Lobstergirl's Full Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel - Bitch: In Praise of Difficult ...
This is the second book authored by Elizabeth Wurtzel, the over-medicated, Harvard educated publicity hound who sold her sob story in Prozac Nation (1995). Young, precocious, and not afraid to talk about being very depressed and sluttish, she was the darling of the publishing world/media circuit for a few weeks. Her timing was perfect, since for a year or so there America could not seem to hear enough about, read enough about, or ingest enough Prozac. It was hard to pass by Prozac Nation in bookstores without giving a second look; Wurtzel's sepia-toned portrait on the cover, looking greasy haired, dazed and strung-out, puffy midriff peeking out above her hip huggers, demanded to be noticed. This naked self-promotion continues on the cover of B*tch, but at least now she seems to have showered and combed her hair. Now she looks like a high-priced call girl, bare shouldered, teasing and provocative.
B*tch is a rather ambitious examination of "b*tches:" women who, like Wurtzel, demand to be noticed. They're cocky, abrasive, and usually more than a bit slutty: the antithesis of the Stepford wife.
A Brief Synopsis
Chapter 1 is an interminable analysis of the Samson and Delilah story. The first b*tch is Delilah. Skip it if you're pressed for time, or even if you're not.
Chapter 2: the second b*tch is Amy Fisher, the "Long Island Lolita." Wurtzel argues that society puts teenage girls in an awkward position: they've got the boobs and the overt sex appeal that lures men and boys, but none of the understanding of how to deal with the consequences of sex or sexuality. Like Amy Fisher, they get used and abused and then punished for actions they can't completely comprehend.
Chapter 3: the third b*tch is the often-suicidal artist: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frances Farmer, Zelda Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, Edie Sedgwick, Courtney Love. These women are full of pain and drama. Their depression and/or drug use makes them demanding and disruptive. Wurtzel argues that their bitchiness is a cover for despair.
Chapter 4 features such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Sally Hemings. Have fun playing Find the Connection: b*tches? Women who slept with Bill Clinton or Thomas Jefferson? Political groupies? House slaves or field slaves? I read the chapter, and I still don't know the answer. Nevertheless, this chapter (puzzlingly titled "The Blonde in the Bleachers") is extremely worth reading. Wurtzel has strong opinions and they are trenchantly expressed.
Chapter 5 discusses Nicole Brown Simpson's situation, followed by an insightful, if unnecessarily long, foray into wife battering. It's not quite clear how Nicole fits into the b*tch mold, but this is a well-written chapter regardless, worth reading.
The Epilogue, titled "Did I Shave My Legs For This?" is a mini-manifesto. It argues that society demonizes the permanently single woman: "No matter what clever tricks feminism has come up with, it has not quite succeeded in truly legitimizing an unmarried woman as an autonomous being, as a person in a chosen living arrangement and not as someone whose life is in abeyance…" Men who stay single are often romanticized as loners. Women who stay single are just lonely.
An Analysis
For much of this manuscript, Wurtzel's editor at Doubleday was clearly asleep at the switch. Already by page 2 of the Introduction, Wurtzel's allusions to film, literature, TV, fashion, and pop culture have begun to seem like a very, very long grocery list. Her sentences are long and comma-filled and her prose is very, very cluttered. Her brain is like a vast junkyard, teeming with ideas that tumble out uncontrollably. She rambles manically from one mini-topic to the next and then back again, with plenty of asides, parentheticals, and tangents thrown in for good measure.
It must have become clear to the Doubleday editors at some point that a proper edit of Wurtzel's manuscript would have excised a good 40-50% of the text. They probably just gave up. There are some good ideas and wonderful passages hidden in this stream-of-consciousness morass, but sometimes finding them is like searching through pigshit for pennies.
At times Wurtzel's prose sinks into turgid self-indulgence, probably the result of too many creative writing classes:
Madness has always had great visuals, its ugly affliction often creating a freakish beauty when it preys upon and plays upon the young and lovely and charmed and blessed, inflicting the bipolar image of the female grotesque: the luminosity of beauty is matched only by the stupefaction of insanity, the opaque eyesore of sadness and despondency, a mixture of prettiness and pollution so striking and inexplicable that it is as hypnotic and paralyzing as a skyscraper burning down, so strange that mystification becomes inevitable. (p. 172)
At other points, however, she is clear, eloquent, and convincing, as when describing people on the verge of suicide, people who have endured very long marriages, or the current state of feminism.
Sometimes she is snide and funny, describing Hillary Clinton as "an all-American rugged Midwesterner with wide childbearing hips, muscular stocky legs, and, most likely, a strong back and utilitarian body inherited from the middle-American gene pool that is designed to deliver a baby one day and carry sacks of corn and grain from silo to pickup truck the next." Or, even funnier, and absolutely on target: "How is it that Pamela Harriman, a woman who even by today's wanton standards was a complete S.L.U.T., managed to become the Ambassador to France and not the W.H.O.R.E. of Babylon is anyone's guess…at least one possible explanation for her restored respectability may reside in her skill with a particular word beginning with 'f.' It's fund-raising, of course…" [capitalizations mine.]
In conclusion, I would give B*tch a thumbs-up, but with a few strong caveats. When Wurtzel says something well, she says it very, very well, and (outside of the first chapter) this book is rarely boring. If you've followed feminist literature over the past decade or longer you've already heard many of these ideas, but you probably haven't heard them expressed quite this way. I think she is performing a valuable service by bringing her brand of feminist ideas down to a pop culture level and a Generation X audience. On the downside, the five chapters seem as though they've been cobbled together to form a book. (Perhaps they started out as separate term papers.) At times the "b*tch" rubric feels like a canopy stretched thin over five disjointed essays, with each essay struggling to cleave to the theme. Wurtzel found a drug for her depression; now if she could just find a drug that would unclutter her brain.
Note to Epinions: It's very irritating to try to review a book called B*tch without being able to use the word b*tch. Similarly, when the author uses the words S.L.U.T. and W.H.O.R.E., I'd like to be able to use them too, if necessary.
Maybe you could stop infantilizing all the users of this site.
The author of the bestselling Prozac Nation presents a fascinating tract on the history of female behavior and how it has been interpreted and misinte...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.