BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler & Margaret Cho

Author:Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler & Margaret Cho
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780374113438
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Envy, a Love Story

Queering Female Jealousy

Anna Mills / SUMMER 2001

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN ARE consistently drawn to images of other women? Mainstream female America can’t get enough of half-naked, conventionally gorgeous women sulking or smiling out from magazine covers, TV sets, and movie screens. Look at the magazine rack in your local drugstore or supermarket—without the words, can you tell Maxim from Cosmopolitan? Can you tell if the “luscious” women on the covers are supposed to entice a man or a woman? I can’t. As feminists, we charge the media with using female bodies to sell everything from soap to beer to Palm Pilots. As often as not, though, these campaigns target women, not men. How do we explain straight women’s susceptibility to these images?

Here’s the traditional feminist explanation: In a patriarchal society, women’s worth is based on attractiveness to men. Women are drawn to images of women who fit the “beautiful and sexy” mold because we want to fantasize about the desire, love, attention, and respect we would get from men if we looked like them. “Land that man, ace your job, and look your sexiest ever!” screams a typical women’s-magazine cover line. Sexiness is all about status. Fascination with other women is all about admiration, competition, and envy. Right?

It follows that mainstream American culture expects women to be riveted by each other’s beauty. Straight women are often acutely aware of and affected by each other’s clothes, jewelry, makeup, and body size. Women are notoriously—stereotypically—competitive and jealous of each other’s looks. The cliché that women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women, passes without comment. But no one bothers to ask if sexual attraction has anything to do with it—not even feminists. We should. How can the sensual, the erotic, and the sexual not be woven into those complex and intense emotions that women feel when they compare themselves to each other? How can women’s intense interest in other women be totally divorced from sexuality?

It’s time to queer our views of women’s fascination with other women, to free them from assumptions of heterosexuality, and to look at the ways their meanings escape and wreak havoc with heterosexual, sexist norms—and the ways this fascination gets played out in envy, self-hate, female friendships, and women’s preoccupation with eating and body image.

An article in the sex section of Women.com—an umbrella site that hosts, among other things, Cosmo’s web presence—describes a woman’s relationship with her ex-husband’s new wife: “One afternoon, I breezed over early for the designated pick-up [of my children]. There, sitting in [my ex-husband’s] living room, was a young woman in shorts with the most beautiful legs I had ever seen. Legs are a big deal for me; I’m convinced mine look like storm-uprooted tree trunks. I was glad I was wearing a long skirt.”

Read the passage again, this time imagining that the narrator is bisexual. Might one wonder if she was attracted to her supposed rival? The encounter can be read as erotically charged until the narrator turns her reaction into an attack on her own body.

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