Word: wurtzel
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Beyond Palac, there are other young postfeminists who have launched careers by merely plucking from and personalizing Paglia's headline-making ideas. The latest addition to the women's-studies sections of bookstores, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, features on its cover a topless picture of author Elizabeth Wurtzel. Beyond it lies a seemingly unedited rant in which Wurtzel, billed on her book jacket as a Pagliaite, demands for herself and womankind the right to be rapacious, have fits and own more than one Gucci bag. "I intend to scream, shout, throw tantrums in Bloomingdale's if I feel...
...judge a book by the cover. But perhaps there's another way. Maybe you can judge the author by the cover or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Take a peek at some recent book authors without jackets: Isabel Allende (Aphrodite), Douglas Coupland (Girlfriend in a Coma) and Elizabeth Wurtzel (Bitch...
Fortunately for Wurtzel, her book comes out at a moment when the culture seems painfully devoid of commanding female troublemakers. Courtney Love is now a chic model/actress, and Sharon Stone has married, in a big peony of a dress, a newspaper boss. We have no brazenly rapacious Barbara Stanwycks or Bette Davises; instead we have Monica Lewinskys and Ally McBeals, women just insecure and pesty. On the bright side, no one will ever make a career out of doing Calista Flockhart in drag...
...While Wurtzel's plaint is heartfelt, it isn't more than that. The book is all shapeless feeling. Wurtzel complains that predatory Joey Buttafuoco, not Amy Fisher, should be in jail. She wishes Hillary Clinton were President. She thinks Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction was misunderstood: the woman was just true to her feelings (never mind that many women sleep with married men but don't start boiling pets...
...Often Wurtzel's research doesn't seem to extend much beyond what she's read and reacted to in Esquire. Bitch, in fact, seems intended for people who let all their magazine subscriptions lapse in the late '80s and early '90s and never bothered to ask anyone what they missed. But then, only good girls spend their time in libraries...