Confronting the Mainstream
AFTER A DECADE OF SURVEYING THE POP LANDSCAPE, WE’RE constantly reminded of what has changed since
Bitch
began. Pop culture critique, considered mere fluff journalism in the mid-’90S, has become commonplace in such formerly lofty organs as
The Wall Street journal
and
The New Yorker.
The Internet, once a thrilling-yet-nebulous curiosity, has become an info mecca for culture junkies, a place where you can cross-reference actors on the Internet Movie Database, read blisteringly funny recaps of
The Apprentice and The Sopranos
on Television Without Pity, and suck hours out of each workday perusing thousands of political, artistic, and satiric web publications and blogs. Pop culture might even be making us smarter. Steven Johnson, in his 2005 book,
Everything Bad Is Good for You,
argues that increasingly sharp, complex writing in television, video games, and beyond challenges us to flex our problem-solving and abstract-reasoning skills—and in the process offers pop obsessives an ironclad rationalization for their avocation.
But if the critique of pop culture, as well as its perceived social value, has improved, why hasn’t the culture itself evolved more? This is the question at the heart of
Bitch.
Over the past ten years, we’ve watched as women’s soccer and basketball held young girls in their well-muscled thrall only to falter or even fold due to lack of funding, as weedy little Ally McBeal stamped her foot and pouted, as fashion mavens declared that Jennifer Lopez’s keister made
her “full-figured,” and as the Spice Girls came and went on a sugary wave of girl power. We’ve puzzled over films like
Fat Girl
and book sensations like
He’s Just Not That Into You,
survived an improbable number of dating-and-mating reality shows
(Married by America,
anyone?), and watched in bemusement as celebrity tabloids reproduced like especially trashy rabbits. But what we haven’t seen is any meaningful, validating change in the mainstream perception and representation of women.
Loving pop culture comes at a price, and for many women that price is most often a deep sense of betrayal at being told the lives that we’re shown onscreen, in books, and in advertising are accurate, important, and charmingly quirky reflections of our own. The stereotypes and limitations of popular representations of women haunt us everywhere from talk radio to chick lit, and the common language such products use when they discuss and define the world of women is often maddening. Though newspapers no longer feature condescendingly titled “women’s pages,” there’s still a clear-cut separation between what’s shaped for our cultural consumption and what isn’t. We’ve got blocks of TV commercials that run during
Oprah
and
Desperate Housewives
(cleaning products, diapers, and tampons ahoy!); women’s mags advertise “decadent” scented shaving gel, their language implying that each woman lives in a diet-obsessed
Cathy
comic; and news organs feel free to frame politics as a “women’s issue” only when it involves abortion. The condescension may no longer be spelled out in twenty-four-point type, but it’s loud and clear.
And it seems as though the more fantastical our would-be mass-market doppelgängers become, the more persistently they are held up as evidence of real women’s selfishness, unrealistic expectations, or, hell, feminist failure. Never before have so many fictional women been asked to symbolize their generation: We thought it was bad back in 1992, when Dan Quayle got his Brooks Brothers shorts in a bunch over baby mama Murphy Brown. But who could predict the supposed role models that would slowly stack up? First there was Ally McBeal, fawned over in women’s magazines as the working woman’s alter ego but lambasted on the cover of
Time
as an emblem of feminism’s failure. Hot on her bitsy heels was Bridget Jones, celebrated as the new voice of the man-crazed single woman. Then came Carrie Bradshaw and her potty-mouthed girl posse, anointed as the real new voice of the man-fatigued, shoe-crazed somewhat-single woman—empowered, we
were told, by their shocking nondependence on men and the economic freedom they enjoyed. And then there were the Desperate Housewives, the
new
new voices of the crazed single and/or married woman—also empowered, we were reminded, by their independence and even their sneaky secrets. See a pattern?
It’s really not fair to blame the people who created these characters for how they were snapped up by the mainstream as paragons of modern—and empowered, of course!—womanhood. It’s not as if Helen Fielding ever represented Bridget Jones as anything other than the bumbling disaster she so cartoonishly is. The problem with Bridget is the problem with Ally is the problem with Carrie is the problem with the ladies of Wisteria Lane: As much as we’d like our most visible, quotable, merchandise-moving pop icons to be women we would want to be—rather than those we cross our fingers and hope we’re not—the market seems to seize on endless variations on insecurity, incompetence, competition, and frivolity and then tries to pass them off to us as versions of feminism.
The pop culture world, as limited as it often seems, isn’t lacking in multifaceted, thoughtful females—from smart-mouthed cops and doctors on prime-time procedural dramas to nuanced characters in contemporary fiction to real-life icons like Kate Winslet and Queen Latifah and Tina Fey. So seeing the women who pout over men, catfight with women, solve every ill with shopping, and perpetuate antifeminist cant heralded as those who, in fact, embody the modern female mind-set just won’t work anymore.
That said, we know change is incremental. Ten years ago, for example, it was hard enough to find one lesbian character on TV; the fact that there’s now a cable show like
The L Word
can’t be dismissed as progress. But each step demands further steps: In this case, the next would be a show about lesbians where the characters look like they stepped out of somewhere other than the letters section of
Penthouse.
It doesn’t mean that feminists, as so often rumored, just can’t be happy with what the culture deigns to bestow upon us—what it means is that we have a right to lobby the culture (including the self-proclaimed feminists who are responsible for creating shows like
The L Word,
say) for more and better representations of who we know we are. The point is not to wipe all the bookstore shelves clean of those pastel-covered chick-lit novels, each with a shoe or martini glass on the cover, or to bully all the Kings of Queens off the TV networks, or to fill
every single billboard and advertising page with models who look more like the actual girl next door than like wholesome fantasy neighbor Heidi Klum. What’s important is to have a diversity of everything: people, viewpoints, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and ideals within pop culture and accessible to everyone.
People have often wondered why
Bitch
is so devoted to pop culture when pop culture has proved over and over again how completely nondevoted it is to giving feminism its props. (We love Maude like she’s our own mother, but you just can’t argue that she was created to make feminism look attractive to either women or men.) What we say in response is this: Mainstream pop culture can’t be ignored, but, more important, it shouldn’t be—that’s where we all find our ideals and our cultural beliefs played out and reflected, and it’s only going to continue. If politicians and the news media are going to treat fictional characters as stand-ins for real women, it’s up to us to figure out how to make those stand-ins more lifelike. Women and girls need to arm themselves with media literacy like it’s Wonder Woman’s magic bracelets, because there are life-zapping consequences to letting mainstream dispatches about What Women Do go unchallenged. We might not be able to stop teenage girls from, say, taking their cues about personal worth from
America’s Next Top Model
or
The Real World,
but we can ask them—loudly and repeatedly—to look at the machinations behind that “reality.” Political idealism and activism are crucial, but pop culture has the juice to bring it to the people. We wouldn’t believe in
Bitch
if we didn’t believe in the power of pop to change minds, inspire lives, and put the need for action into words and images that last.—A.Z.
Ten Things to Hate About Jane
Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler,
with special guest vitriol by Rita Hao / WINTER 1999
WHEN WE HEARD THAT JANE PRATT, THE FORMER EDITOR OF
Sassy
—the sharp, celebrated teen mag that was staunchly unwilling to pull its readers into the spiral of insecurity and product consumption so endemic to the genre—was launching a new grown-up glossy, we, along with other feminist pop culture junkies nationwide, squealed with excitement. Then
Jane
launched, and we weren’t excited anymore. Here’s why.
1.
Its fake, sanctimonious, look-how-we-encourage-you-not-to-be-obsessive-and-negative-about-your-body tone, combined with models even skinnier than Vogue’s, constant reminders of all the beauty tasks you absolutely must do, and plugs for an endless array of products to help you at it. After August 1998’s smug and self-satisfied proclamation that “We’re so against boot-camp tactics of body toning and the pressure to skinny up for summer,” the mag encourages you to “make a good thing better” with exercises to get rid of your “Jell-O thighs,” “Buddha belly,” and other problem spots. The editors think they’re touting self-esteem, but they’re really just reinforcing the idea that you can change the way you feel about yourself simply by changing the way you look: “We want you to be kissing that bathroom mirror—even if your stomach makes it difficult to reach over the sink … [But] if you’re not that liberated yet, take baby steps and focus on your favorite peeve.” Um, here’s a better idea: Why not take a huge step and forget
your favorite peeve instead of letting some magazine writer sell you an exercise regimen under the guise of uncritical self-acceptance and distaste for exercise regimens?
Take
Jane’s
shot of the skinniest girl you ever saw. “A chubby tummy is sexy and an empty tummy is so not,” gushes the accompanying hypocrisy … I mean, copy. Well, if you actually think so, then why not put your photo editor where your copywriter is and actually print a picture (gasp!) of a chubby, or even unemaciated, bod? I don’t care if “[fashion director] Sciascia swears that Anne-Catherine, our model here, is a healthy eater with a healthy body.” She could just as easily be illustrating a story about anorexia, so stop with the defensiveness and get new models already.
2.
Never has a magazine been so self-obsessed as this one, under the auspices of reaching out to its audience. At first it’s easy to believe that the
Jane
staff wants to be your friend. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t publish pictures of themselves in the editor’s note—insouciantly titled “Jane’s Diary”—so you’re sure to notice how cute and stylish they all are, and so you won’t overlook how wacky life around the office can be. And who else but your friends tell you when they get their periods and give themselves goofy little nicknames like “Granny Fanny”?
The fact that every page of the magazine has been injected with irrelevant personal tidbits is precisely what’s supposed to make
Jane
more accessible than women’s glossies like
Elle
or
Glamour,
ones in which you don’t turn every page to discover that this editor was dumped badly or that writer was feeling bloated on the day of a big interview. This device was also much of what set
Sassy
apart from the teen magazines of its day, but the informative, girls’-room chattiness that permeated
Sassy
turns, in the context of
Jane,
into egregious narcissism. The difference can perhaps be attributed to the age gap between the writers and their audience; since the staff of
Jane
are ostensibly around the same age as its readers, their in-jokes and self-congratulatory tone aren’t so much about reaching out to their audience in an effort to make them feel comfortable and understood as about holding themselves above said audience. To make a high-school analogy—which is the kind that seems most appropriate in this case—
Jane
is like the girl in your homeroom who chats with you pleasantly enough, but always manages to mention that her skirt cost more than yours.
3.
The blithe unconcern with which the mag suggests spending huge amounts of money on items of debatable utility. Some of the items that are “affordable” and “guilt-free” in the
Jane
universe: $100 wooden thong sandals, $90 silver mesh slides, and a $195 miniskirt that’s meant to be worn with a $158 bustier and a $98 sweatshirt. The presumably guilt-ridden stuff is, of course, more: A random sampling of fashion spreads yields a $490 Armani jacket (styled in a faux camping tableau, by the way), a $415 camisole, and one page featuring a selection of items that total more than many of us make in a month—a $590 skirt, a $365 sweater, a $720 coat, and more. The only thing that most of us could afford would be the socks from the Gap.
4.
Jane’
s emphasis on individuality is countered by fashion-forward dogma on a near-constant basis. Take the Jane Makeunder, in which a gal with some kind of individual look (big curly glam hair, funky eye makeup) is magically transformed to look hip, natural, and straight-tressed—conveniently, just like all the
Jane
girls. The magazine’s encouragement to make your own decisions is hard to take seriously when placed beside such statements as “You’ll be wearing violet shadow (oh yes you will!)” or “Haircolor used to be a bold move—now you feel almost naked without it.” It’s telling that the one beauty feature that actually realizes the magazine’s credo of individuality wasn’t written by any of the staff—it’s the
Jane
beauty survey, in which readers write in to confess to a triple-digit lipstick collection and sing the praises of their favorite conditioner. Our suggestion to
jane—let
your readers do more speaking for themselves, because if individuality is really what you’re all about, why should we give a fuck that bright red eyeliner/orange lipstick/ dead baby seal pelts/etc. were all over the runways in Milan?
5.
Blatant advertorial. Isn’t it convenient that a page singing the praises of impossible-to-walk-in stiletto heels is placed directly across from an advertisement for Gucci’s, um, stiletto heels?
6.
Jane
thinks we’re still supposed to give a tiny rat’s ass how men want us to look and behave. The overweening focus on the superficial, ersatz do-it-for-you tone, and fake individualism (see item 4) add up to this: Your appearance and behavior are not about being attractive to men. Except when they
are, which is most of the time. Token staff boy Tony Romando, who functions as
Jane’s
voice of universal male opinion, graciously lets us in on scoops such as: Men don’t like “granny panties” or “when action hair is excessive.” The latter is “just too masculine for us and, besides, we were weaned on centerfolds in girlie magazines.” (Maybe we girls would kinda like for you to learn the difference between the woman in your bed and the one in the magazine on the back of your toilet … but I digress.) The message is still that what men think matters more than what we think. Wouldn’t it be better for us to eat (which, according to Tony, guys dig) and be opinionated (ditto) because we want to, not because some mag told us that boys like it?
7.
When their lips are not actually attached to famous buttocks, the
Jane
staff keeps busy dropping names of close, personal celebrity friends. Each issue is stuffed to the brim with gratuitous celeb kissy-kissy: “Jane and I were unexpectedly whisked away to an intimate dinner hosted by Donatella Versace at the late Gianni Versace’s town house. We ate lobster salad and drank champagne while Bono took a tour of the art collection.” “By the way, Ethan Hawke called to say how much he liked Nicole Burdette’s fiction story in our premiere issue. And Courteney Cox called to congratulate us.” “Samantha Mathis is an amazing person and an amazing actress.” The special Touched by a Celeb, Like We Care prize goes to Pratt herself: “I was going to say Michael [Stipe of R.E.M.] and I used to date, but he says, ‘Let’s just throw the euphemisms right out the window and say that we … were friends and lovers on and off for several years.’”
8.
Jane
is mean. And I don’t mean mean like a mean martini. I mean just mean. In the June/July 1998 editor’s note, for instance, Jane Pratt lashes out at an intern who thought that it might not be such a hot idea to put Pamela Anderson on the cover. (Said intern, and anyone else who isn’t thrilled with the choice of cover model, are “so-called feminists” who are “elitist,” “predictable,” and “closed-minded.” But certainly reasonable minds could differ on the appropriateness of putting a woman who arguably made her fame and fortune through her breast implants on the cover of a magazine that purports to speak to progressive women.) Writers also love to throw around choice phrases like “whiny coffeehouse wench” and use the magazine’s letters column to insult their fans. Lovely.
9.
When it comes to features, style over substance is definitely the order of the day. Granted, celebrity journalism is not known for its intrinsic depth, but
Jane’s
burning desire to be the Mag That Famous People Like (see item 7) ensures that the compelling stories they do run will always be outnumbered by those of the “Milla Jovovich is rilly cool and she invited me to her house, and by the way, she smokes Parliaments!” variety.
10.
Jane
made promises it couldn’t keep. “I didn’t want to create a magazine that would make women feel bad after reading it. I didn’t want it to be a manual for all your flaws and all the things you need to fix,” Pratt commented in a
New York Times
article that accompanied the magazine’s release in September 1997. One of the standard criticisms of women’s magazines is that they present their readers with a completely unrealistic idea of what a woman’s life is/should be. Smart women know it’s not all about curling irons and bikini waxes and dog-earing your copy of
The Rules,
and it’s this knowledge that is supposedly the engine behind
Jane.
But Pratt and her cohorts probably shouldn’t strain their arms patting themselves on the back. It’s true that you won’t find diet plans, calorie breakdowns, or dopey self-discovery quizzes within
Jane’s
matte-finish pages. But much as
Jane
would like to believe that retro typefaces and bleedingedge fashion styling make it the anti-
Cosmo,
it ain’t so easy. In plenty of the ways that count,
Jane
is just like any other women’s magazine (see items I, 3, 4, 5, 6). There might not be an article on, say, how cellulite makes you a less valuable person, but
Jane’
s premiere issue’s road test of cellulite creams featured Pratt herself remarking that she hid her tube of something called Chanel Multi-Hydroxy Cellulite Complex “so no one would think I cared about something so superficial.”
MAYBE OUR EXPECTATIONS OF
JANE
WERE UNFAIR. MAYBE IT’S our own fault for forgetting that anything run by a major media conglomerate can hardly buck the ad-driven culture of women’s magazines that literally depends on the product plug for its revenue stream. There was a reason, after all, why
Sassy
went down the tubes. But why insult intelligent women by instituting hypocrisy from the start? Sad as it is, we’re used to women’s magazines making us feel that we’re not thin or pretty or rich or well-heeled
enough, and that’s why many of us choose not to read them. But it’s far worse to be smugly informed that what we’re getting from
Jane
is different, when in fact the only difference lies in the pitch itself.
Jane’
s snooty, preening reality is that much more painful for having the initial premise—and Pratt’s own promises—dangled before us. Good design may allow
Jane
to assume the pose of an alternative to the usual crop of women’s magazines, but the result is nothing more than, to cop a phrase from our high-school math teacher, an old friend in a new hat. An advertiser-smooching, beauty-product-hawking, celebrity-ass-kissing, skinny-model-filled old friend in a new, faux-iconoclastic, hypocritical, self-congratulatory hat.