Book-It '10! Book #3
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.
Title: BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine edited by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler
Details: Copyright 2006, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Bitch was launched in the mid-'90s as a xerox-and-staple zine covering the pop landscape from a girl's-eye view. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way that culture reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch stands today as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the manner in which pop culture informs feminism-- and vice versa-- and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind their favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like.
BITCHfest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, BITCHfest is a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and a taste of feminism's future."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd been mildly interested to see what Bitch was about (I had a prejudice based on the attempts of "fauxminists" to co-opt feminism's edginess with "bitch" this and "bitch" that).
How I Liked It: The book manages to cover pop culture roundly and entertainingly.
There is seriously something for everyone here. Like any pop culture commentary, it's going to be dated, but it never claims not to be and the pieces are arranged in a way to examine time difference in the respective phenomenons mentioned between then and now.
Highlights include:
• A collection and review of young adult novels (from 1969 to 1996) with a lesbian theme ("Rubyfruit Jungle Gym: An Annotated Bibliography of the Lesbian Young Adult Novel", pg 11)
• A mesh of identity through music ("Sister Outsider Headbanger: On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead", pg 26)
• The driving feminist aspect of slash fiction ("Fan/Tastic Voyage: Rewriting Gender in the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction", pg 192)
• How female envy can be a source of attraction, not division ("Envy, a Love Story: Queering Female Jealousy", pg 186)
• The devoid-of-critical-aspects and kinda offensive really portrayals of gay parenting popping up ("Queer and Present Danger: What's Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?", pg 232)
• The trend of "politically incorrect" (re: racist) fashion ("Bias Cut: Old Racism as New Fashion", pg 322)
• Tips on creating a greater awareness of advertising and its effects and what we can do, including some tips as simple as writing "Feed your models!" or "Stop exploiting women!" on annoying subscription cards (with handy free postage!) which both helps eliminate some litter and costs the magazine about thirty cents per card ("Refuse and Resist with Jean Kilbourne: How to Counteract Ad Messages", pg 335)
• A fierce call-to-arms with clear outlines and goals for taking down the patriarchy via pop culture ("How to Reclaim, Reframe, and Reform the Media: A Feminist Advocacy Guide", pg 344)
I could go on, but I'll stop at these. As one reviewer blurbed, it really is Bitch's greatest hits and they're pretty great.
Notable: None of these essays I found to be an exercise in passivity, even the ones that preached most to the choir, however the ones that got me thinking the most are the ones that threw up a red flag.
"The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse" is one such attention-grabber. The author, Vanessa Veselka, questions the commonly held (and accepted) belief that rape and sexual abuse result in a breakdown. She points out language used in comfort that actually can harm more than hurt ("With the best of motives, we still say to [the victim] 'I'm sorry for your loss.' We will ask her to 'reclaim' her experience, rather than realize its effects." pg 58) and encourages a better understanding of the situation:
"The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The lowlife who did it threw his soul into the trash, but yours is still intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman's worth and sense of self lie in her sexual purity, and we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is an absolute objectification of women." (pg 58)
Of course, it can just as convincingly be argued that the rapist/abuser is stealing a sense of security, to say the least, a very tangible feeling, and that Veselka could somehow be "arguing down" the travesty that is rape and sexual abuse and therefore invalidating the victim's feelings of being robbed and despoiled.
But she does encourage hearing out the victim and in part not "forcing" a reaction that we think she (the article focuses exclusively on female victims) should have (collapsing, thus the title).
Very much a chapter for discussion and debate.
Secondly comes "The New Sexual Deviant: Mapping Virgin Territory" wherein the author makes a case that virgins are actually a highly persecuted group, laden with accusations and stereotypes. Unlike the attention-grabber chapter above, however, little of author Carson Brown's article seems redeeming so much as abstinence-only campaigners reframing their message with some handy feminist-sounding cant. While certainly women not sexual active with someone other than themselves unarguably face stereotypes and certainly occasional feelings of isolation, it's minor compared to the fallen woman/slut stigma that runs deep throughout pop culture and it's dangerous to suggest that it isn't.
Brown recalls the marriage of a high school friend, a 23-year-old Christian (Brown injects faith, specifically Christianity, into the entirety of the article, leaving out, I suppose, the many Christians that didn't and don't wait and the non-Christians that have and do) virgin (as was her fiancé, whom she had never even kissed until the reception) which, according to Brown, are "a dying breed" (pg 182). Other such sweeping and questionable cultural statements worthy of Bernard Goldberg dot the article. The "sex-positive brigade" is, according to Brown, primarily responsible for such persecution and propagation of mistruths about virgins.
It can be argued that "True Love Waits" and similarly minded movements simply didn't have the presence at the time of the article's publication (winter 2000) which certainly colors the entire virgin question (and is worthy of a recent book by Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth). The Jonas Brothers, Twilight, Bristol Palin (I don't get it, either), and other icons of abstinence-only education had yet to make their respective marks.
Brown does make note of True Love Waits, in their then-fledgling state, as she fawningly reworks them as feminism to even Sarah Palin's envy:
"If you did the deed [sex] but feel horrible about it, you should be able to call a do-over. Revirginizing allows you to define your own existence based on your current behaviors, saying, in effect, 'I am who I conceive myself to be.' This is a very powerful-- and potentially very feminist-- notion."
"Also, the secondary-virginity model is more gender fair than other sexual rule systems. Here, sex is a no-no for both sexes-- zero room is allowed for statements like 'boys will be boys'." (pg 184)
Of course, what Brown is overlooking (or creatively omitting), even as she notes "ceremonies where parents place pledge rings on their child" (pg 184) is the fact that while True Love Waits and other abstinence only programs include boys, their focus remains on girls. Fathers place rings on their daughters' fingers, pledging to be the man in their life until their husbands come along. Mothers do not do the same with their sons.
Perhaps to dodge the accusation of heteronormativity, Brown tosses in some references to gay and bisexual youth, including the case of a friend who counts sex with a woman as not really losing her virginity (thus the hymen question, although clearly Brown doesn't understand all the complexities of female/female sex). However, her focus is still overwhelmingly straight (and Christian, who she suggests are thought of as "deviants").
Brown wraps her article with apparently no trace of irony as she concludes:
"[I]t's much simpler to rely on prepackaged identities-- whether people are virgins or note, whether they are gay or straight, whether they're loose or frigid by reputation-- than to figure out if they're satisfied with their lives. So how can we create a culture free of virginity obsesion and outdated dichotomies? It may be time for a third term, a social creature even more unlikely and elusive than virgins: ourselves as individuals." (pg 185)
One could question why this article is included amongst Bitch's greatest hits and rightly argue that simply because a writer wraps herself in feminist jargon that does not make her a feminist and not making that distinction is downright dangerous. However, the article is nonetheless thought-provoking and an interesting snapshot (albeit a blurry and photo-edited one) of an era, of sorts. The article itself could even be considered as a case study of the appropriation of feminism, certainly worthy of inclusion in such a book, proving that even Bitch can make a misstep in judgment of articles.
Title: BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine edited by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler
Details: Copyright 2006, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Bitch was launched in the mid-'90s as a xerox-and-staple zine covering the pop landscape from a girl's-eye view. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way that culture reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch stands today as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the manner in which pop culture informs feminism-- and vice versa-- and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind their favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like.
BITCHfest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, BITCHfest is a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and a taste of feminism's future."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd been mildly interested to see what Bitch was about (I had a prejudice based on the attempts of "fauxminists" to co-opt feminism's edginess with "bitch" this and "bitch" that).
How I Liked It: The book manages to cover pop culture roundly and entertainingly.
There is seriously something for everyone here. Like any pop culture commentary, it's going to be dated, but it never claims not to be and the pieces are arranged in a way to examine time difference in the respective phenomenons mentioned between then and now.
Highlights include:
• A collection and review of young adult novels (from 1969 to 1996) with a lesbian theme ("Rubyfruit Jungle Gym: An Annotated Bibliography of the Lesbian Young Adult Novel", pg 11)
• A mesh of identity through music ("Sister Outsider Headbanger: On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead", pg 26)
• The driving feminist aspect of slash fiction ("Fan/Tastic Voyage: Rewriting Gender in the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction", pg 192)
• How female envy can be a source of attraction, not division ("Envy, a Love Story: Queering Female Jealousy", pg 186)
• The devoid-of-critical-aspects and kinda offensive really portrayals of gay parenting popping up ("Queer and Present Danger: What's Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?", pg 232)
• The trend of "politically incorrect" (re: racist) fashion ("Bias Cut: Old Racism as New Fashion", pg 322)
• Tips on creating a greater awareness of advertising and its effects and what we can do, including some tips as simple as writing "Feed your models!" or "Stop exploiting women!" on annoying subscription cards (with handy free postage!) which both helps eliminate some litter and costs the magazine about thirty cents per card ("Refuse and Resist with Jean Kilbourne: How to Counteract Ad Messages", pg 335)
• A fierce call-to-arms with clear outlines and goals for taking down the patriarchy via pop culture ("How to Reclaim, Reframe, and Reform the Media: A Feminist Advocacy Guide", pg 344)
I could go on, but I'll stop at these. As one reviewer blurbed, it really is Bitch's greatest hits and they're pretty great.
Notable: None of these essays I found to be an exercise in passivity, even the ones that preached most to the choir, however the ones that got me thinking the most are the ones that threw up a red flag.
"The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse" is one such attention-grabber. The author, Vanessa Veselka, questions the commonly held (and accepted) belief that rape and sexual abuse result in a breakdown. She points out language used in comfort that actually can harm more than hurt ("With the best of motives, we still say to [the victim] 'I'm sorry for your loss.' We will ask her to 'reclaim' her experience, rather than realize its effects." pg 58) and encourages a better understanding of the situation:
"The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The lowlife who did it threw his soul into the trash, but yours is still intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman's worth and sense of self lie in her sexual purity, and we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is an absolute objectification of women." (pg 58)
Of course, it can just as convincingly be argued that the rapist/abuser is stealing a sense of security, to say the least, a very tangible feeling, and that Veselka could somehow be "arguing down" the travesty that is rape and sexual abuse and therefore invalidating the victim's feelings of being robbed and despoiled.
But she does encourage hearing out the victim and in part not "forcing" a reaction that we think she (the article focuses exclusively on female victims) should have (collapsing, thus the title).
Very much a chapter for discussion and debate.
Secondly comes "The New Sexual Deviant: Mapping Virgin Territory" wherein the author makes a case that virgins are actually a highly persecuted group, laden with accusations and stereotypes. Unlike the attention-grabber chapter above, however, little of author Carson Brown's article seems redeeming so much as abstinence-only campaigners reframing their message with some handy feminist-sounding cant. While certainly women not sexual active with someone other than themselves unarguably face stereotypes and certainly occasional feelings of isolation, it's minor compared to the fallen woman/slut stigma that runs deep throughout pop culture and it's dangerous to suggest that it isn't.
Brown recalls the marriage of a high school friend, a 23-year-old Christian (Brown injects faith, specifically Christianity, into the entirety of the article, leaving out, I suppose, the many Christians that didn't and don't wait and the non-Christians that have and do) virgin (as was her fiancé, whom she had never even kissed until the reception) which, according to Brown, are "a dying breed" (pg 182). Other such sweeping and questionable cultural statements worthy of Bernard Goldberg dot the article. The "sex-positive brigade" is, according to Brown, primarily responsible for such persecution and propagation of mistruths about virgins.
It can be argued that "True Love Waits" and similarly minded movements simply didn't have the presence at the time of the article's publication (winter 2000) which certainly colors the entire virgin question (and is worthy of a recent book by Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth). The Jonas Brothers, Twilight, Bristol Palin (I don't get it, either), and other icons of abstinence-only education had yet to make their respective marks.
Brown does make note of True Love Waits, in their then-fledgling state, as she fawningly reworks them as feminism to even Sarah Palin's envy:
"If you did the deed [sex] but feel horrible about it, you should be able to call a do-over. Revirginizing allows you to define your own existence based on your current behaviors, saying, in effect, 'I am who I conceive myself to be.' This is a very powerful-- and potentially very feminist-- notion."
"Also, the secondary-virginity model is more gender fair than other sexual rule systems. Here, sex is a no-no for both sexes-- zero room is allowed for statements like 'boys will be boys'." (pg 184)
Of course, what Brown is overlooking (or creatively omitting), even as she notes "ceremonies where parents place pledge rings on their child" (pg 184) is the fact that while True Love Waits and other abstinence only programs include boys, their focus remains on girls. Fathers place rings on their daughters' fingers, pledging to be the man in their life until their husbands come along. Mothers do not do the same with their sons.
Perhaps to dodge the accusation of heteronormativity, Brown tosses in some references to gay and bisexual youth, including the case of a friend who counts sex with a woman as not really losing her virginity (thus the hymen question, although clearly Brown doesn't understand all the complexities of female/female sex). However, her focus is still overwhelmingly straight (and Christian, who she suggests are thought of as "deviants").
Brown wraps her article with apparently no trace of irony as she concludes:
"[I]t's much simpler to rely on prepackaged identities-- whether people are virgins or note, whether they are gay or straight, whether they're loose or frigid by reputation-- than to figure out if they're satisfied with their lives. So how can we create a culture free of virginity obsesion and outdated dichotomies? It may be time for a third term, a social creature even more unlikely and elusive than virgins: ourselves as individuals." (pg 185)
One could question why this article is included amongst Bitch's greatest hits and rightly argue that simply because a writer wraps herself in feminist jargon that does not make her a feminist and not making that distinction is downright dangerous. However, the article is nonetheless thought-provoking and an interesting snapshot (albeit a blurry and photo-edited one) of an era, of sorts. The article itself could even be considered as a case study of the appropriation of feminism, certainly worthy of inclusion in such a book, proving that even Bitch can make a misstep in judgment of articles.