Portland Loves Women Who Bitch

Event review by Nora Robertson

Folks of all stripes jammed their chairs together like they were packed in a 747 to hear the ladies of Bitch magazine launch BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). It was standing room only at Reading Frenzy on September 6th to hear founders Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler skewer the tension between boys and girls in pop culture, spotlighting the centrality of gender in our understanding of the world.

Bitch has, from its DIY roots, remained committed to an “attempt to use our pop culture screens as mirrors,” as Jervis put it. Zeisler illuminated the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery and rah-rah grrl acceptance of sexing oneself up. “Lipstick now can be a feminist statement, though to a casual observer, you may just be a woman in lipstick.”

Perhaps the hardest hitting piece was read by contributor Vanessa Veselka on the cultural response to rape and abuse survivors, the “forever-scarred, pain-haunted, neurotic” woman being the ideal model of recovery. Those more stoic are not honored for their unwillingness to break, but may be told they’re in denial for not having a meltdown. “The real problem is not that we treat rape as sex, but that we treat it as theft,” Veselka said in a low simmer of a voice, heads nodding around her. “To claim your soul can be stolen is the ultimate objectification of women.”

My one disappointment was the lack of Reading Frenzy owner Chloe Eudaly’s trademark embarrassing author questions based on incriminating Google results. “They were just too clean-living,” she said. Guess Margaret Cho, who wrote the forward, wasn’t on the tour. --Nora Robertson, formerly Nora McCrea, is occasionally known to wear lipstick.