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

by Lisa Jervis

  That said, I’m ambivalent about navigating these issues in Jewish circles. After all, I have willingly put on long skirts and elbow-covering tops to visit other communities and cultures—while traveling in India and Morocco, and also to attend a friend’s church service in my own hometown. Those are not my spaces, and I feel it’s just good manners to be respectful and mindful of my role as guest. Certainly, it could be argued that when entering Jewish communities not my own, the same rules apply. And if I go somewhere like the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim (an important destination for those of us who want to buy holy books on the cheap), where life is in many ways radically different from my own, I can tolerate dressing in the drag of their cultural norms for limited amounts of time. Because, of course, drag is exactly what my long skirt and elbow-covering top is: an enactment of a certain set of gender ideals in a purely performative way. I don’t really mind having to do this from time to time; there’s a part of me that enjoys playing dress-up.

  I have more trouble pretending to be something I’m not (or pretending not to be something I am) in liberal Modern Orthodox circles or my mixeddenomination neighborhood in Los Angeles, both of which are either literally or metaphorically closer to home for me. Even if women in kippot aren’t a common sight in either of those spheres, I am a religious woman and I wear a kippah. At some point it’s only fair for me to stake ownership in that fact: Judaism is my religion too. And it becomes just as problematic for me not to stand up and assert my relationship with and obligations to God, to claim my spiritual life, as it would to provoke with my tzitzit. To what extent should the culture of my neighborhood take precedence over my own understanding, grounded in Jewish law, of how this works?

  In every religious tradition there is an interplay between issues of egonullification and individual identity—there are times when it’s appropriate to be reminded that, ultimately, it’s not all about you. For women in particular, the spiritual work of what writer Carol Lee Flinders calls “selfnaughting” has the potential to run counter to many important feminist principles: Find your voice. Tell the truth as you understand it. Establish your self, your identity. Do not annihilate yourself to please others. Fight cultures in which double standards and sexist dictates make women or their bodies the problem.

  A male colleague recently told me that he decided to tuck in his tzitzit because he became unsure if he was seeing them for his own spiritual benefit or showing them off to others, and he wanted to err on the side of humility. I sometimes wonder if my own showing off is sufficiently great that it would be wise to put the fringes away. In some respects the answer is yes. But for women, there’s another s word in play, and it matters: “silencing.” The mitzvah is about seeing them, and when I tuck my tzitzit in, I notice all the men on the street who get to leave theirs swaying, who do not have to shift how they perform one of God’s commandments out of concern for personal safety or to put other Jews at ease. If I always kept them tucked in, would I be enacting humility or buying into my culture’s suggestions about what a good girl does and doesn’t do, placating those who would rather not see women take on these practices at all? Is it ever possible to fully tease out one from the other?

  I’d be lying if I said that there was no activist dimension to all of this. I put the tzitzit on and keep them on because of their tremendous spiritual power and the benefit I receive from wearing them, but an upside of wearing them untucked is the number of conversations I’ve had with other Jews—particularly women—about the mitzvah. I was recently chatting with a new colleague who had been thinking about wearing tzitzit; by the end of the conversation we were planning a workshop/crafts night with half a dozen women so that everyone could learn how to make the undergarment and attach the fringes. I’m thrilled if any of my choices have helped other women and men move closer to taking on practices that strengthen their own connection to and relationship with God. I know women who wear tzitzit and always keep them tucked in, and while I respect their decision, when I was first taking on the mitzvah I would have loved to know that I wasn’t the only one in my community doing so. In fact, I had never thought about doing it until I met another woman who wore her tzitzit out. Expanding the range of possibilities for everybody is a feminist value, and bringing people to mitzvot is a Jewish one.

  From there the answer seems, fleetingly, clear. But even so, the issue is too complex for me to sit pretty with my self-righteousness. At a Sabbath afternoon lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen in years, my tzitzit wearing somehow came up. (I was wearing a dress that day, so the fringes were hidden and the conversation was theoretical.) My friend is an Orthodox rabbi who teaches radical-feminist theology, has encouraged women to enter the rabbinate, and is a regular at the most feminist Modern Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem. And he—wholly accustomed to women in prayer shawls and having no philosophical opposition to women in tzitzit—actually shuddered as we talked about it. “It’s … even for me … it’s just a really visceral thing,” he said, somewhat apologetically.

  People—even allies—sometimes need time to get used to new things. I’m too old to think that I have to shove my beliefs down the throats of others, and yet I’m also too old to think that it’s always my job to keep others from being uncomfortable. As I understand the world, a little discomfort is sometimes a healthy thing. And more to the point, is my choice to wear an article or two of clothing that transgresses traditional norms to be understood as getting in someone’s face, or simply living my own life?

  I don’t think there are any easy answers, and I’m pretty sure my responses will shift both over my year in Jerusalem and over my lifetime. As I write this in a café, there’s a do-rag on my head and the fringes are tucked in, and at this moment, it feels okay. What I might need to do in the same café, or at synagogue, or at my school tomorrow or the day after that might be different—and that’s also okay.

  It’s nice to remember that for others, too, things sometimes shift. After several months of concerted effort on my part, Yaakov has come around a little. He now responds to my greetings and doesn’t scurry to hide when I come by the store for milk. It’s still a little weird when I’m kippah-clad, grabbing an iced coffee on my way to school, but on other days when I wave hello, he’s begun to wave back. I don’t expect him to change everything he believes about Judaism and gender, and that’s not my agenda. For other reasons, his recent softening is encouraging—after all, if there’s a way for Yaakov and me to live together in our little neighborhood, maybe there’s hope for all of us.

  Screen Butch Blues

  The Celluloid Fate of Female Masculinity

  Keely Savoie / BITCHfest 2006

  A WHILE AGO, MY GIRLFRIEND, A., GOT A CALL FROM A FRODUCER looking for butch women to audition for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The Fab Five were looking to transform a butch in an upcoming show.

  “Like, transform how?” A. asked, imagining, I suppose, how she might compare to Janet Reno in a skirt.

  The producer assured her that her butch identity would not be compromised, and they booked her for an interview later that week. I squealed like a girl when she told me and immediately pulled out a notepad to start listing proposed improvements to our apartment. We talked about what colors we would suggest for the living room, how we could replace our catscratched sofa with a spankin’-new sectional, and, of course, where a flat-screen TV would look really good. But as the interview drew nearer, it hit me that the show was primarily about her, not our co-op. And then the real excitement dawned: My girlfriend could be one of the only butches seen on television since The Facts of Life’s Jo Polniaczek.

  Don’t get me wrong—the fact that TV these days is all about queer has not passed me by. Gays have sprung up everywhere from the obvious L Word, Will & Grace, and, of course, Queer As Folk, to the not-so-obvious queer characters on otherwise-straight shows like The O.C., The Wire, and ER. Even the straightest shows have occasional gay appearances: Law and Order: SVU, CSI, Wife Swap, Survivor, even Amer
ican Idol. But while television is teeming with queers, the roles women play seem to have gotten straighter. It seems that prime time has flung the doors open (“ladies first!”) to the whole rainbow spectrum of gender-bending men, but women on TV occupy a very narrow band—from kinda femme to ultrafemme. Girl-on-girl sexuality has no doubt evolved—girls have made out with other girls on everything from Six Feet Under to Gilmore Girls—but our gender expression is stuck in Stepford. Even true lesbian couplings, like those on The L Word, Queer As Folk, and the dearly departed Buffy, are overwhelmingly femme-on-femme.

  After A. was interviewed for Queer Eye, I set out on a little quest to find butches on TV, just to see where we really stood. I immediately ran into trouble.

  In the real world, it’s not difficult to suss out how someone identifies. Butchness is an overall presence, a melding of character, presentation, mannerisms, and personal identity. Clothes often offer clues, but they’re only part of the story. A. never wears skirts and lip gloss, but if she did, it wouldn’t make her any more feminine—it would just look weird. When I asked A. to describe the essence of butchness, she called it a gravitational pull toward typically masculine things. “I was always playing football with my brother instead of doing feminine things with other girls,” she said. “Butches are who they are before the environment comes along and screws with them and says, ‘You are a woman, you are supposed to do x, y, and z because that’s what girls do.’”

  But with television being what it is, I was reduced to ferreting out butches by relying on the less-than-scientific “has short hair, wears pants” stereotype. By that definition, even I could be a butch, so I figured I was giving the TV world every benefit where there was a doubt. Even so, I quickly found there wasn’t even much to doubt. Shane, The L Word’s resident ladykiller, could be seen as butch, given her swagger and voracious libido, but her goth-caliber eyeliner addiction undermines any substantial butchy pretense. Sandy, Dr. Kerry Weaver’s firefighting girlfriend on ER, has a certain butch appeal, as does lesbian detective Kima Greggs from The Wire, but they both have long hair and are pretty in typically feminine ways—not an automatic disqualification for being butch, but I wish they were more obvious.

  More blatant butches do exist, but they’re easy to miss. There are the “wait, I blinked” butches, who occasionally pop up on the The L Word, but they tend to be on and off the set so fast you think they may have just tripped over it on their way to lunch—or they may actually be errant sound dudes. Then we have the straight butches, those poor women who are frequently tricked, cajoled, or corralled into appearing on the ubiquitous makeover shows like What Not to Wear that have piled up on TV like poo in the dog run and purport to teach women how to become “real” women for the edification of the audience and their beleaguered (and almost always unattractive) husbands. A recent episode of Maury Povich featured women in “manly” jobs—a firefighter, a zookeeper, and a mechanic among them. Povich chided their indifference to typical feminine frills: “Don’t you want to feel sexy? Don’t you want to feel like a woman?” And after shoehorning them into dresses, blowing out their hair, and slapping on some makeup, he applauded their new look: “You were really women under there!” By the looks of many of them, they were not nearly as happy as Maury to see their feminine sides.

  In short, it’s pretty sorry pickings out there, butchwise. Oddly, the dearth of butch representation seems to have gotten worse. Characters like the aforementioned Jo, Carla from Cheers, even Roseanne challenged gender-typical roles more than almost any character on contemporary shows, where their kind of butch appears only for a minute, to serve as a “before” picture for a newly feminized version waiting to emerge. A. remembers what a revelation it was to see her own aesthetic mirrored on The Facts of Life: “It was like seeing a family member.” There is one spot of hope on the horizon; perhaps not surprisingly, it comes from The L Word. Many of the show’s lesbian viewers complained that the show’s glossy-haired, Pradaclad waifs, while scoring high on the eye-candy scale, left a lot to be desired in the dyke-versity department, so the show responded: For its third season, The L Word promises a new, improved butch. I am standing back with cautious hope that Daniela Sea will better the butch benchmark set by Nancy McKeon, with nicer hair and clothes, of course.

  Big-screen butches are in a different predicament from their TV counterparts. They manage to score a tad more screen time, but when they do elbow their way through the sea of slender feminine sidekicks, it’s only so they can die horribly in the end.

  Only two movies in the last three years have featured butches in a leading role. There was Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, in which Hilary Swank plays Maggie Fitzgerald, a boxer who ultimately chooses assisted suicide after an injury leaves her paralyzed from the neck down. And there was Monster, the filmic portrait of serial killer Aileen Wuornos that starred Charlize Theron, her extra twenty-five pounds, and the dental prosthetics that miraculously transformed her flawless features into Wuornos’s exaggerated grimace of poverty and despair.

  Both movies were the subject of unstinting critical acclaim upon release. Swank and Theron, of course, both won Oscars for their “powerful” performances as butch women, but it was undoubtedly more about the daring it took for gorgeous women to debase themselves by gaining weight and looking unforgivably torn up than about any special consideration the Academy gives to breaking down gender barriers. If anything, the subtext is that crossing gender lines is such an enormous feat that accomplishing it at all is worthy of an Oscar: No ordinary woman could do such a thing.

  The characters of Maggie and Aileen embody most of our cultural stereotypes about butches: the predatory, man-hating dyke butch (Aileen); the asexual butch (Maggie); the poor white trash butch (both); the emotionally disturbed butch (Aileen); and that all-time favorite, the dead butch (both).

  This is where the huge disconnect is: In the real world, butches are everywhere. There are a lot of butches among urban lesbians, yes, and there are the stereotypical butches pumping gas, teaching gym, and running drills in the army. But they’re also in suburban malls, in corporate offices, and in SUVs with their broods of children.

  The problem is that women who take on masculinity as part of their identity violate two key rules of pop culture: They don’t play to the male-friendly aesthetic of sexy, and, in taking on masculine characteristics, they assume more power than our culture is willing to give them. They are not fuckable in either sense of the term. Nelly men, on the other hand, don’t violate that standard. They both play to the male eye and, in feminizing themselves, relinquish the social power that they, as men, naturally possess. For men, the punishment for crossing gender lines is inherent in the act of feminization.

  I don’t pretend that pop culture is a democracy: I don’t expect proportional representation. But the total absence of images of butch women—and the erasure of them when they do appear (whether it’s in the form of a makeover or a murder)—speaks to a disturbing inability among television and movie producers to deal with women who don’t fit neatly into their gender boxes. What does this mean for us as a culture? Sure, we’re going through a spasm of social and political regression, but have we actually devolved from the days of Jo?

  It may be just a matter of time. TV and film will inevitably grow to reflect the culture as a whole, if a buffer, better-looking version. My hope is that progress made cannot be unmade, even if it’s forced underground for a time. As I write this, there are four cable channels exclusively geared toward gay audiences, and although they, too, do their share of stereotyping, they push the gender envelope. A new series called Transgeneration on the gay network Logo follows four transgendered college students as they wrestle with the slippery concepts of gender, identity, and biology. I can see some of A.’s struggle as a butch in the faces of the female-to-male transsexuals whose lives have been suspended between cultural expectations and their own inescapable yearnings to break free. It will be a long time before a show like Transgeneration cro
sses over to a mainstream outlet, but it might be a beginning—a place where questions of gender are earnestly asked, and the humanity and drama inherent in them are allowed to unfold.

  The producers for Queer Eye never did call us back. Maybe they pulled the plug when they saw that A. really would not be made over in some more feminine version of her butch self—or maybe, as she prefers to believe, she was “just too hip” to change. Whatever the case, I’m sure that one day I will see a butch on TV—a butch who is not going to be stuffed into a skirt or stuck in a coffin by the end of the show. Until then, I will continue bravely patrolling pop culture to the upper end of cable channels in search of butch characters. Unfortunately, it won’t be from that new flat-screen TV I wanted so badly.

  Dead Man Walking

  Masculinity’s Troubling Persistence

  Brendan O’Sullivan / BITCHfest 2006

  MASCULINITY IS DEAD. MORIBUND, WITHOUT A PULSE, SEEING the white light. But don’t be fooled; it’s not gone yet. As the 1989 classic Weekend at Bernie’s demonstrates, sometimes death doesn’t matter—sometimes a carcass suffices.

  Sociology and pop culture have taught us that the features we attribute to men are just a rough assemblage of daily rituals. Folks born (or declared by doctors to be) XY are furnished with a slew of cultural prompts on how to dress, act, and interact to best imitate the character of Man. But the traditional construct of masculinity is facing a fatal crisis: Where once there was relative certainty about what it meant to “be a man,” there is now an explosion of different—often conflicting—possibilities.