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No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel. Bitchis 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." Bitchtells 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 ofThe Rules,the evil that isThe Bridges of Madison County,the twisted logic ofYou'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,Bitchis a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.… (meer)
"Bitch" takes beautiful, intelligent ideas and words (too much in fact) and place them together in the form of a messy, unreadable mass of wasted paper. Very sad because she can do, and has done, WAY better than this. She is still one of my favourite authors, but sorry Elizabeth, just being truthful, this one is not good. ( )
Too bad Wurtzel spends most of the book coming off as a complete poseur & name dropping every 2 pages. When she actually gets down to cultural analysis, her arguments are actually pretty intelligent Her "cooler than thou" attitude she cops throught the book overshadows what could've been a valuable work of cultural criticism. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.
–Situationist graffiti Paris 1968
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For Betsy Lerner and Lydia Wills, without whom . . .
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
In the November 1996 issue of Allure, editor-in-chief Linda Wells writes a column about how she wants to be dark and bad.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
It seems like, all this, all these years of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi—all that smart writing all so we could learn to behave? Bra-burning in Atlantic City—so we could learn to behave? Roe v. Wade—so we could learn to behave? Thelma & Louise—so we could learn to behave? The gender gap—so we could learn to behave? Madonna, Sally Ride, Joycelyn Elders, Golda Meir, Anita Hill, Bette Davis, Leni Riefenstahl—all those strong indefatigable souls so we could learn to behave?
The power you have as a girl at eleven is to make men uncomfortable; it is not yet to make them feel good.
[...] in Vladimir Nabokov's novel she is actually rather vile, obnoxious, not in the least bit seductive. She chews on gum with bovine vigor and blows enormous pink bubbles that pop into sticky puddles across her face. She prefers her sleeve to napkins and tissues. Her nail polish is always chipped. She may be the subject of blue movies, but Nabokov's Lolita is green, still picking at earwax in public, an unwashed phenomenon.
This is the story of a girl who pretty much just wants what boys are guaranteed as their birthright—to go out there and hunt and make claims and take lovers and take chances and take in and take off and take out and say gimme gimme gimme and never once be told that a lady must wait and all that stuff.
Beauty is so powerful to us that we forget that it is only what it is, it is its own closed system, open it up and it contains nothing, it signifies nothing and it implies nothing other than the premium of pleasure that beauty itself provides: it does not bestow goodness or braininess or anything more, and yet the omnipotence of beauty by itself is enough to make it perhaps the most desirable asset in God's creation.
People liked Steinem because she was pretty and disliked Friedan because she was so damn froglike, which is just fine by me: given the choice between someone aesthetically pleasing and someone else whose appearance is somewhere short of offensive, I will always take the former.
People romanticize insanity because they believe it is the thing behind the art; in fact, it is the thing in front of the art, the roadblock and police barrier and phantom tollbooth that you are pushing against.
And the photography and artwork that portray and celebrate depression not only fail to enlighten us about the emotional illness of the ravishing subject—if anything, they make us appreciate it too much, enjoying the aesthetics rather than aiding with an antidote—but also fail to increase our generosity toward the majority of the mentally ill people whose pain is not so pretty.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel. Bitchis 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." Bitchtells 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 ofThe Rules,the evil that isThe Bridges of Madison County,the twisted logic ofYou'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,Bitchis a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.
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