Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

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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.