Did you just call me the B-word? Why ... thank you

IN their introduction to “Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine,” editors Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler explain the seemingly pejorative name of both their magazine and this book-length collection of its greatest hits. “If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch,” they write, “we’ll take that as a compliment, thanks. And if we do, the word loses its power to hurt us.... ‘[B]itch’ is efficiently multipurpose -- it not only describes who we are when we speak up, it describes the very act of making ourselves heard.”

Featuring more than 50 essays, “Bitchfest” is a smorgasbord of feminist thought, outrage and exploration. From the erotics of pedagogy to the faux-feminism of Jane magazine to a piece about a female rabbinical student wearing tzitzit (ritual fringes that are usually worn by men), the anthology is eclectic and engaged. Ultimately, this suggests a third, unspoken reading of its title -- reminding us of the many ways that being a woman is a bitch.

There was a time when, newly awakened to a culture that routinely uses women’s bodies to sell products while relentlessly exercising double standards for its female citizens, I would have devoured every issue of Bitch. But I got lazy. I was sorely in need of provocation, and this book delivers the goods. Nothing escapes the writers here, whether it’s deconstructing the antics of pseudo-feminists Katie Roiphe, Camille Paglia and the Spice Girls or questioning the widespread use of a term like “you guys,” which, as Audrey Bilger points out, “makes femaleness invisible. It says that man -- as in a male person -- is still the measure of all things.”

The third wave of feminism has been crashing on the shores of popular culture for a decade, showing us there is more to froth about than ever before. Take, for instance, the much-marketed notion of “Girl Power.” In “Girl, Unreconstructed: Why Girl Power Is Bad for Feminism,” Rachel Fudge argues that Girl Power “represents the ultimate commoditization of empowerment ... it grabbed the rhetoric from one of the most potentially powerful, yet woefully misunderstood, feminist uprisings of my generation [the riot grrrl movement], discarded every ounce of political heft, and reduced it to the cheap iron-on letters on a baby T.”

Fudge notes that the real danger of Girl Power is that “it lulls us into thinking that all of feminism’s battles are won, that females in America don’t have anything to fight for anymore.” The trouble with letting girls believe we live in a post-feminist world is that “when the going gets rough and those girls come face-to-face with sexism, they don’t have the tools with which to formulate a critique -- nor do they have an awareness of the power inherent in collective activism. In other words, they don’t have feminism.”

If there is blame to be laid here, it falls squarely at the feet of corporate-powered mass media, which grab the most digestible and marketable elements of feminism and churn them into empty fluff. Another essay by Fudge, “Celebrity Jeopardy: The Perils of Feminist Fame,” explores how media choose our icons for us. “Women rise to fame not because they are lauded as leaders by other feminists,” she writes, “but because the mainstream media sees in them a marketable image -- a newsworthy persona upon whom can be projected all sorts of anxieties, hopes, and responsibilities.” The sentiment is echoed in Lisa Jervis’ “The F Word,” which looks at how advertising uses pseudo-feminist slogans to sell products to women, encouraging us to find empowerment through shopping.

All this is informative and thought-provoking, but what it isn’t is a lot of laughs. Humor, long a potent weapon in the feminist arsenal, is treated soberly. Zeisler’s essay “Laugh Riot: Feminism and the Problem of Women’s Comedy” probes the difference between “feminist humor,” which like male humor dares to offend, and “female humor,” which must operate within the framework of male-established comedy rules, making women the butt of the joke.

“Discouraged from training their wit on others,” she notes, “girls grow up to aim it at themselves, building up a repertoire of stories of their social failures, physical shortcomings, and general inadequacies and inviting others to relate, to laugh with, but also, maybe, to laugh at.”

It’s a good point, although I can’t help wishing that the feminist comedians Zeisler lauds (Janeane Garafalo, Fran Lebowitz, Amy Sedaris) had been asked to contribute pieces of their own. Margaret Cho pens an earnest, yuk-free foreword, but some vaunted feminist humor would be welcome, both for comic relief and to shoot down the stereotype that feminists are a humorless bunch.

Nevertheless, “Bitchfest” is inspiring and instructive, bringing home the notion that along with big-platform issues like equal pay and abortion rights, women’s equality is also fought for in the arena of daily life.

We’ve still got a long way to go, baby.

*

Erika Schickel is the author of the forthcoming “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”