So who, then, is a bitch? People say a bitch is a woman with a mind of her own and who isn’t afraid of speaking it loud and clear; a woman who knows what she wants and uses everything at her disposal to get it. A “bitch” would seem to have adopted the title of the popular American song “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets” as her catchphrase.
Everybody knows that the media — television, film, the Internet — is the most powerful promoter of images, ideas, ideologies, and trends, and that it shapes our consciousness. As a passionate devotee of Hollywood film, my mother became a smoker, emancipated by Hollywood stars. Today, only bad guys smoke on-screen, and everybody knows that a smoker is capable of anything.
When my mother was a teenager, there was no such thing as teenage popular culture. She didn’t have much option but to go to the cinema (most often on the sly), where she would dream away and identify with the great Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to my mother’s cinephilia, and the same absence of teenage culture when I was growing up, my childhood pleasures came from books — and Hollywood films.
Today, the mass culture market is spectacularly diverse and caters to the needs of all consumer age groups; even impecunious children have become serious consumers. Children, teenagers, twenty-somethings, the middle-aged, each group has its own stars, although the boundaries have become uncannily porous and elastic. Take the notorious Sex and the City as an example: The show’s anorexic thirty-something women look like teenagers, put on teenage affectations, speak in squeaky anemic voices, and the problems of these seemingly self-confident urban women — embodied by Sarah Jessica Parker and her fellow heroines — appear to be almost identical to those of the average twelve-year-old girl — the twelve-year-old of our time course. Because, when I was a little girl, in the absence of richer and more entertaining cultural offerings, my hero was Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
In the dynamic, diverse, and generationally-divided world of popular culture, capturing every typological representation of women is no walk in the park. Representations frequently carry mixed messages, and patriarchal content is often packaged in emancipatory images. In the broad typology of female characters, of those with feminist pretensions only the “woman-warrior” seems to be truly emancipatory — the tough girl, the wonder woman, the action chick, all of which have spin-offs in various forms of popular culture. “Women-warriors” are generally first seen in comics and video games, then “spun-off” into films, television series, and genre novels (fantasy, gothic, etc.), before finally becoming products for the toy and souvenir industries. “Buffy” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a good example of a teenage “woman-warrior.” Buffy isn’t an adventurous type keen on hunting vampires, they’re right there for her at school. In contrast to the demure Buffy, Lara Croft is a real adventurer, a wealthy and athletic noblewoman, an archaeologist and expert in ancient civilizations and languages. A female Indiana Jones, Lara Croft was originally a video game character, before going on to appear in films (starring Angelina Jolie), comics, novels, and cartoons. Xena, Warrior Princess is a product of the tacky genre of historical fantasy. An Amazonian, Xena is a female version of Hercules, and although they never actually say that she’s Bulgarian, her battle cries sound like something out of a Bulgarian folk song. Bulgarian yelps and New Zealand landscapes make for a pleasant emancipatory cocktail. Played by Uma Thurman, the woman-warrior character from Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a mash-up born of Hong Kong cinema, spaghetti westerns, and Japanese Samurai films. More recently, the imaginary of popular culture has been colonised by mysterious and aggressive women warriors from visually striking Chinese films.
The emancipatory transformation of a woman is most explicit in the film Batman Returns, where Mousy Selina (Michelle Pfeiffer), a feminine, insecure, and demure secretary who lives in a world dominated by men, is transformed into the dangerous and seductive Catwoman (Life’s a bitch and so am I!). Cultural products with pretensions to seriousness such as the iconic film Thelma and Louise use the same principle of transformation — a woman goes from mouse-woman to cat-woman, from a woman in danger to a dangerous woman.
When I imagine my mother and her granddaughter, compare their cultures, and consider their formative influences and icons, the differences are striking. My mother’s formation was shaped by Hollywood films; her icons were Katherine Hepburn, Carol Lombard, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joanna Crawford, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, and many others. When I watch those films today, I’m gobsmacked by the fact that the male and female characters appear as equals, above all because they converse as equal and intelligent human beings. Whenever I think about the eloquent and witty dialogues between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, or between Cary Grant and his female partners, I’m dumbfounded by the humiliating fact that today’s supposedly emancipated female characters inevitably hold their tongues. And they hold their tongues because they evidently have nothing to say. The old Hollywood film and television scripts were predominantly written by men, and while the male-female relationships in them were clearly idealized, they concomitantly established an ideal standard of behavior between men and women. The absence of dialogue in contemporary films is stark proof of the humiliating absence of the need for dialogue.
For all that, it seems, at least in part, that female popular culture revolves less and less around men. Lara Croft and the heroine from Kill Bill are both solitary, independent “players” and barely differ from their male counterparts. Female culture is slowly becoming monological, as is male culture — the monologue being not only a confessional form, but also a form of domination over the listener. Women are slowly establishing this domination of the monologue in many spheres: in literature, in the genre of the personal memoir, in newspaper columns, in television shows, in contemporary art. Women are now “loose tongues,” “loudmouths,” “chatterboxes,” and “fishwives.” They have won the right to their monologues, to their “loose tongues,” although they’ll respond to that with the claim that a loose tongue was always the weapon of frustrated court jesters, fools, and of Scheherazade. They might be right about that, but they might also be wrong.
How women will use the position they have won both now and in the future is up to them. My only hope is that one of today’s female icons, Victoria Beckham, will have faded from the media horizon by the time my mother’s granddaughter begins imitating her female icons. Why single out VB from the multitudes like her? Because VB is notorious for saying that she’s never read a book in her life.