Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Overview

From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.

Bitch
is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.

She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."

Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307829887
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/17/2012
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 448
Sales rank: 1,014,919
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of the bestselling books Prozac Nation, Bitch, and More, Now, Again. A Harvard graduate whose work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, New York, The Guardian, and The Oxford American, she lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

As feminism has charged forward--and no one can deny the leaps and strides it has made--so has the invention of the overeager hypersexualized female body.  Nowadays you pay for sex not because you are lonely and miserable and can't get laid, or married and looking for cheap thrills, but because sex as a commodity is not distasteful; it's interesting.  The recent best-seller by three Hollywood call girls, You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again, essentially chronicles the availability for money of just about anything.  The women write about their experiences servicing major Hollywood movie stars, men who presumably don't "have to" pay for sex, but like to be able to control the action, or like the absence of any emotional involvement, or just plain think it's cool.  In the midst of all this, it seems hard to talk about date rape or anything else, because as much as women may try to be seen not as sex objects there is a countervailing force, in which many women collaborate--mostly out of financial need--to turn women into nothing but sex objects.

Which is why the good-time liberated lady whose sexual bravado could be celebrated by Germaine Greer and Helen Gurley Brown alike has metastasized over time into a harsh, hard force of flat, canned sexuality whose most protuberant and pertinent metonymy is the obvious and bulbous silicone breast implants that caricature a sexual reality that is already a cartoon, that don't even try to mimic mammarian nature.

I think the choices become whether you will use it for yourself or against.  Look, I think many people have rescued themselves from this game, but pretty girls, girls who learned to manipulate, girls whose hearts always belonged to daddy--they just can't help it. And the world rewards it at the same time it condemns it.  On the whole, one lesson of a book like You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again is that sex is really not much of a weapon in the end.  You need to have some talent and brains or nothing will work.  Most men who sleep with some girl won't want to give her a job since they'd prefer never to deal with the situation again.  I think that's the main thing that's missing from any discussions of this subject--the complexities of date rape, the way strip clubs have become feminist enterprise zones while ignoring the degrading damaging nature of the work.  For a woman to do just as she pleases and dispense with other people's needs, wants, demands and desires continues to be revolutionary.  Men pretty much do as they will, and women pretty much continue to pick up the slack.  That's why books like The Rules and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus succeed.  It remains to this day, even after feminism, a woman's chore to close the gap.  Time is not on our side, our youth and beauty is brief, tick-tock the biological clock, and that message is thrown at us over and over again.  In Manhattan Nocturne, an unusually perspicacious noir novel with the genre's usual theme of the good man brought down by a beautiful bad girl, the author Colin Harrison muses at one point on what a short shelf life a pretty girl in New York City has.  "I would say the most determined people are the young women who arrive in the city from America and around the world to sell, in one way or another, their bodies: the models and strippers and actresses and dancers who know that time is running against them, that they are temporarily credentialed by youth."

Of course, we are meant to understand that this is the lot of glamour girls, that those of us who put brains beforebeauty need not worry about this stuff.  But to paraphrase Rosie O'Donnell once again: It feels as if it's true for us all.  And while there are commitment-phobic women, the story you always hear when there is a troubled relationship--when the balance of power is off--for the most part it's always the one of women trying to get men to tie the knot.  Now, I personally know a number of women who are putting off their boyfriends who are eager to get married--but those relationships are not the ones that seem in constant crisis, they are not the ones where somebody is always complaining, because for any number of reasons, the focus on commitment still only assumes a desperate cast when the woman is the injured party.

And the fact that all this relationship anxiety marks a regression of sorts is not lost on pioneers of the women's movement who thought it would be better by now.  London eating disorders expert Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, is the founder of the Women's Therapy Centre, where among her patients was Princess Diana.  "I see all sorts of young confident women around," she told Mirabella in late 1996.  "But when they're in my consulting room, they talk about the same bloody issues we had thirty years ago.  They're afraid.  Women in the most oppressive relationships are trying to manage them rather than get out of them.  Only now, with no women's movement, if you have problems you feel like a freak.  All the problems are internalized."

That's why The Rules is a runaway best-seller and may well be a perennial hit.

But it is wrong to see that book as a setback to feminism in any way, or to be mad at the authoresses for their Aunt Edna-like advice because the book is completely nonideological: feminism is beside the point in a list of what is probably fairly sound advice for learning to behave like a woman who is about to embark on some serious, goal-oriented dating.  It tells women how to act so as to compensate for the fact that while feminism has changed the way many of us think and behave, while it has made men change diapers and do dishes and spend quality time with children while women perform neurosurgery and direct movies and trade Eurodollars, it has failed to truly change the way we feel.  The proof: Go to any bookstore and there are hundreds of titles in the self-help section about how to overcome love addiction and fear of abandonment and the like, and while there are plenty of books for women about how to deal with commitment-resistant, impossible men--Smart Women, Foolish Choices and the like--there is not one book addressed to men about how to work out their own damn problems with relationships.  No book for men about how to get over fear of commitment, how to learn to open one's heart, how to stop running from emotional involvement--I know, because I searched high and low for such a thing for my last boyfriend and it doesn't exist.

Do you know why?

Because it doesn't need to.  Men don't have to change the way they sexually assess women, the way certain triggers and indications of female power or feminine weakness may frighten them off.  They don't have to change the psychic messages inculcated into their brains from way back in their preverbal, pre-Oedipal days.  They don't have to because we women will learn to behave.

Well, I for one am sick of it.  All my life, one person or another has been telling me to behave, saying don't let a guy know you're a depressed maniac on the first date, don't just be yourself, don't show your feelings.  And the truth is, this is probably good advice, men probably don't like overbearing, hotheaded women who give blow jobs on the first date.  In all likelihood the only man who will ever like me just as I am will probably need to believe I'm somebody else at first.  I probably do need to learn to behave.  But I don't like it.  It seems like, all this, all these years of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi--all that smart writing all so we could learn to behave?  Bra burning in Atlantic City--so we could learn to behave?  Roe v.  Wade--so we could learn to behave?  Thelma & Louise--so we could learn to behave?  The gender gap--so we could learn to behave?  Madonna, Sally Ride, Joycelyn Elders, Golda Meir, Anita Hill, Bette Davis, Leni Riefenstahl--all those strong, indefatigable souls so we could learn to behave?  What good really have any of those things done if we still get the feeling that we have to contain our urges and control ourselves in the interest of courtship and love?  Did Germaine Greer importune us so long ago with the words "Lady, love your cunt," and did Anka Radikovich regale us with her tales of the sexual picaresque in The Wild Girls Club so we could be told never to succumb to sexual abandon on the first date?  After all this agitation, along comes The Rules to tell us that we're not even allowed to accept a date for a Saturday night after Wednesday.

Here's my point: I have no quarrel with The Rules or the advice it gives--it actually seems pretty sound to me--but if we had really come a long way, baby, if men's perceptions of women had transformed fundamentally and intensely so that we were accepted as full-fledged sexual creatures and romantic operatives who were free to chase or be chased, and if this expanded dimension of women's sexual personae were not frightening or overwhelming to them, then we would not need The Rules. We would be truly free.

So of course the bitch persona appeals to us.  It is the illusion of liberation, of libertine abandon.  What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished?  You don't want to diet, you don't want to say no, thank you, and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always, you want more.  That has been your defining characteristic: You have appetites, and only if you are truly shameless will you even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough.  Not because you are greedy or insatiable but because you can't help it, you can't go along with the fiction that the world would have you believe and adhere to: that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with, that feminism and other political theories of woman cannot really begin to address because this is about something else entirely.

This is about what has become the almost monstrous notion of female desire.  This is not about making demands of other people or wearing down those who have their own screams for MORE!  to address: You'd be amazed at how often we are reluctant to indulge ourselves by our own means.  It is amazing that the smallness of the space we've been told to squeeze into has meant that we don't even know how to ask or what to want.  Everything tells us to stop, to not talk to that guy first, to not have a thousand lovers if that's what feels right because one husband is supposed to be enough.  Everything says we don't need another piece of chocolate cake, we don't need another Gucci bag, another dime-store lipstick, another Big Mac, another night on the town, another spin on the Rainbow Room dance floor.  Well, this is meant to be a story about people who are so beyond need, who want and have figured out that it's never too soon to make demands of this life, this world, this everything.  It's about how nice it must be to just decide I will not be nice, I am never sorry, I have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me.

But for a woman, to assume she has to be not nice, it puts her outside of the system, outside of what is acceptable.  She can be a deeply depressive Sylvia Plath, a luxuriating decadent Delilah, a homicidal adolescent Amy Fisher, she can be anyone who decides that what she wants and needs and believes and must do is more important than being nice.  She may, in fact, be as nice as can be, but as soon as she says catch me if you can I'm so free this is my life and the rest can fuck off and die--as soon as she lays down the option of my way or the highway, it's amazing how quickly everyone finds her difficult, crazy, a nightmare: a bitch.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION Manufacturing Fascination1
PART ONE He Puts Her on a Pedestal and She Goes Down on It35
PART TWO Hey Little Girl Is Your Daddy Home?93
PART THREE There She Goes Again159
PART FOUR The Blonde in the Bleachers225
PART FIVE Used to Love Her but I Had to Kill Her295
EPILOGUE Did I Shave My Legs for This?383
BIBLIOGRAPHY 415
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 428
PERMISSIONS433

Interviews

On Wednesday, April 15th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Elizabeth Wurtzel to discuss BITCH.


Moderator: Thanks for joining us tonight in the barnesandnoble.com Live Event Auditorium. Congratulations on this recent publication. Is this your first online interview?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Yes. I think so. I'm interested to see how this works, because I've read transcripts of all these other online chats where the answers and questions are eight lines apart, usually to really comical results. But I figure, if Cynthia Ozick can do this, it must not be very funny anymore.


David from Los Altos Hills, CA: You're clearly very into films. What's your all-time favorite?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: The Robert Altman movie "Nashville." I have always maintained that if you want to know everything you need to about what makes America what it is, all you need to do is read Norman Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG and see Altman's "Nashville." It's hard to explain exactly why, but both those works cut into the dark heart of this country's soul. But "Nashville," simply from the point of view of being a great movie, is just so full, it's so huge, it tells all these stories of human frailty, set against this backdrop of politics and music and...everyone should just see it. I could go on for hours about it. Just trust me.


Harriet from New London, CT: Hi, Elizabeth. You have a lot of music quotes in your book. Have you ever played an instrument, or is music just a strong influence in your life?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: If only I had any musical talent! My voice is so bad that if I sang "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" to you, you would have no idea what I was singing, or if I was even doing it in the English language. Nevertheless, I did learn to play guitar when I was 12 or thereabouts, and I could play "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" that way. Also, I think I mastered "Take It Easy," and this was when it was really uncool to be into the Eagles (kind of like now). But once I figured out that I was not going to be a big huge rock star (I could only envision my future in terms of big and huge, the thought of minor and cultlike did not interest me), I just abandoned the whole enterprise and stuck with writing, which I at least had some aptitude for. (I think.)


Bill Learner from Maryland: Hey, I think your books are fantastic -- sharp and wittier than most out there! Do you have any other writing plans for the future? Any hope of seeing your name in The New Yorker again soon?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Talk to Tina Brown!


Megan from Detroit, MI: I feel like you were excusing Jackson Browne for hitting Daryl Hannah because, hey, wouldn't you be pissed off if your lover was leaving you for a hot Kennedy. Am I misreading this?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Did you see the movie "L.A. Confidential"? I only ask because one of the most interesting scenes in that movie had the cop who was Kim Basinger's boyfriend, and who had made it his life's work to break up fights between men beating up on women, the scene had him punch her in the eye. This was after he'd caught her in flagrante with his rival. After he threw this first punch at Ms. Basinger, he immediately backed off in shame because for him this was just the worst offense. But sitting in the audience, you're meant to understand that she "deserved" it -- not that anyone ever deserves to be physically injured, but she had knowingly done something to provoke him, and his response was understandable. The horrible thing about habitual wife-beaters is that they do what they do for no reason. All I was saying about Jackson Browne was that as far as anyone knows he has no history of abusing women, but I can imagine feeling so hurt and humiliated by that set of circumstances that all kinds of awful and unacceptable things happen that ought not leave him branded for life.


Jonah from Connecticut: Now that Courtney's gone Hollywood, who do you see as the next woman artist having the potential to really inspire teenage girls?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Me.


Jamie from New York City: To my disgust, the New York Times reviewer of your book (a woman) criticizes your baring your breast on the book cover. Does this surprise you? Amuse you?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Believe it or not, I understand what she is saying. I myself have always been ambivalent about the cover. I really like it -- I mean, I wish I looked that good (amazing what they can do with shadow and lights), and I thought it was very fun, very rock and roll. But on the other hand, I worked very hard on this book, and it is supposed to have a serious message. And I have always feared and continue to worry that the cover gives people (reviewers, for instance) an excuse to not take the book seriously. Or to dismiss it outright. Now, as someone who grew up nourished much more by rock music than by anything else, I have always wanted to have my books look like albums, to shamelessly embrace the possibility of personality (could you imagine liking an album and not having a feeling for the person behind it?), and it bothers me that books are so remote to most people. I've always maintained that if this whole country stops reading, the publishing industry will have no one but itself to blame. I don't know why books need to seem inaccessible or humorless or unsexy to be serious, but that has usually been the case. I fully expect to get a lot of shit for the cover, but I hope it inspires other authors (and publishers) to be a bit more bold.


Delia from San Francisco, CA: What do you think it will take for our society to turn away from worshipping fashion models?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: I have no idea. I basically think that it would really help if women in other professions were more glamorous. I know it sounds unfair to complain that Janet Reno doesn't resemble a fashion model (although I suppose it would be fair to note that in most ways she does not resemble an attorney general either), but I sometimes think that one of the crimes of feminism has been to desex female role models. It used to be that movie stars were Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth and Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck -- all extremely fabulous and solid and strong. But now we seem to have this divide: Models carry the sex appeal and glamour quotient, while career women have to be really serious and straitlaced or else, even after all these years, they still are perceived as bimbos. Look, I am really glad to see that there are three women in Clinton's cabinet, but wouldn't it have been great if Kimba Wood -- a mother, a very sexy former Playboy bunny, and a federal judge -- had actually been made attorney general? Wouldn't it have been something if we had to worry that the President was chasing people other than volunteers and interns around the Oval Office desk? The only way to save us from the tyranny of Tyra and Naomi and Cindy and Christy is to allow women in other roles to be sexy too. Hence, my book cover, but that is another subject.


Brandon H. from Oklahoma City, OK: Hi, Elizabeth. David Foster Wallace recently wrote a short story, "The Depressed Person," which appears in a recent Harper's. Does his character's neurosis convey any of the same feelings you wrote about in PROZAC NATION, and do you think women in general are getting deemed as more depressive than men in recent literature?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: I really hope that the Harper's piece was intended to be a satire of this type, which I think is fair enough, because depression has been so discussed and overdiscussed at this point. I have to say that Mr. Wallace is a ridiculously talented writer, and I urge everybody to take two weeks off from work and plow through the glory that is INFINITE JEST, but I don't think "The Depressed Person" was necessarily his finest hour. As far as women and depression go: I know of a couple of books being written by men right now that are memoirs of their depressions, so I suppose this will be the next special-interest group to come out of the closet. Personally, I think depression is ultimately a human issue more than anything else, and after I wrote PROZAC NATION I was astonished to find that the letters and other responses I got was as much if not more from men than from women. People are extremely lost and lonely and communityless and unhinged and unbound for any number of reasons that I could only get into in very short, trite terms in this format. I wrote BITCH because of a lot of the anger and horror I still felt about the way the world was that I could not have addressed in something so intimate as PROZAC NATION, and though it is about women's difficulties, I think ultimately it sees the world as we live in it now as no easier for men to navigate. I'm trying to get away from the topic of depression and move on to to the subject of optimism. I'm hopeful about the future. I mean, it's our world to invent -- don't you think?


Moderator: Thanks so much for indulging our curiosities here tonight! Best of luck with the rest of your tour. Any final comments?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Thank you so much for having me. I guess this was not one of those chats where everyone inadvertently cuts each other off and all. This is much more civilized. I hope you will let me go back and correct grammar and spelling mistakes made in the interest of typing in "real time." Regarding BITCH, my book, I just want to say that I hope people who read it do enjoy it, and that they're able to take it in in the right spirit. It is frequently sloppy, and I think I probably contradict myself quite a bit, but this is a book that was written on the edge of my seat. I think I said somewhere that feminist writing has been so dry, and I want to make it wet again. Take that thought for what it's worth, but bear in mind that this is my credo, it's my personal attempt to scream loud enough that the world will be forced to listen: It's my personal attempt to be undeniable. If you find this -- or the idea of this -- just repulsive, you are not going to like this book at all. But if you enjoy such maniacal energy, you may well like it a lot, or even love it. That's all I could do when I worked on this book, and it's the best I have to offer -- in fact, this book is the very best I have to offer.


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