women—Biography. 2. Femmes fatales—Biography. I. Title.
HQ1123.W87 1998
920.72—dc21
97-52106
eISBN: 978-0-307-82988-7
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
For Betsy Lerner and Lydia Wills, without whom …
Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.
—Situationist graffiti
Paris 1968
Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
Manufacturing Fascination
PART ONE
He Puts Her on a Pedestal and She Goes Down on It
PART TWO
Hey Little Girl Is Your Daddy Home?
PART THREE
There She Goes Again
PART FOUR
The Blonde in the Bleachers
PART FIVE
Used to Love Her but I Had to Kill Her
EPILOGUE
Did I Shave My Legs for This?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PERMISSIONS
INTRODUCTION
Manufacturing Fascination
The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One’s Own
In the November 1996 issue of Allure, editor-in-chief Linda Wells writes a column about how she wants to be dark and bad. This is a woman so blonde and light-eyed and white as the driven snow that for her to imagine herself as lush, in torrents, a smoky volcano of gushing feminine lava, is preposterous. As it is, Ms. Wells runs a makeup magazine and doesn’t even wear much makeup. But still, when a man in the gym flirts with her by saying, “Hey, Ivory Girl, can I walk you back to work?” she is deeply offended. “In my mind, I’m the last person who’d … wash my face with a soap billed as 9944/100% pure,” Wells writes. “I may look blond and corn-fed, I may come from a long line of Iowa farmers, but in my heart I am dark and cynical and dangerous … So humor me. Tell me I’m Catherine Deneuve, Anna Magnani, Dominique Sanda, just don’t tell me the truth.”
This true confession is, of course, much less alarming than any woman admitting that, in her secret life, she wishes she were Sandra Dee or Doris Day or Tipper Gore. Unless she wanted to take on these roles in order to prove—in a fantasy within a fantasy—that these girl-next-door types, these natural blondes in shapeless Lilly Pulitzer garden shifts and white gloves, are actually, really and truly, bad girls too. Because bad is where it’s at: bad is such a good thing that in the Orwellian terms of hip-hop speak, bad means good. Consider the metamorphosis that unfurls within that multiplex touchstone of feminist bad-goodness (good-badness?), Thelma & Louise. Consider, in particular, the way Geena Davis’ ditsy Thelma butterflies from a mothy, frothy microwave-meal homemaker into an Amazon avenger who chooses death over drudgery, who refuses to be stuck between a rape and a hard place. “You better be nice to your wife,” Thelma warns a highway patrolman as she holds a gun to his head and leads him to be locked into the trunk of a car. “My husband wasn’t nice to me, and look how I turned out.” To be a do-right woman, the movie’s moral assures us, sometimes you have to do wrong.
And now that Mother Teresa is finally dead, it is safe to say that the Goody Two-Shoes as real, live girl has so thoroughly fallen from grace in recent years that those branded with virtue—perhaps with a scarlet letter “V” on their foreheads, like two fingers signing for peace—will go as far as taking off their clothes just to change the label. Really: Mary Poppins, also known as Julie Andrews, actually pulled off her top and triumphantly bared her breasts in the 1981 movie S.O.B., seemingly for no reason other than to let the world know that she actually has breasts. Judy Norton, best-known as eldest daughter Mary Ellen on The Waltons, felt locked in the role of Depression-era daddy’s girl—where she will stay forever if the Family channel has anything to say about it—and tried to remedy this in 1982 by posing nude in Playboy. Of course, Miss America 1984 was not trying to prove anything when she turned up nude and sapphically engaged in the pages of Penthouse. And while Vanessa Williams may not have wished for the unsanctioned exposure, she is the only Miss America to have a real, infomercial-free show business career—Phyllis George, Lee Meriwether and Mary Anne Mobley are examples of title holders who have not-real not-quite-careers—and it’s probably in no small part thanks to the photographic revelations of her raunchy un-American activities. But if Ms. Williams let down Bert Parks and America, Jessica Hahn betrayed God, the church and Jim Bakker—of course, Jim Bakker was also betraying God, the church and probably himself—by posing nude in Playboy (before and after extensive cosmetic renovations). La Toya Jackson betrayed her family (which is hard to do) by posing nude in Playboy. Of course, some people try to escape their treacly-true pasts in less drastic ways: Debbie Gibson became Deborah Gibson and made sultry videos that involved sheer clothing and wet hair, directed by fashion photographer Matthew Ralston. While Ms. Gibson wasn’t able to escape her cheerleader days quite so easily, cute little Gertie from E.T. grew up to be Drew Barrymore and showed no sign of her cherubic childhood ever again; she too posed nude in Playboy.
Obviously, in the pageantry of public life, in the places where women invent personae, the one statement a girl can make to declare her strength, her surefootedness, her autonomy—her self as a self—is to somehow be bad, somehow do something that is surely going to make her parents weep. No one is advocating acting like Marie Antoinette, no one wants to show serious indifference in the face of human suffering, but rebellious and unladylike and occasionally antisocial acts are the obvious statement.
The bitch as role model, as icon and idea, has moments of style and occasions of substance—it at times looks like just the latest mask, a game to play, a chance to dress like something out of a Joan Crawford movie, and to act like something out of Mommie Dearest; but quite often it reveals itself to be about genuine anger, disturbance, fear and the kind of female resentment and rage that produce the likes of Jean Harris, Lorena Bobbitt, Amy Fisher, Susan Smith and Aileen Wuornos, among others. But no one in her right mind wants to end up doing time, no one wants to be moved to Medea-like acts or gun-crazy jealousy—no one wants to end up a sex kitten in the slammer. What we all want is to cop the cosmetic attitude, we want to be Olivia Newton-John in the last scene of Grease, the girl swiveling her foot like a broken record to put out a cigarette with one of her red Candie’s slides, the girl with ratted hair, in slinky shiny black pegged pants, the girl in the blue eye shadow that launched a thousand teenage makeup misfires. Yes, by the end of Grease, Sandy has become your basic 1958 model ho: the girl who, after suffering months of rejection for being a party-pooper prude who didn’t drink or smoke, has finally realized that you do have to pet to be popular, that you do have to put out to get the guy, that it isn’t the blondes who have more fun—it’s the sluts.
These same good girls gone bad of that epoch would linger, languish and finally reemerge at century’s end as the full-grown woman in a song by Trisha Yearwood, the Galatea-good Everygirl of country music who is careerist and proud of it, and who sings in “I Want to Go Too Far” about a reliable, steady housewife who wants to fuck up once in a while, who wants to forget to pick up the kids from soccer practice, who wants to wear fishnet stockings. It is the same woman played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, the mousy and meek secretary by day who uses leather and lamé to become Catwoman by night, to flip and strut, to scratch and bite, to be the mouse that roared with dangerous curves; and cat-scratch fever, we’re meant to understand, is a mild malady compared to what this feline woman can do to you when she’s mad. It is the same woman who, way back in the seventies, went from natty housecoat to negligee in a perfume commercial, all the while singing, “I’ve been sweet and I’ve been good / I’ve had a long hard day of motherhood / But I’m gonna have an Aviance night.” Presumably, an Aviance night involved all sorts of naughty behavior, though at this point none of us will ever know since the fragrance is either gone or gone into remission. Not that there is any want of new potions and pills and powders, more and more each day, promising Poison and Opium and Tabu and Obsession, meant to induce the same idea, still selling hope in a bottle, still assuring those of us who are cursed with wholesomeness that we can somehow fake it, can somehow be a bad girl—or just look/smell/act like one.
These days the only female role more ent
rancing than the darkly, distraughtly bad is the small town sweetheart who drips sugar and saccharine for all the world to see but is in fact full of lust and evil (which are one and the same in woman) and malice and bad thoughts in her secret, sinful Jungian shadow life. That was the idea behind the fresh-faced teen-dream doom of Laura Palmer, in the briefly mesmerizing Twin Peaks, her busty body the most enchanting corpse ever to grace network television, with eyes of red and lips of blue, purple from bruising and slugs and decay, wrapped like crepe filling in cellophane—this was the homecoming queen by day and the hooker with a heart of dope-pumping ventricles by night. These two Palmer personae seemed to compete for dominance—would sweet sixteen or sordid slut prevail?—with death the deus ex machina that allowed the series’ creator David Lynch to avoid the impossibility of integrating both, of granting this girl on the edge of womanhood the frankly simple complexity that would allow her to be a sex maniac who also participates in 4-H Club. The fact that our culture seems to swing between sweet spans of preferring perky Debbie Reynolds and sophisticated bouts of embracing the more soignée charms of Elizabeth Taylor—with Eddie Fisher hanging in the balance—is further fomented by the way these contradictory impulses are played out within the woman herself: Laura Palmer was a crude mock-up of the divided girl, and the war of attrition within was seen as more destructive to this character than the murder weapon that killed her. David Lynch could not conjure a woman good and bad at once.
But of course it’s not that simple. Calvin Klein’s launch of a fragrance called Contradiction in the fall of 1997 was fashionable mass production’s first acknowledgment of woman’s desire for her warring factions to find peaceful coexistence, for bad and good to show a unified front—and really baffle an unsuspecting world that would prefer to reduce us to all types.
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