90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

300 Pages·3.118 MB·English

by  Allison Yarrow

Dedication
For Ben, Ruby, and Oscar
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Introduction
1: Pretty on the Outside
2: Sex in the 90s
3: The Goldilocks Conundrum
4: Women Who Worked
5: Bad Mom
6: First Bitch
7: Female Anger
8: Manly
9: Damaged Goods
10: Victims and Violence
11: Catfight
12: The Girl Power Myth
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
M
any women remember the first time they were called a bitch in pristine
detail, like a first kiss or childbirth. For me, it was at a party for my high
school soccer team where I got drunk for the first time. An argument with a
friend about a boy escalated into yelling and she called me a bitch. I was so
startled that I slapped her in the face. It was the talk of the lunchroom the
next week, in part because we had just learned about irony in English class
and my friend’s last name happened to be Slappey. Being the perpetrator
was humiliating. Girls didn’t hit and I had violated the code. But I had to
retaliate because innately I knew that being called a bitch was the worst
possible slight.
“Bitch” is a gendered insult with a long history of reducing women to
their sexual function. Ancient Greeks slandered women by calling them
dogs in heat who begged for men—a slur that referenced the virgin goddess
Artemis, the huntress who changed herself into a wild dog. According to
etymologists, the word has long been used with the intent of “suppressing
images of women as powerful and divine and equating them with sexually
depraved beasts.” From its very conception, “bitch” was a verbal weapon
designed to restrain women and strip them of their power.
Today, “bitch” has been spit-shined, retooled, and given new life. We
hear women using it to describe one another—“boss bitch,” “basic bitch,”
and “resting bitch face” are ubiquitous terms on social media, in the school
lunchroom, and around the office watercooler. What was once a derogation
is now seen as an appellation of empowerment and sisterhood. But the
attempted reclamation of the word doesn’t change its history or more
common use: it has historically been, and remains, the worst invective
hurled at women—one that degrades, disparages, and disenfranchises all at
once.
This is plainly on display in the historical record. Use of the word has
increased as women have gained power and influence, specifically to
undercut their achievements and stop their progress. Indeed, this is the real
story of how “bitch” and its corollaries were deployed by misogynists in the
90s, and how the word and the concept proliferated throughout society in
that decade. This “bitch bias” shaped the way a generation of women and
men came of age, and also this current moment. We can no longer ignore
the history of “bitch” and how it has influenced the world we live in today.
I’ll use the verb “bitchify” and the noun “bitchification” to characterize
how 90s media and societal narratives reduced women to their sexual
function in order to thwart their progress.
Introduction
I
’m not sure whether to follow the girl in the Hanson tee or the guy in the
All That hat. They are walking in opposite directions. If they are both
headed to the inaugural 90s Fest—a Nickelodeon-sponsored outdoor
concert featuring a scattershot assemblage of popular bands from that
decade—then somebody is lost.
The large lot on the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, features a
slime machine opposite the large stage. Contest winners, Pauly Shore, and
the rap duo Salt-N-Pepa will later be doused in green goo. Life-size Jenga
and Connect Four draw a few players. Girls are sprawled atop a leopard
coverlet in a “Real-Life 90s Girl Bedroom” sponsored by Shop Betches.
The 90s may be the frame, but this is still a 2015 music festival. The
eight-dollar hot dogs are named for performers, and the wristband handlers
are high. Attendees wear the decade’s full regalia—baby tees and butterfly
clips, combat boots, flannel, acid-washed jeans, oversize blazers, leggings,
kinderwhore, neon. Some are dressed as the Spice Girls. Others wear
Clinton/Gore 1992 T-shirts that look conspicuously white and crisp for
twenty-three years later.
Children of the 90s are a demographic relatively new to the workforce
and to their own money, and businesses want to lock them down for life.
Their childhood television programmer, Nickelodeon, wants them back,
too. The network is promoting a new block of programming called the Splat
that will air the shows attendees watched as kids.
I am one of these 90s kids. I was eight years old at the start of the
decade and eighteen at its end. It’s easy to rhapsodize about the years spent
shedding childhood, and I have warm memories of mine. I collected the
stuff—the American Girl doll, the baby tees, the Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper
—and mainlined the culture. I loved films like Clueless and Reality Bites
and devoured book series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley
High. I watched tabloid talk shows and MTV, and learned to drive listening
to Nirvana and Lauryn Hill on compact discs.
The nostalgia strategy Nickelodeon is banking on seems inspired by
how we hear the music of our youth. Brain-imaging studies reveal that the
deep attachment we feel to the music from our adolescence isn’t a
conscious preference or reflection of critical listening, but the result of a
host of pleasure chemicals bombarding our brains. Despite our tastes
maturing, 1990s daughters and sons will likely prefer TLC, Smash Mouth,
and New Kids on the Block to new hits—not for their quality, but for their
emotional wallop. Perhaps that’s one reason why clubs from Brooklyn to
Portland have found success with 90s Nights, drawing thousands to
reminisce and dance to the songs they once loved.
This onslaught of 90s nostalgia is no great surprise, as kids of the 90s
tumble into adulthood, bidding reluctant farewell to their younger zine-
reading, Game Boy–playing, Rugrats-watching selves. They are pondering
having children of their own, or are newly minted parents. Nostalgia is a
gift and affliction of every generation. It eases the collective identity crisis
as adulthood’s mundanities gel.
It’s also unsurprising that 90s Fest presents a version of the 90s that
doesn’t attempt to deviate much from history’s script. And the children of
the 90s don’t seem to want it to. Reheating and serving the commercial
culture that we 90s kids remember is just fine, thank you. In between band
sets, a jumbotron plays a montage of clips from 90s television shows,
movies, music videos, and advertisements. Festival goers intermittently sigh
and aww at the Saved by the Bell credits, Sunny Delight ads, and Freddie
Prinze Jr. But the pull of the past has clouded our critical minds. Are the 90s
really as great as we remember them to be?
THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED DECADE OF WOMEN
As the decade dawned things were looking up for women. Daughters of
second-wave feminism came of age and chose new paths unavailable to
their mothers: delaying marriage and children, pursuing higher education,
joining the workforce, and assuming independence and identities outside of
the home. The gaps between men and women in education “have essentially
disappeared for the younger generation,” declared a 1995 report by the
National Center for Education Statistics. At that time, female high schoolers
bested their male counterparts in reading and writing, took more academic
credits, and were more likely to go to college. By 1992, they earned more
bachelor’s, master’s, and associate’s degrees than men. The equal education
promise of Title IX was coming to fruition.
In the 80s, women began marrying older, or not at all. For more than a
century, the median marriage age for women swung between twenty and
twenty-two, but in 1990, it nearly jumped to twenty-four. By 1997 it
reached twenty-five. Carefree sex outside of marriage became increasingly
acceptable. Access to birth control expanded. Postponing marriage and kids
liberated women sexually; it also gave them increased economic power and
paved their entry into male-dominated careers. By the decade’s end, women
accounted for close to 30 percent of lawyers, nearly half of managers, and
more than 40 percent of tenure-track professors. Almost half of married
women surveyed in 1995 reported earning half or more of their total family
income, leading the study’s sponsor to declare, “Women are the new
providers.”
The forward motion of the 90s seemed to build on the 80s, a decade of
hallowed female pioneers in diverse fields. Sally Ride traveled to space.
Geraldine Ferraro secured the vice presidential nomination of a major
political party. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison won Pulitzer Prizes for
their epic, women-centered fiction. Madonna smashed barriers in music,
entertainment, and popular culture. Because these firsts and many others
were so widely celebrated, society assumed these trailblazing women would
also cut a path for all women to advance in work, entertainment, politics,
and culture in the years to come. At last, the dream of gender equality
would be realized.
The dream, as we know, was not realized. But a quick glance back at the
90s would suggest that American women indeed made significant progress
during the decade. In Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, Judith Rodin, and
Carly Fiorina, the 90s saw the first woman attorney general, secretary of
state, president of an Ivy League institution (University of Pennsylvania),
and CEO of a Fortune 100 company (Hewlett-Packard). More women won
political office than ever before in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman,
when their numbers in the Senate tripled (from a measly two to a small but
more respectable six).
Cultural feminism in the 90s made strides, as well. The “Girl Power”
movement promised that progress for women would trickle down to girls,