Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

...listening to her is neither an empowering nor a liberating experience. Her self-imposed intellectual isolation, her rhetorical slashings at other women, her illogical and manic arguments, her bellowing of "facts" that are either self-evident or wrong, her dismissive rehearsals of ideas she seems barely to have understood in the first place: These struttings and preenings suggest that she prefers her audience prone, passive and awestruck. -- The Nation, Stacey D'ErasmoIn Wurtzel's view, feminism is guilty at best of misinterpreting and at worst of condemning what women with outsize desires represent, and so diminishing the full range of female prospects. But that is hardly Wurtzel's only gripe against feminism. As a type, the bitch is more than a free sexual spirit; she is emotionally vulnerable in a way that feminism specifically deprecates and disallows. Wurtzel's catalogue of complaints against feminism includes another, quite novel and revealing, charge. Two of her bitch heroines are the poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, both of whom committed suicide. These two, she writes, "had the force and talent and beauty to turn their emotional disasters and hysteria into ... art." But now feminism, by "politicizing [female] depression"--that is, by defining depression strictly as a function of the unequal power relations between men and women--has radically impoverished the possibilities of such feminine self-expression. In turning to popular culture for images of glamor and significance, Wurtzel finds women who can also be, however absurdly or meretriciously, vehicles for the expression of emotion. In this they do indeed have a wholly feminine significance--and not just for her--that is nowhere to be found in the contemporary landscape, a landscape marked by the continuing failure of feminism to shape women in its image. -- Commentary, Margaret SchulmanThe prose, seemingly untouched by editors, is windy, incessantly self-referential, and packed with show-offy references.... It's also an extraordinarily thought-provoking, absorbing, wise, often poignant read. You can disagree with Wurtzel, but at least she always has a passionate point of view. -- Entertainment Weekly, Dana KennedyWhile Bitch is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while. -- The New York Times Book Review, Karen Lehrman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.