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

by Lisa Jervis

  3. The blithe unconcern with which the mag suggests spending huge amounts of money on items of debatable utility. Some of the items that are “affordable” and “guilt-free” in the Jane universe: $100 wooden thong sandals, $90 silver mesh slides, and a $195 miniskirt that’s meant to be worn with a $158 bustier and a $98 sweatshirt. The presumably guilt-ridden stuff is, of course, more: A random sampling of fashion spreads yields a $490 Armani jacket (styled in a faux camping tableau, by the way), a $415 camisole, and one page featuring a selection of items that total more than many of us make in a month—a $590 skirt, a $365 sweater, a $720 coat, and more. The only thing that most of us could afford would be the socks from the Gap.

  4. Jane’s emphasis on individuality is countered by fashion-forward dogma on a near-constant basis. Take the Jane Makeunder, in which a gal with some kind of individual look (big curly glam hair, funky eye makeup) is magically transformed to look hip, natural, and straight-tressed—conveniently, just like all the Jane girls. The magazine’s encouragement to make your own decisions is hard to take seriously when placed beside such statements as “You’ll be wearing violet shadow (oh yes you will!)” or “Haircolor used to be a bold move—now you feel almost naked without it.” It’s telling that the one beauty feature that actually realizes the magazine’s credo of individuality wasn’t written by any of the staff—it’s the Jane beauty survey, in which readers write in to confess to a triple-digit lipstick collection and sing the praises of their favorite conditioner. Our suggestion to jane—let your readers do more speaking for themselves, because if individuality is really what you’re all about, why should we give a fuck that bright red eyeliner/orange lipstick/ dead baby seal pelts/etc. were all over the runways in Milan?

  5. Blatant advertorial. Isn’t it convenient that a page singing the praises of impossible-to-walk-in stiletto heels is placed directly across from an advertisement for Gucci’s, um, stiletto heels?

  6. Jane thinks we’re still supposed to give a tiny rat’s ass how men want us to look and behave. The overweening focus on the superficial, ersatz do-it-for-you tone, and fake individualism (see item 4) add up to this: Your appearance and behavior are not about being attractive to men. Except when they are, which is most of the time. Token staff boy Tony Romando, who functions as Jane’s voice of universal male opinion, graciously lets us in on scoops such as: Men don’t like “granny panties” or “when action hair is excessive.” The latter is “just too masculine for us and, besides, we were weaned on centerfolds in girlie magazines.” (Maybe we girls would kinda like for you to learn the difference between the woman in your bed and the one in the magazine on the back of your toilet … but I digress.) The message is still that what men think matters more than what we think. Wouldn’t it be better for us to eat (which, according to Tony, guys dig) and be opinionated (ditto) because we want to, not because some mag told us that boys like it?

  7. When their lips are not actually attached to famous buttocks, the Jane staff keeps busy dropping names of close, personal celebrity friends. Each issue is stuffed to the brim with gratuitous celeb kissy-kissy: “Jane and I were unexpectedly whisked away to an intimate dinner hosted by Donatella Versace at the late Gianni Versace’s town house. We ate lobster salad and drank champagne while Bono took a tour of the art collection.” “By the way, Ethan Hawke called to say how much he liked Nicole Burdette’s fiction story in our premiere issue. And Courteney Cox called to congratulate us.” “Samantha Mathis is an amazing person and an amazing actress.” The special Touched by a Celeb, Like We Care prize goes to Pratt herself: “I was going to say Michael [Stipe of R.E.M.] and I used to date, but he says, ‘Let’s just throw the euphemisms right out the window and say that we … were friends and lovers on and off for several years.’”

  8. Jane is mean. And I don’t mean mean like a mean martini. I mean just mean. In the June/July 1998 editor’s note, for instance, Jane Pratt lashes out at an intern who thought that it might not be such a hot idea to put Pamela Anderson on the cover. (Said intern, and anyone else who isn’t thrilled with the choice of cover model, are “so-called feminists” who are “elitist,” “predictable,” and “closed-minded.” But certainly reasonable minds could differ on the appropriateness of putting a woman who arguably made her fame and fortune through her breast implants on the cover of a magazine that purports to speak to progressive women.) Writers also love to throw around choice phrases like “whiny coffeehouse wench” and use the magazine’s letters column to insult their fans. Lovely.

  9. When it comes to features, style over substance is definitely the order of the day. Granted, celebrity journalism is not known for its intrinsic depth, but Jane’s burning desire to be the Mag That Famous People Like (see item 7) ensures that the compelling stories they do run will always be outnumbered by those of the “Milla Jovovich is rilly cool and she invited me to her house, and by the way, she smokes Parliaments!” variety.

  10. Jane made promises it couldn’t keep. “I didn’t want to create a magazine that would make women feel bad after reading it. I didn’t want it to be a manual for all your flaws and all the things you need to fix,” Pratt commented in a New York Times article that accompanied the magazine’s release in September 1997. One of the standard criticisms of women’s magazines is that they present their readers with a completely unrealistic idea of what a woman’s life is/should be. Smart women know it’s not all about curling irons and bikini waxes and dog-earing your copy of The Rules, and it’s this knowledge that is supposedly the engine behind Jane.

  But Pratt and her cohorts probably shouldn’t strain their arms patting themselves on the back. It’s true that you won’t find diet plans, calorie breakdowns, or dopey self-discovery quizzes within Jane’s matte-finish pages. But much as Jane would like to believe that retro typefaces and bleedingedge fashion styling make it the anti-Cosmo, it ain’t so easy. In plenty of the ways that count, Jane is just like any other women’s magazine (see items I, 3, 4, 5, 6). There might not be an article on, say, how cellulite makes you a less valuable person, but Jane’s premiere issue’s road test of cellulite creams featured Pratt herself remarking that she hid her tube of something called Chanel Multi-Hydroxy Cellulite Complex “so no one would think I cared about something so superficial.”

  MAYBE OUR EXPECTATIONS OF JANE WERE UNFAIR. MAYBE IT’S our own fault for forgetting that anything run by a major media conglomerate can hardly buck the ad-driven culture of women’s magazines that literally depends on the product plug for its revenue stream. There was a reason, after all, why Sassy went down the tubes. But why insult intelligent women by instituting hypocrisy from the start? Sad as it is, we’re used to women’s magazines making us feel that we’re not thin or pretty or rich or well-heeled enough, and that’s why many of us choose not to read them. But it’s far worse to be smugly informed that what we’re getting from Jane is different, when in fact the only difference lies in the pitch itself. Jane’s snooty, preening reality is that much more painful for having the initial premise—and Pratt’s own promises—dangled before us. Good design may allow Jane to assume the pose of an alternative to the usual crop of women’s magazines, but the result is nothing more than, to cop a phrase from our high-school math teacher, an old friend in a new hat. An advertiser-smooching, beauty-product-hawking, celebrity-ass-kissing, skinny-model-filled old friend in a new, faux-iconoclastic, hypocritical, self-congratulatory hat.

  Marketing Miss Right

  Meet the Single Girl, Twenty-First-Century Style

  Andi Zeisler / WINTER 2000

  “I’m single because I was born that way.”

  —Mae West, 1967

  “I am going to die. But I will die married.”

  —Suzanne Finnamore, Otherwise Engaged, 1999

  STANDING IN LINE AT THE MOVIES, I’M LISTENING TO A friend chat with an old acquaintance behind us. As they bemoan the state of San Francisco housing, the acquaintance mentions that her older sister just purchased a hunk of East Coast real estate. “S
he bought a six-room apartment,” she says proudly. A dramatic pause, and then the kicker: “Without him.”

  Him? Who’s him?

  Oh, him. Right. I feel as though I’ve been transported into one of those General Foods International Coffee ads, where a knot of women sit around someone’s living room with their Café Hazelnut Mochas, reinforcing female stereotypes for all they’re worth. This woman is waiting for my friend to respond excitedly, but what is she supposed to say? “Gosh, it’s great that your sister isn’t afraid to look like a pathetic spinster, what with having her very own apartment and all”?

  It’s weird to hear women still mouthing the kind of stuff that even Cosmo seems to know better than to print these days. But then, it’s kind of a weird time to be a single woman. On the one hand, the choice to be single is acknowledged and validated in ways that seemed unthinkable as little as a dozen years ago, when the famous you’ll-have-a-better-chance-of-being-killed-by-terrorists-than-getting-married-in-your-thirties reports flowed in from every media venue around. Slowly, the ranks of the never-married are swelling, and with about forty million single women in America, it’s a demographic that’s getting noticed.

  On the other hand, what’s getting noticed about single women in 1999 can be summed up with two words: Bridget Jones. The current era of the single woman might as well be described as post-BJ, since it seems that no pop cultural mention of either women or singlehood can pass without trotting out her booze-swilling British ass as evidence that we’re all thigh- and marriage-obsessed neurotics. Never mind that single women are owning their own businesses in record numbers, matching men dollar for dollar in spending, and remaking the arts in their own image. It’s much easier to market to single women by dwelling on what they aren’t—married, and by extension settled comfortably into society. Pick up a book, peruse a diamond ad, watch your television, eavesdrop on people at the movies: We’re tapping a well of long-extant stereotypes, fears, and assumptions about single women and selling them back to ourselves at a bargain price.

  Bridget Jones Superstar

  The publication of 1995’s The Rules may have set the wheels of pop culture’s retro-cycle in motion, but the unprecedented success of Bridget Jones’s Diary sent it into hyperdrive. Helen Fielding’s London Independent column–turned-novel put a goofy, semi-ironic face on the same story women have been fed for years—the one about the single career woman who, rapidly approaching thirty, goes into what can only be called a marriage frenzy. But whether the million-plus women who bought and loved the book were responding to its gently satiric prodding of the beauty myth or letting its sarcasm fly right over their heads is beside the point—marketers everywhere saw a publishing zeitgeist waiting to happen and quickly positioned Bridget to be its patron saint. The newish crop of books featuring single female protagonists, all released in the spring and summer of 1999, testify.

  Take Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, a book of interrelated short stories that, according to its promotional copy, “explores the life lessons of Jane, the contemporary American Everywoman who combines the charm of Bridget Jones [and] the vulnerability of Ally McBeal.” Or Suzanne Finnamore’s Otherwise Engaged, a comedy of prenuptial manners that replaces Bridget’s now-famed fear of “dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian” with the more prosaic “I’ll die a spinster, a gaggle of cats sniffing my bloated corpse.” Or Amy Sohn’s Run Catch Kiss, the story of a sex columnist courting relationship disaster with her tell-all dispatches (the Independent, in a slice of praise that takes the fiction-as-reality thing to an unreasonable level, dubbed Sohn “the thinking person’s Bridget Jones”).

  There are others: In the Drink, Kate Christensen’s darker-than-dark-humored tale of a hapless, lovelorn, and unappreciated ghostwriter with an unbridled hankering for the sauce; and A Certain Age, Tama Janowitz’s story of a woman whose ridiculously high standards preclude finding the Right Man. Finally, there’s Melissa Roth, who, in the nonfiction book On the Loose, tracks three single women through one year in their lives in order to capture the “‘real world’ of single living.”

  If these books have any individual characteristics to separate them from one another, you wouldn’t know it from their reviews and marketing. True, the characters share certain things: They’re attractive women in their twenties or thirties; they’re educated, self-aware, and quick with a wise aside; they live in New York, San Francisco, or London; they work in publishing or advertising; their families appear every few chapters, Greek chorus–style, to shake their heads in synchronized dismay. Within their pages, the characters are small-s single; with the exception of On the Loose, their singleness is simply part of a narrative life that doesn’t itself purport to define the word. In a marketing context, however, they are Single Women—shameless, hapless, man-hunting single women—and their subtleties and differences are ignored in the spotlight’s glare.

  Where Are We Going and Why Am I in This Borders Handbasket?

  Don’t blame the authors. As long as women have been writing, they’ve been writing about young, single women searching for love, success, and happiness (though, please remember, not necessarily in that order). Still, it’s hard to recall a time when so many female authors have been hyped so arduously and favorably all at once, and this Lilith Fair of literature would be wholly gratifying if not for one major thing: The books, marketed by their publishers as the spawn of Bridget Jones and addressed by reviewers as the direct result of Fielding’s success, are made weaker on their own (in most cases considerable) merits.

  New York magazine’s rundown of the trend, titled “Success and the Single Girl,” crowned BJD “The Gold Standard” before dismissing the new crop of books as no more than clones. (The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing becomes “Intellectual Bridget”; In the Drink is “Dipso Bridget.”) This easy categorization makes for snappy copy, but in doing so it dispenses with the literary context in which these books exist. It’s as though everyone from Jane Austen to Alice Adams has been completely wiped from the cultural blackboard and the only ones left to represent in the single-gal arena are this year’s girls.

  “One reviewer called Run Catch Kiss ‘A wobbly attempt to follow in Bridget Jones’s Manolo Blahniks,’” says Amy Sohn, whose New York Press column, “Female Trouble,” formed the basis for her cheerfully potty-mouthed debut novel. “She doesn’t even wear Manolo Blahniks! What frustrates me is the idea that anyone who sits down to write a book is doing it to mimic someone else.” It doesn’t matter that Run Catch Kiss has more in common with Portnoy’s Complaint than it does with BJD, or that Melissa Bank’s subtle writing recalls the prose of Lorrie Moore far more than it channels Fielding’s sugar-high stylings. The single-girl market is hot, and it behooves publishers to shoehorn as many books as possible into the demographic while the fire’s lit.

  It’s worth noting that certain commercially undesirable factors disqualify a book for hard-core Bridgetized marketing. My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki’s novel about a single Japanese-American television producer who unwittingly stumbles into a massive beef-ranching scandal—one of the smartest and most original books to come out in the past few years—hasn’t found itself linking arms with BJ and her ilk. All the elements are there—the almost-thirty heroine, her noncommittal boyfriend, her neurotic mother, and her quirky coworkers have zeitgeist written all over them. But both its author and its main character are Asian American; add to that an explicitly political premise and you don’t even have to start doing the math to know that Meats wouldn’t reap the same caliber of PR booty as its single-girl sisters.

  Slingin’ Singles

  What these books do have in common is that they center on single women, and, as such, provide ruminations on what it means to be single. Duh, right? Sure—the problem is that the marketing doesn’t reflect the fact that characters like In the Drink’s Claudia and The Girls’ Guide’s Jane don’t, in fact, spend the entire narrative plotting to snag the honeymo
on suite. Their version of singlehood doesn’t necessarily treat the term “single” as a provisional tag, something to be endured until they find the person who lifts that semantic albatross from around their necks. Otherwise Engaged’s Eve, on the other hand, flaunts her equation of marriage = salvation on every page with ruminations like “The ring is my lump-sum payment for everything bad that has ever happened to me. I don’t feel I can tell people this, or they will spoil it.” Another entry in the genre, Kathy Lette’s Altar Ego, presents us with a group of characters whose brain-free couplings and decouplings prop up every prejudice about both single women and marriage (women only marry rich; feminists discard their principles when Mr. Man comes calling; women concentrate on their careers only when they can’t get a husband, etc.). And On the Loose compares and contrasts the lives of three single women in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—or at least attempts to. For all the diversity that could be gleaned from both the premise and the locations, Roth gives us a trio of central-casting white girls, each working in the corporate world (two in entertainment, one in advertising), and all of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. The writing makes it almost impossible to tell whether these women have any characteristics that set them apart from each other, and in the course of following their interchangeable lives—a mélange of bad dates, film premieres, record-release parties, and expense-account vacations—it becomes difficult to care. If this was fiction, we’d simply write them off as caricatures. But On the Loose is a nonfiction work that claims to capture what it’s like to be a single woman in the ’90s, so the fact that its one-dimensionality is meant to resonate with actual women seriously rankles. You can’t even get past the jacket blurb without stumbling onto a played-out cliché of singlehood: “Jen … adopts kittens despite the old-maid stereotype.” The upshot is that while some of these books do support the stereotypes that fuel the parade float of marketing, the ones that don’t are swept up for the ride, smiling and waving in bewilderment.