Bitch Read online

  I think for men this attitude is second nature, it’s as much in their atmosphere as snow is in an Eskimo’s. They don’t even know how much they assume.

  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.

  In the meantime, I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, call when I feel like it, throw tantrums in Bloomingdale’s if I feel like it and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself: that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy, and it seems particularly refreshing in the face of all the contortions women are taught to put themselves through. All over the world there are men shouting orders and being impossible, and there are women hewing to these creatures’ wills. The few women who manage to completely spit in the face of such an arrangement are naturally heroic. The appeal of films like The Last Seduction and Basic Instinct and Thelma & Louise, the reason the miniseries Samson and Delilah was recently made with Elizabeth Hurley, the reason Cher and Barbra Streisand have such staying power, the reason the bad behavior of Shannen Doherty and Naomi Campbell and Courtney Love is so intriguing is that you don’t get the feeling these girls are reading The Rules. You don’t necessarily get the feeling that they are happy, or that they are in healthy relationships, but at least their enslavement (and rest assured, these creatures, fact and fiction, are idolizing something or other or they would not be making so much noise) is not to a stopwatch reminding them to get off a phone with some guy after ten minutes, because they don’t want to seem too chatty.

  We have willingly accepted courtship terms not invented by us when really we should be insisting that the oppressiveness of this is terrible for all. “Of what materials can the heart be composed which can melt when insulted, and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod?” Mary Wollstonecraft asked in 1791 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a question still applicable, with our full realization of double entendre in use. We decide to learn to be the way men want us to be, rather than insisting they change to suit us. That’s why we all hate Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: It’s not just that Alex is nuts, but also that she reads the situation from her own point of view, from a female perspective. She refuses to accept the idea that married men get a little on the side but are happy with their wives. The time-honored assumptions of the role of the mistress in a civilized society have not been rejected by her—no, it’s far worse: they have not occurred to her to begin with. She is like a savage who encounters the affection and lust and electric energy she felt for that one weekend with her married lover and takes it for what it feels like: love. She is unable to mediate that emotion with societal truths, with the rules of engagement, with the demand that she be dignified and cool and know that he is married and that what she felt is therefore false. In our world, Alex is patently nuts for trusting her own experience, her own version of events. All of us, even women—even me—watch that movie and wish she’d get a grip. We don’t honor her uncivil disobedience of the rules, even though those rules were written by men and for men. Why, at this late date, are women still playing by their rules?

  It was an interesting cultural moment when Alanis Morissette’s song “You Oughta Know” became a huge, smash, runaway hit. And besides the enormously appealing energy that is apparent in all aspects of the song, I have no doubt that it was such a marked success as much for the message—the grim, hurt, angry, avenging message—in the lyrics as anything else. It is, above all, a thoroughly desperate and undignified song addressed to a man who has left her—the narrator, the singer, the Alanis persona—for someone else. Of course, the history of the Top 40 is written in songs about this kind of heartbreak, so this isn’t really a breakthrough. But Alanis’ complete lack of shame about how crazy and bereft she feels—combined with a frightening fury, the kind that Fatal Attraction did so much to make the woman scorned feel embarrassed about—is what is so new. Morissette’s voice vindicates Alex’s actions. When she sings, “Do you remember how you told me that you’d love until you died / But you’re still alive,” you half expect that the next move will be homicide. And every time I hear that couplet, there is a part of me that thinks: She ought to know that people say that kind of thing all the time—“I’ll love you forever,” “You’re the only one,” etc.—and when the love dies so does the feeling, so grow up and deal with it. My sentiment, in fact, is a lesson of feminism—no woman should ever lose her mind over a man, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle—and it is also, strangely, one of the major messages of The Rules. “You’re a Rules girl! Your life is never on the edge because of a man,” the authors write. “Either a man is available and in love with you or he’s taken and you have nothing to do with him romantically. You are not desperately waiting … You have a life of your own.”

  Of course, what is so refreshing about Alanis’ song is its firm refusal to go along with this dictum: I mean, of course she has a life of her own, that’s clear enough, she writes and sings songs. But she doesn’t feel like any of that much matters, in the context of the situation of “You Oughta Know,” because she is, indeed, on the edge because of a man. And she is not going to keep quiet about it. She is raving, she is sad, she is mad, she feels betrayed, and even if every day, all over the world, hearts are breaking like shards of china, she is not going to keep it in perspective, because her pain is too important. She is going to scream, she is going to disturb him at inappropriate moments—“I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner”—and she is going to ask him unacceptable questions—“And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”—and she is even going to throw a voodoo curse his way—“Every time I scratch my nails on someone else’s back I hope you feel it.” And the funny thing is, by the end of the song, I do get the feeling that Alanis Morissette has achieved a great deal more dignity by being true to herself, her impulses, however idiotic, than any of us are by staying in control. Yes, it’s better that you don’t call five million times and stalk someone who has broken your heart because these actions genuinely have an incoherent and self-abasing quality, because few of us can be as firm in our convictions about having been wronged as the narrator of the song is. That’s why, once again, we’re all perhaps better off sticking to The Rules.

  But let us not deny that this is a form of enslavement meant to please men, not women. “Men love independent women because they leave them alone,” insists the book. “They love chasing women who are busy.” In other words, that MBA, that PhD, those French lessons, that book contract—it’s all so that men think we have better things to do. Which, I suppose, is one approach. But the other one, the Alanis Morissette approach, which has something to do with being true to yourself, with making clear what you need and want rather than concerning yourself with what men like—well, maybe I’m crazy, but I’d prefer her method any day. Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can’t be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.

  And I’m sure lots of people do things for Sharon Stone, Shannen Doherty, Drew Barrymore and the like just because they ask. Of course, people end up feeling put out and put upon, which is why I, like all women who believe the world needs them more than they need the world, am basically doomed, while the girls who live by The Rules, or some version thereof, seem happy. And at the same time that I want to celebrate and delight in these women’s behavior, I want to always remember that the image that is being dangled
before all of us is just another decoy meant to suggest that this is really possible, that wild women are thriving in this world—it is meant to distract us from the truth of the matter, which is that they really are not. And I don’t just mean that most of us are not beautiful or talented enough to get away with this—I mean that no one is. Perhaps the whole world noticed when Di twisted her hair up and revealed her statuesque neck, but her husband was carrying on with someone else, overwhelmed and threatened by her flair for fascination. In The House of Mirth, what good did it do Lily Bart to be so enchanting? What consolation awaited Isabel Archer for her troubles in Portrait of a Lady? What happiness was there ever found for Anna Karenina?

  The world will adulate the woman lying on the settee with a turban on in silk pajamas asking for the world to do her bidding, but ultimately it will extract a price in failed relationships, in isolated lives. I don’t think it’s really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated, the ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them every day, at every meal where there’s a waiter, in every taxi and on every train they board, in any instance where someone can get to know them just a little bit, just enough to get completely gone. But most men in the end don’t quite have the stomach for that much person. Why do you suppose Arianna Huffington married a complete simpleton? Does anyone know where it is in the state of Tennessee that Dolly Parton keeps her husband hidden? These women knew what they needed to do to make the world work with them. But that’s unusual.

  Otherwise, the world has not really made room for alternate possibilities. Even Simone de Beauvoir was ultimately a fool for Sartre. No one is making it easier for us to just be free. Everybody loves to watch, whether it is a voyeurism of great anger like Courtney Love or great pain like Janis Joplin, or magnificent vulnerability like Marilyn Monroe, or gorgeous madness like Anne Sexton or stony glamour like Sharon Stone. But up close, up real, real close, it is not terribly accommodating to eccentric personalities. From a distance, we all admire the insane person, the creative genius and colorful type. But up close, no one wants to be bothered. And if this is true for men, it’s doubly or trebly true for women. We have always been willing to cannibalize these brilliant creatures who shine, but really and truly we would much prefer that, in our dealings with them, they behave, they play by the rules: We want good girls, really we do.

  This is a book about women who wrote and write their own operating manuals, written in the hope that the world may someday be a safer place for them, or for us, for all women.

  PART ONE

  He Puts Her on a Pedestal and She Goes Down on It

  I told myself it was all something in her

  But as we drove I knew it was something in me

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  “Highway 29”

  On a recent Sunday, one of the hints in the New York Times crossword puzzle was “Acts like Delilah.” I kept thinking that the answer would be “seduces” or “tempts” or “entices.”

  It was “betrays.”

  Right there you’ve got everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the way most people read the Bible.

  Most people I know who were forced as children to attend Sunday school or to take some extracurricular Bible class when they could have been throwing a Frisbee or—and this really dates me—playing Atari were, naturally, bored by it. In fact, the experience has left them with the sense that the Bible itself is boring. But I always knew better. I always knew that if Jerry Falwell had ever actually read what ought to be called “the good book” only with the greatest of irony, there is no way he would urge his congregation to do so. The Old Testament is a crazy caricaturish catalogue of archetypal stories that rely on random events and the last-minute hand of God—the deus ex machina as real event, not literary convention—to make them work out, in which the good and noble suffer endlessly and the naughty often get off scot-free (with promises of hell in the afterlife, which we somehow never see—Hades being a Greek invention of the New Testament epoch). Any attempt to decipher a moral message is wasted. It is a grim view of the world, one where might makes right, where birthright makes right—and if hairy Esau is the firstborn, then it is acceptable for less hirsute and less savage Jacob to steal the blessing of the eldest through deceit and trickery.

  Whatever prattling homilies are offered in the more conciliatory gospels that comprise the New Testament (and the book of Revelation pretty much destroys the good intentions of the earlier chapters by offering an anarchist’s cookbook of diabolical fare), the unredacted worldview of the Old Testament is a history of families and clans that beget nationalities and wars—it’s all Serbs and Croats, Cowboys and Indians, Hatfields and McCoys, Irish Catholics and English Anglicans, Arabs and Jews—in short, the beginnings of what Freud describes as “the narcissism of minor differences.” And none of it is very pretty. You barely get into Genesis and out of the Garden of Eden before Cain slays Abel, his own brother, and adds insult to injury by claiming he’s not responsible for his actions: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is the natural precursor to the Twinkie defense and the abuse excuse. For the impulsive sin of turning to look back at the funereal pyre of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife is transmogrified into a pillar of salt as she flees the inferno; such a harsh punishment for such a thoroughly human impulse as looking back longingly—this is just an example of how God makes an example of those who just don’t listen to Him. After being the dream boy born to a ninety-year-old, presumed-barren Sarah, fair Isaac is saved from sacrifice on Abraham’s altar—an incident of God-mandated filicide that set the stage for a world in which the odds that a murdered child was killed by his own parents are twelve to one—by a whimsical Deity’s last-minute interference, the rescuing hand of God that other victims of their parents’ ill will—the children of Susan Smith, for example—were not granted.

  But these acts of atrocity—occasionally alleviated by eleventh-hour episodes of Divine intervention—brought on by an Old Testament imagining of a Creator who is personified as both “jealous” and “vengeful,” are small compared with the long, lingering pain that some of God’s best-loved seem to endure. No sin can explain why Jeremiah suffered so much that he virtually invented the lament with his Jeremiads, no cinematic stage set of Herman Melville’s dreams could justify Jonah doing time in the Leviathan, no bad behavior could be vindicated by forcing the prophet Ezekiel to lead the people through an atonement ritual that involved eating barley cakes mixed with excrement, nor did Daniel need to wrestle the lion to let us know that the Lord is God and what He wants, He gets, so heaven help us all. On a wager with Satan, God—as if heaven and hell were just a game of baccarat in a Las Vegas casino—takes the ever-faithful Job, smites his cattle with disease, decimates his wealth, sends a dust-bowl wind that bashes in his house, and when the roof caves in, it kills all ten of his children at once, all just to prove that nothing—nothing—will make this long-suffering servant of the Lord renounce righteousness and embrace the devil. “This man was blameless and upright,” says the first sentence of the book of Job, describing the man it was named for. “He feared God and shunned evil.”

  Every year on Yom Kippur, Jews beg forgiveness, likening themselves to clay in God’s sculpturing hands, but Job, it seems to me, was more like putty that was stomped upon by God’s foot. You read his story and if you are gullible you may see a parable of faith, of cleaving to belief even as the rug is, almost literally, being pulled out from under your feet; but if you are sensible, you can only see that it’s the portrait of an unjust world, and you must derive the anti-Aesop lesson that there is no reason to be good—not because mankind is foul but because the great and good Creator who made us in His image is far fouler. As Virginia Woolf remarked, in that rather dry and wry way
of hers: “I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

  Certainly, with the righteous so downtrodden, a careful reader of any Old Testament book can only conclude that you might as well murder and make mayhem: perhaps crime does not pay, but goodness actually seems to cost. After all, Moses, for all his devotion, is never allowed to see the land of Canaan, and David, the warrior-king, has too much blood on his hands to be the one to build the Holy Temple. Never mind that these two chosen ones of God are chosen for no reason other than that they just are: it is not that they are good and virtuous, but rather because an assortment of Divine whims—along with some previous life experience working as a shepherd, the apprenticeship job for all of God’s anointed ones because sympathy for one’s woolly flock is meant to be good preparation for leading a group of the human variety—make it so. “See how the mighty crumble”: these were David’s famed horror-struck words when King Saul fell on his sword to avoid being slain by the enemy in battle. Saul too was one of God’s chosen shepherd-monarchs, and his humiliating death is in part a punishment for failing to destroy the enemy’s farm animals—God had ordered him to leave no trace of the arch-evil Amalekites—and in part penalty for sacrificing one of the spared ovine creatures to express gratitude for his victory sooner than he was supposed to: essentially, Saul, who was crazy as a loon—a paranoid schizophrenic obsessed with destroying the young David, whom he believed was after his throne, which was actually true (as with Richard Nixon, King Saul’s suspicion begot its own cause)—was ultimately killed over scheduling problems.