Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women [Paperback]

Elizabeth Wurtzel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1999

No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior.  By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations.  Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.

In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson.  Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.

She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame.  She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself.  Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress.  She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do?  Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."

Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love.  Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core.  In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

There is little praise for women in Wurtzel's hyperbolic rant about "bad girls" and their relationship to Western society. Indeed, hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed. In her defense, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, LJ 8/94) has taken on a huge project, and every now and again she introduces a startling insight about how women manipulate situations to control their lives. Her look at the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah is particularly instructive in elucidating the history of our reaction to the alluringly repulsive femme fatale. Likewise, her presentation of both mythic and real women who flaunt their "pussy power" makes for provocative reading. Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of the book focuses on Nicole Brown Simpson (who few would call a "difficult woman") and is shockingly mean-spirited. While she lambastes the Simpson jury as "just plain stupid," we never learn how she knows what the jury did not: that O.J. killed Nicole. Since she was not in the courtroom, her cavalier dismissal of the verdict rankles and casts doubt on her other arguments. Worse, she seems to believe that violence is endemic to being "crazy in love," and her writing romanticizes the black eye and slapped cheek as proof of passionate involvement. In addition, Wurtzel completely ignores lesbians?an odd omission since the expression of Sapphic love represents a blatant rejection of "good girl" norms?and dismisses the happily single, writing that "it would be easier to eliminate racism or end poverty or cure illiteracy or dethrone Fidel Castro than it would to make girls stop wanting to be brides." Recommended only as catalyst for debate.
-?Eleanor J. Bader, New School for Social Research, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 7th edition (May 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385484011
• ISBN-13: 978-0385484015
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #440,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

147 of 164 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Women who love men who hate women, July 3, 2001

By 

Tevis Fen-Kortiay (Bloom county) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Paperback)

Wurtzel treats other people like poo, and calls it empowerment. It's okay, though, because as she reminds the reader ad nauseum, she's extremely well-connected and attended Harvard. Anyway she's good-looking, and the most consistent message in this otherwise self-contradictory mess is that "Beauty = Virtue."

Read between the lines and Wurtzel's idea of feminism is a hot chick who dresses like a prostitute, mistreats others, throws tantrums like a child and otherwise embodies the darkest misogynist fantasies of men. Even Wurtzel acknowledges that this attracts men at their worst, leading to loveless, mutually destructive relationships - but it makes you cool, tragic and popular!! Be warned that her advice isn't for everyone, however: Nicole Simpson rates higher on Wurtzel's "Flattering Projection of Myself" scale than Gertrude Stein or Eleanor Roosevelt, for instance, because she was inherently superior. I mean, duh! Nicole was *way* hotter than Stein!! I think we all agree that the ability to inspire a man to camouflage his lap topology with a strategically-placed briefcase is the sole measure of a woman's worth, right? File me under Feminism!

Wurtzel borrowed her book's title from an essay by Ron Rosenbaum. The cover photo was her publisher's idea, and she just went along with it. She uses the word "youthquaker" an average of four times per chapter. But perhaps the best summary of this book comes from an excerpt from her interview on National Public Radio shortly after publication:

Random Caller: Hello. I just want to say that I find it deeply offensive that your publisher and this radio network are presenting you as the voice of feminism, apparently on the merits of your appearance and connections. Your book is if anything anti-feminism, and the writing's so bad it reads as though it was written on speed.

Wurtzel: It was written on speed.

[uncomfortable silence]

*****

ADDENDUM (10 years later): Wurtzel was still model-pretty when she meth-propelled her way through this messy screed on how good-looking people are more admirable than the rest of us. Ten years later she's only 43 but has begun to look like a cocaine/meth casualty. In her Elle magazine article 'Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades,' Wurtzel bemoans her lost beauty and reconsiders the wisdom of rejecting her one genuinely loving boyfriend in favor of the horrible, destructive, drama-addict relationships she celebrates in the still-in-print 'Bitch.' After getting a much-publicized $500,000 advance (you read that right) for writing this book, after the intensly unsympathetic self-portrait she paints in Prozac Nation, Wurtzel unbelievably expects reader sympathy for her 20-year run of overwhelming unearned privilege finally winding down. I don't doubt she had a troubled past, depression, an absent father and cloying mother, but wow.

- In 1988 Wurtzel was fired from The Dallas Morning News for plagiarism (a fact "someone" removed from her Wikipedia page)

- Wurtzel attracted some attention again in 2007-2008 for her frequent public claims of being a lawyer despite having failed the bar exam, which is illegal (she did eventually pass in February 2010). She responded by writing an article arguing that bar exams should be eliminated.

- While writing 'Bitch,' Wurtzel used her publisher's FedEx number to have her friends overnight her cocaine

- Despite her too-low-to-get-in LSAT score of 160, Wurtzel was still admitted to Yale Law School. "Suffice it to say I was admitted for other reasons," she explains.


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56 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars There are things I liked about it and others I didn't..., November 22, 2001

By 

Diane Moore - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bitch (Hardcover)

I did not like:

*that the book did not follow any sort of train of thought. Even though it was broken up into five or six essays, she would go from one person to the next so quickly, you don't even know she was talking about a different person. I skipped most of the stuff on Delilah, the character showed up on occasion throughout 2-3 of the essays, and sometimes stayed for pages. I wasn't interested in it, and the author probably should have just written a whole essay on her. Apparently, this book was written on some kind of speed, which makes sense, but couldn't it have been cut down a little? Or, at least, molded into something readable? Maybe its supposed to fit with the running theme: "Bad girls: young, beautiful, and on drugs." Which leads me to the next thought...

*What is her obsession with beauty? It seems like every woman she mentions is somehow tragically beautiful.. and these are the women who are bi#$%#s, the "difficult" women... how she says: "I am still pretty. I still have time to work out my marital status." <---What is that about? As if the only people who are married are good looking? Since when is marriage about "looks" anyway? or she also says.."even worse, it seems inevitable that there will come a time when I won't look good, when men will stop flirting with me, when this freedom sh#$ will start to feel more like free-falling. Will I know? Will I become pathetic?" No, you will just have to win people over by personality for a change! I just don't understand the superficial attitude for someone who is supposed to be a feminist. I have known women who are not great beauties, but everywhere they go, men fall in love with them. Once again, love is not about outside beauty. Unless, she is worried that at 50, she won't be able to have lots of one night stands, and men falling at her feet. This is probably true.

*Her opinions didn't even follow anything concrete. It seemed that at one moment she believed wholeheartedly in something, and then turned around and said.. oh wait, i forgot about that. nevermind, i believe this instead. Unfortunately, i can't come up with an example, because I would have to plow through this monstrous book for it. At least, she broke it into paragraphs.

What I did like about the book:

* the way she uses examples of movies, books, stories, and songs in her essays. Most of the movies are familiar to me, Fatal Attraction, Foxfire... then she mentions others that maybe some people wouldn't know, but should watch.. like Welcome to the Dollhouse or if Lucy fell. Many books that I own, have references or what the author has as a bibliography... My favorite author SARK recommends books on every chapter, sometimes music or web pages. It's just like a chain where you are exposed to things you would never have been before you read this book. Unfortunately, in Wurtzel's bibliography, i think she fails to mention the movies.

* I liked the essay, "Used to love her but I had to kill her." This touches on a lot of things having do to with O.J., and his late ex-wife Nicole. I never really followed the trial, but I do agree with the author, that he did it. It's funny too, because she doesn't use the word "allegedly" anywhere in the chapter. It's written like: when he killed her.... or he probably killed her because. It's as if she believes beyond a shadow of a doubt that he committed the crime, and she is not going to believe otherwise no matter what you say...

*which leads into this: the honesty of the book gets me. I would be afraid to let go of myself too much into a book. She has very strong opinions. Not only that, but she talks about her life, how she feels about herself, what she has done. One of my favorite paragraphs is where she talks about how she is not married and why she is not.. the reason is because there are things she "needed to do." the start of this paragraph is... "I needed to spend a week in Florence by myself, to check into the Excelsior Hotel and eat breakfast and dinner in bed with a view of the Arno, watching soccer on Italian television and be amazingly bored, I needed to walk the streets of this most romantic and recherche of cities all alone..." I loved that. It goes on for about two pages but I didn't mind. You get a peek into her life and all of the adventures she has had. For me, I yearned for those experiences to be mine. I want to go back to Europe, this time all by myself, and see things I didn't get to see the first time because I was going to pubs and hanging out with friends.

To sum up, it is a whale of a book, but if you have the patience to go through it, you should. She is very intelligent and has a lot of insight on things that I had never thought to analyze. If it is confusing or boring, skip it. That's what I did. There are just little gems scattered throughout. You just have to look for them sometimes.

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Counterfeit "feminism" at its worst., August 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Paperback)

Wurtzel basically presents herself as a latter-day Helen Gurley Brown, with a Nineties-postmodern-in-your-bleeping-face twist, in this execrable work. While her self-indulgent rambling and overarching 'tude may be entertaining in a certain light, the fact that "Bitch" is taken at all seriously as a work of "feminist literature" speaks volumes about how a once-proud sociopolitical movement as been co-opted, like most everything else, by the social, moral, and intellectual wasteland of corporate-controlled pop culture. Quit trying to change the world, Wurtzel is telling women (and men, too), and look out for Numero Uno! But those women (and there are many) who aren't rich, gorgeous Manhattanites will have little to glean from her example. As a male, I happen to like women who are tough, self-confident, and willing to fight for themselves, for other women, and for other worthy causes. But "bitchiness," as defined by Wurtzel, seems like little more than the pursuit of decidedly antisocial and irresponsible ends. Being able to throw a temper tantrum at Bloomie's? This is what Anthony and Stanton and Steinem put themselves into battle for? And doesn't Wurtzel have anything to say about black women,poor women, or working moms, or abused and battered women here in America and around the world? Oh, that's right; Wurtzel's a card-carrying member of the cultural, social, and economic elite. Why SHOULD she be unduly concerned about anything beyond herself? The saddest thing of all is how many of my own gender will be attracted to a woman like Wurtzel, because she lives up to all their darkest mysogynistic fantasies. Embrace this kind of absolute garbage as "feminism"? I don't know 'bout the girls, but as Sam Goldwyn said, "Include me out."