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

by Lisa Jervis

  IN THE PAST DECADE, SEVERAL SINGLE-MOTHER DRAMAS HAVE played the reality card, most notably Erin Brockovich and Riding in Cars with Boys, both based on true stories. As real as these stories purport to be, they are also the thematic heirs to the maternal melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. For better or worse, these movies foreground what are seen as “women’s problems,” all the while concealing the process by which they become both problems and exclusively women’s territory.

  The early scenes of Brockovich promise a film focused on the social difficulties of single motherhood: Erin’s got no job and bills to pay, and her babysitter’s moving away. Yet, quickly and unbelievably, these troubles are overcome. First, Erin blackmails her way into a job at a law office, then her child care problems are solved when George—a biker with a heart of gold and lots of free time—moves in next door and takes on babysitting duties with nary a discussion of payment.

  The film defines Erin as a sacrificing mom on a grander scale than ever before, which justifies her “neglect” of her children and boyfriend; this is explicated in a late scene in which Erin’s son picks up one of his mom’s work files and reads about a girl his own age with cancer. “Why can’t her mommy help her?” he asks. “Her mommy’s sick, too,” says Erin. The boy finally gets how important Erin’s work is, that she’s mothering a whole damn town (a justification that, alas, will not fly for most working mothers).

  If Brockovich is about a supermom, 2001’s Riding in Cars with Boys resides at the other end of the spectrum; it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who never gets to grow up. Though the film’s publicity suggested we were going to see the story of a bad girl’s triumph (“She did everything wrong, but got everything right,” smarmed the poster), this film is a success story with all the good parts—the parts that actually show the heroine succeeding—missing.

  Adapted from Beverly Donofrio’s memoir about her tumultuous early adulthood—pregnant and married at fifteen, divorced a few years later—and her efforts to get a college education and make it as a writer, Riding in Cars is, it turns out, less about how Beverly triumphs over adversity than about how her son struggles with and resents her. As we move back and forth between the past and the present, the ongoing dilemma is not how Beverly’s going to make it out of Wallingford, Connecticut, but whether her son, Jason, will be able to free himself from her domineering influence. In fact, we never do learn how Beverly made it out; we see only flashbacks to her miserable marriage and have to be content with the fait accompli of educated-writer Beverly in the contemporary scenes. What happens in between is a mystery.

  The film’s anxieties about single motherhood are obvious: At every turn, Beverly is surrounded by her father, husband, or son, all acting to control this immature woman. At the close of the film, Jason drives off, stranding his mom without a ride. She calls her dad to pick her up. In a film that takes as its metaphor the power and freedom that cars give, Beverly is still getting rides from boys until the very end.

  In some respects, though, Brockovich and Riding in Cars have moved ahead of “realistic” forerunners like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and An Unmarried Woman. In the latter two films, the perfect man was the reward for achieving self-realization, and the absence in Brockovich and Riding in Cars of male partners for their heroines allows for the possibility that self-realization can be a reward in and of itself. Yet this absence also strengthens the link to the maternal melodramas of the past; like the mothers in Madame X and Stella Dallas, Erin must sacrifice male companionship to become a more perfect mother, while Beverly is so carefully passed from son to father and back again that there’s no room for a boyfriend.

  Far more nuanced and complex portraits of single moms appear in the Cher vehicles Mask (1985) and Mermaids (1990), Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging (1992), and, more recently, the film You Can Count on Me (2000). Part of their power is that they are not only about the “issue” of single motherhood. The resonant You Can Count on Me, for instance, focuses on the relationship between a ne’er-do-well brother and his normal-on-the-surface sister, Sammy, who despite their differences are grappling with many of the same problems. When single-mom concerns do come up, they often originate outside the family, not within it. (When Sammy’s arrangements for picking up her son after school are disrupted by her narrow-minded boss, for instance, we’re meant to blame him for being a tight-ass, not her for working.) The mothers in these films are imperfect, yet always adults: Motherhood hasn’t swallowed them up, but we never think of them as bad parents.

  Then there are the single-mom romantic comedies. They’re meant to be a froth of fantasy, but what we usually get is Hollywood’s idea of what our fantasies ought to be, rather than what they really are. And what women really fantasize about, according to height-of-the-backlash 1980s comedies like Baby Boom (1987) and Look Who’s Talking (1989), is staying at home and raising their kids in cozy nuclear families. And if the films of the 90s finally, tentatively accepted working moms, the need to couple them with dads became proportionately greater. As cultural anxiety about the destruction of the nuclear family loomed, films like Jerry Maguire and One Fine Day (both 1996) argued that everyone—Dad as well as Mom and kids—needs a two-parent family.

  In Baby Boom, Diane Keaton’s J.C. is a high-powered Manhattan exec who suddenly inherits a baby. Initially, this looks like a radical twist on the Three Men and a Baby concept, as the film introduces the idea, in several comic sequences, that motherhood is no more instinctual for women than it is for men. But before the audience can grab another handful of popcorn, she’s quit her job and fled to a farmhouse in Vermont, a move that the plot reassures us is all for the best: J.C. has always dreamed of a house in the country. In this movie, children don’t entail real sacrifices, just changes that turn out to be redemptive. It’s the baby’s job to feminize Mom and, in the process, save her from the rat race.

  The idea that a son—and in these movies, it’s almost always a son—needs a dad is a timeless one, as we see a decade later in Jerry Maguire. Dorothy (Renée Zellweger) is even willing to marry a man who doesn’t love her, simply because he’s so great with her kid. When, at the end, she tells him that she can’t be with him just for her son, it turns out he does love her—he just hadn’t realized it yet. In a scene straight from a Harlequin romance, he returns to claim her from a group of embittered divorcees, who applaud as the couple embraces. Jerry (Tom Cruise) is the yuppie who must be humanized, and mother and son are the humanizing agents. Jerry loves Dorothy because she is a mother, because she represents the moral, family-centered values that he is traveling toward for the length of the picture, away from the self-centered business ethics he started with.

  One Fine Day addresses the same work-vs.-family issue Baby Boom did, but also includes the “it’s good for men, too!” angle. Architect Melanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her son are mirrored by reporter Jack (George Clooney) and his daughter. On a day that the kids miss their class field trip, the two parents (who loathe each other on sight, in true romantic-comedy fashion) must share child care in order to complete important job-related goals. But as their parallel stories play out, Melanie and Jack get very different treatment.

  Although Jack is initially presented as the irresponsible parent, his turn at taking care of the children goes smoothly. When it’s Melanie’s turn, however, she loses Jack’s daughter and ends up standing on cars screaming the girl’s name as rain pours down and her mascara runs. Jack finds out, of course, and uses the incident to make Melanie admit her deficiencies, flaws, and need for help.

  Similarly, when Jack is pulled in two directions by work and family, the crisis passes relatively painlessly: He soothes his unhappy daughter by buying her a kitten and makes it to his press conference on time. Melanie’s moment of conflict, on the other hand, is very public. Trying to have a quick drink with some important clients, painfully aware that her son is waiting to be taken to his soccer game, Melanie must announce in a quavering, Julia Roberts–worthy speech
that her son is more important then these clients’ new business. One Fine Day’s magnetism consists of two broken halves irresistibly drawn together to form a whole, asserting that shared parenting can only take place within a nuclear family.

  A SINGLE MOM AND HER KIDS ARE BY DEFINITION A FAMILY without a father, and the female-headed household is destruction of the patriarchy at its most basic level. Needless to say, in Hollywood, showing its unproblematic success is still a huge taboo. Contemporary single-mom films are truly reflective of our culture: A massive amount of energy is expended in a desperate attempt to prove that single parenthood is not good enough, even as an ever-increasing number of women parent on their own. (It’s important to note that this anxiety manifests itself onscreen with an almost exclusive focus on white, middle-class single moms, despite the fact that more than one-third of American single moms are women of color. Though this is part and parcel of the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood in general, it conveniently allows mainstream films to ignore the factors of class and race that are inextricably intertwined with single parenthood.)

  Contemporary movies are always ready to give screen time to fathers and father figures, and whether they’re heroin addicts (Riding in Cars with Boys) or just your average immature screw-ups (One Fine Day), the films are as eager as a codependent girlfriend to forgive their flaws and give them credit for trying. If movies do manage to dispense with Dad, they do so by linking contemporary moms to the selfless single mothers of the past, who sacrificed love—and sometimes custody of their children—in the service of their all-powerful mother instinct. Interestingly, it’s only in the male-dominated genres of action and horror that Hollywood dares to suggest that father figures are not all they’re cracked up to be—movies from the 1987 horror classic The Stepfather to the Terminator series to more recent fare like Domestic Disturbance outline either the limits or the downright evil of controlling patriarchs.

  These days, single-mom movies seem to occupy the space queer films did in the late ’70s: A social reality is emerging onscreen, crawling out from under old stereotypes and not sure where to go next, wondering what a really positive image would look like. My ideal single-mom movie hasn’t been made yet. But I know it won’t be one in which Mom winds up with a man, or lets her kids boss her around, or has no other interest in life than being a mother. In the meantime, when I’m at the video store picking out something for the evening, it’s Terminator 2 over Erin Brockovich every time.

  Hoovers and Shakers

  The New Housework Workout

  Sarah McCormic / WINTER 2005

  THE OTHER DAY, MY NEIGHBOR KATHY STOPPED BY AND WITNESSED an unusual sight: me pushing a vacuum cleaner around my living room. She nodded enthusiastically at my upright Hoover. “Did you know that vacuuming burns almost two hundred calories an hour?”

  I looked down at a week’s worth of cat hair and dirt tracked in from the yard. “No, I did not know that.”

  “You can also do lunges to burn even more calories,” Kathy said, grabbing the handle away from me to demonstrate. Taking a giant step forward, she bent her other knee almost to the ground while thrusting the vacuum handle forward in a move worthy of one of the Three Musketeers. “It’s a killer thigh workout. You should really try it.”

  After she left, I did. But I felt ridiculous, and the lunges only prolonged one of my least favorite activities. Despite the very real threat of flabby thighs, I vowed to continue vacuuming as infrequently and as quickly as possible.

  A few days after Kathy’s visit, I came across an article on the popular women’s site iVillage.com that called my decision into question. In order to stay fit and trim, it suggested, women should “turn vacuuming into a race, wash windows with plenty of elbow grease, or scrub floors until you work up a sweat.”

  A quick web search turned up several similar articles in newspapers around the country, all touting this new housework-centric exercise regimen. In March 2004, a Chicago Sun-Times headline suggested that you “Scrub, mop your way to fitness.” In April, the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal announced that “ordinary chores can promote health and burn calories.”

  From these and other articles, I learned that while making the bed burns a measly 136 calories an hour, washing windows takes care of a more respectable 204, and scrubbing floors knocks off a full 258. But if you really want to shed those pounds, you should consider rearranging the furniture (408 calories) or carrying a small child up and down stairs (578 calories per hour). An April 2004 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article recommended that you “intensify cleaning and outdoor tasks to improve fitness” and offered suggestions such as using shopping bags as weights for biceps curls or doing squats while dusting.

  The Boston Globe went a step further in a March 2004 piece suggesting that in order to maximize the slimming benefits of housework, you should try to be less efficient when doing chores. It suggested “taking multiple trips upstairs with the laundry or other clutter instead of one trip” and ended with an ominous warning: “Hiring a cleaning service and gardener is attractive when you’re too busy or can’t be bothered to do it yourself, but it doesn’t help your waistline one bit.”

  Since I can’t afford to pay someone else to clean my house, I figured my figure was safe, but then I came across an article that implied cleaning just one house might not be enough to keep off the pounds. Under the headline “Grab a duster and lose some weight,” a newspaper in England’s Wiltshire County recounted the success story of Emma Langley, a young woman who shed her pregnancy weight by cleaning houses. After just a few months of scrubbing other people’s floors, the article gushed, Ms. Langley “saw immediate health benefits.”

  I doubted that we were hearing Ms. Langley’s whole story (perhaps a pressing need for money had something to do with her activities?). But it occurred to me that no matter where you find yourself on the socioeconomic scale, the message is the same. On the upper end of the economic ladder, women in Boston are being told not to hire someone to clean their homes for the very same reasons that middle-class British women are being schooled in the benefits of scrubbing someone else’s toilets: Doing housework is healthy for women.

  And, apparently, only women. Not surprisingly, none of these articles profiled men who were taking advantage of the new domestic athleticism. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine entreaties like “Wash windows for killer biceps!” or “Lose that gut with a little mopping!” appearing in the likes of Men’s Health. The trend of housework-as-workout pairs two of the classic standards used to measure a woman’s value. My own mother taught me from an early age that being a “good” woman meant steering clear of both extra flab and a messy house; combining these two sources of female shame in a self-help message is as ingenious as it is cruel.

  Despite my annoyance with the retrograde messages of this new domestic weight-loss plan, when I thought about my neighbor Kathy—fit, upbeat, healthy Kathy—I realized that you can’t argue with its basic premise: Staying active (whether by doing yoga or lugging loads of laundry) burns calories and builds muscles. And that can’t be a bad thing in our couchpotato culture, right? But then I read something that upped the stakes considerably.

  The March 29, 2004, BBC News headline read “Housework ‘reduces cancer risk.’” The story that followed described how researchers at Vanderbilt University had found a decreased risk for a form of uterine cancer in women who do four or more hours of housework a day compared with women who do fewer than two. This study, picked up by Reuters, made headlines in newspapers from Chicago to London to New Delhi. At its most stark, the message was this: If women don’t do enough housework, we’re not just going to get fat—we’re going to die. What those headlines didn’t bother to mention, however, is that the study had also found that women who spent an hour walking each day were at lower risk for the same kind of cancer.

  Although you probably don’t need a study to tell you this, recent research shows that women are still doing much more housework than men. A 2002 study at the
University of Michigan found that, on average, American men do sixteen hours a week of housework; women do twenty-seven. This elevenhour gap actually represents some progress. Between 1965 and 1985, men’s share of the housework increased by a whopping four hours. At the same time, women’s share dropped from forty to thirty-one hours, reflecting the fact that more women were working outside the home. After 1985, women’s weekly average dropped by another four hours, but after climbing slowly for two decades, men’s share skidded to a halt in 1985 and hasn’t budged since.

  It’s no coincidence that the 1980s also gave birth to Martha Stewart’s homemaking empire. A rising nostalgia for domesticity has brought with it a slew of recent books and magazine articles promising women fulfillment through a return to the most time-consuming forms of homemaking. Cheryl Mendelson’s bestselling Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House puts even Martha to shame in its painstaking attention to the most minute details of housekeeping, instructing readers in the proper method for folding socks and the correct distance between place settings. Nigella Lawson, bodacious TV chef and author of How to Be a Domestic Goddess, argues on her website that “many of us have become alienated from the domestic sphere, ad … it can actually make us feel better to claim back some of that space,” which she calls “reclaiming our lost Eden.”