Women behaving badly
Claudia FitzHerbert
BITCH by Elizabeth Wurtzel Quartet, £12.50, pp. 426 C 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,' argues Elizabeth Wurtzel, in the introduction to Bitch, which she no doubt hopes will succeed for similar reasons. Bitches — Wurtzel's blanket description of difficult women who have stepped out of line from time immemorial — appeal to us because they offer the `illusion of liberation, of libertine abandon'. Were we truly liberated or abandoned, bitches would be two a penny and not worth bothering about.
Wurtzel's big thesis — that the double standard is as old as the hills, that nothing's really changed and that the perennial suc- cess of self-help books and dating manuals directed at women are proof of this — is the one consistent and consequently dull thread which runs through her anarchic and often dazzling tapestry. Beginning with Delilah, and ending with Nicole Brown Simpson, she offers up a collection of wild and meandering musings about the wild and meandering lives lived by badly behaved women. She looks at books and films and tabloid dramas and the politics of the presidential marriage and usually suggests not one, but several alternative readings for each of the stories she scrutinises. Delilah's status as femme fatale is explored, admiringly, and at some length, before the author turns round and suggests it is dangerous nonsense, this myth about women pulling men down by the power of their sex. It is this myth which explains why `rape victims are not named, but alleged rapists are'. You stop here, pause for a moment, thinking you are on familiar ten-i- tory. But the territory is only familiar because we are used to considering the anonymity issue from the point of view of the wrongly accused man. Wurtzel, bless her drug-crazed strappy socks, comes at the question from another planet — victims are given anonymity because of the Delilah myth. Anonymity implies that the victim is `ashamed because she made him do it'.
One of the most refreshing aspects of Wurtzel's approach is the way everyone is for real. When she writes about female characters in films, for instance, she does not waste time whining about the motiva- tion of Hollywood moguls, or consider why this or that storyline was given this or that ending. Instead she engages with whatever rubbish the studios throw out, offering such crosspatch reinterpretations as: 'Fatal Attraction is actually a movie about a woman who is wrecked by a man, not the opposite.' On actresses themselves she is too star-struck to make much sense. Read- ers already interested in Sharon Stone will be interested in what she has to say about her, but she won't draw the indifferent in.
Wurtzel's previous book, Prozac Nation, chronicled the drink and drug binges and suicidal troughs of the author's teens and early twenties and one chapter of Bitch is given over to tales of famously depressed women. She considers the lives of women such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and argues that
people romanticise insanity because they believe it is the thing behind the art; in fact it is the thing in front of the art, the roadblock and police barrier and phantom tollbooth that you are pushing against.
Wurtzel then reveals that she is herself wistfully romantic about the causes, as opposed to the effects, of mental illness. Certainly it's possible and 'not wrong at all' `. . . this opens my safety deposit box over there.' to argue that the same crazed women in times gone by would have been helped by Prozac. But turning the madwoman into great art or seeing her as the victim of bad science has the same result:
We still end up failing to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, she had a point, maybe her anger and sadness and sorrow were as justified as Cassandra's prophecies. Maybe their craziness spoke the truth.
The 'maybe' is signature Wurtzel. She does not deal in answers or absolutes. Her polemic is often brilliant, but rarely sustained for more than a few pages at a time. An exception is her chapter on AmY Fisher, the East Coast teenage hooker convicted a few years ago of trying to kill her boyfriend's wife. Wurtzel admits to only having one thought about this particu- lar case, which is that Amy Fisher was blameless. The Long Island Lolita was a young girl 'at risk', the girl who needed all those things we supposedly do to protect the innocent — she is the reason there are statutory rape laws and juvenile delinquency procedures.
Amy Fisher, she argues, poses a challenge to the women's movement:
Nothing she does or says is particularly good for the cause, but she is a grim and healthy reminder [of how feminism is still necessary to] make the world safe for . . . so many girls who have gotten the worst of the promises of liberation.
The Amy Fisher essay stands out for its clarity, but also for its thinness. It was the only chapter of Bitch which left me feeling, Yes, but . . . This is the feeling so often provoked by feminist essays in which female violence is explained and excused, for reasons convincing enough in them- selves but which beg unanswered questions about all the other abused Amy Fishers in the world who do not try to murder the wives of their lovers.
Wurtzel's chapter about Nicole Simpson is bound to be picked up and mangled to pieces. Already I can hear the protests of professionally baffled blokes — 'One bird says its all right to wear lipstick, now anoth- er says there's nothing like a bit of slap to spice things up.' In fact Wurtzel, while she addresses questions of thin fine lines throughout her essay, is as clear-sighted about the dangers of staying with a man after the first punch-up as well as about the reasons why so many women do so. And there is something deeply sane about her insistence that if you happen to be a person who cares enough to want to help battered women, to work in a shelter or become a counsellor, the best thing you can do is feel sympathy and warmth and kindness and just never ask why.
Bitch is a much messier book than Prozac Nation, mainly, I suspect, because Prozac Nation made a star of its clever, young, beautiful and clearly troubled author, and stars aren't edited any more. But it's a cracking good read all the same.
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