No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel. — Bitch is 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...  more » 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."

Bitch tells 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 of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'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, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.

ISBN-13: 9780385484008
ISBN-10: 0385484003
Publication Date: 4/1/1998
Pages: 432
Rating:

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.

3.6 stars, based on 5 ratings

Publisher: Doubleday
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Similar books to this author and title:

Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation

The Secret of Life : Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman

Members who requested this book also requested:

$Courting the Diamond Sow : A Whitewater Expedition on Tibet\'s Forbidden River$

Time Detectives : Their Toughest Cases In Their Own Words

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> Specific Groups >> Women
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Sociology >> General
Nonfiction >> Women's Studies >> General

My Account
Post Books
Wish List
Bookshelf
Member Tools
Under the Hood
Newsletter Archive

Search for a Book
Browse My Favorite Genres
Advanced Book Search
Book Browser
Club Tag Cloud
NYT Best Sellers
Newbery Medal Winners
Pulitzer Prize Winners
Books Posted Today
Award Winning Books
Mobile / PDAs

Help Center
How to Swap Books
Ask the Librarian
Live Help
Browser Test
Feature List
Amazon Search

Community
Spread the Word
Widgets & APIs
Feeds RSS/XML
Box-O-Books
Discussion Forums
Blog
Facebook
Twitter

Company
Press & Media
Pulse of PBS
Contact Us
Careers
Privacy & Security

Sister Sites
SwapaDVD.com
SwapaCD.com

Back to the Top ↑

Tell a friend about this book...

Search - Bitch