Yarrow - 90s bitch: media, culture, and the failed promise of gender equality

For Ben, Ruby, and Oscar

M any women remember the first time they were called a bitch in pristine detail, like a first kiss or childbirth. For me, it was at a party for my high school soccer team where I got drunk for the first time. An argument with a friend about a boy escalated into yelling and she called me a bitch. I was so startled that I slapped her in the face. It was the talk of the lunchroom the next week, in part because we had just learned about irony in English class and my friends last name happened to be Slappey. Being the perpetrator was humiliating. Girls didnt hit and I had violated the code. But I had to retaliate because innately I knew that being called a bitch was the worst possible slight.

Bitch is a gendered insult with a long history of reducing women to their sexual function. Ancient Greeks slandered women by calling them dogs in heat who begged for mena slur that referenced the virgin goddess Artemis, the huntress who changed herself into a wild dog. According to etymologists, the word has long been used with the intent of suppressing images of women as powerful and divine and equating them with sexually depraved beasts. From its very conception, bitch was a verbal weapon designed to restrain women and strip them of their power.

Today, bitch has been spit-shined, retooled, and given new life. We hear women using it to describe one anotherboss bitch, basic bitch, and resting bitch face are ubiquitous terms on social media, in the school lunchroom, and around the office watercooler. What was once a derogation is now seen as an appellation of empowerment and sisterhood. But the attempted reclamation of the word doesnt change its history or more common use: it has historically been, and remains, the worst invective hurled at womenone that degrades, disparages, and disenfranchises all at once.

This is plainly on display in the historical record. Use of the word has increased as women have gained power and influence, specifically to undercut their achievements and stop their progress. Indeed, this is the real story of how bitch and its corollaries were deployed by misogynists in the 90s, and how the word and the concept proliferated throughout society in that decade. This bitch bias shaped the way a generation of women and men came of age, and also this current moment. We can no longer ignore the history of bitch and how it has influenced the world we live in today.

Ill use the verb bitchify and the noun bitchification to characterize how 90s media and societal narratives reduced women to their sexual function in order to thwart their progress.

I m not sure whether to follow the girl in the Hanson tee or the guy in the All That hat. They are walking in opposite directions. If they are both headed to the inaugural 90s Festa Nickelodeon-sponsored outdoor concert featuring a scattershot assemblage of popular bands from that decadethen somebody is lost.

The large lot on the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, features a slime machine opposite the large stage. Contest winners, Pauly Shore, and the rap duo Salt-N-Pepa will later be doused in green goo. Life-size Jenga and Connect Four draw a few players. Girls are sprawled atop a leopard coverlet in a Real-Life 90s Girl Bedroom sponsored by Shop Betches.

The 90s may be the frame, but this is still a 2015 music festival. The eight-dollar hot dogs are named for performers, and the wristband handlers are high. Attendees wear the decades full regaliababy tees and butterfly clips, combat boots, flannel, acid-washed jeans, oversize blazers, leggings, kinderwhore, neon. Some are dressed as the Spice Girls. Others wear Clinton/Gore 1992 T-shirts that look conspicuously white and crisp for twenty-three years later.

Children of the 90s are a demographic relatively new to the workforce and to their own money, and businesses want to lock them down for life. Their childhood television programmer, Nickelodeon, wants them back, too. The network is promoting a new block of programming called the Splat that will air the shows attendees watched as kids.

I am one of these 90s kids. I was eight years old at the start of the decade and eighteen at its end. Its easy to rhapsodize about the years spent shedding childhood, and I have warm memories of mine. I collected the stuffthe American Girl doll, the baby tees, the Lisa Frank Trapper Keeperand mainlined the culture. I loved films like Clueless and Reality Bites and devoured book series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. I watched tabloid talk shows and MTV, and learned to drive listening to Nirvana and Lauryn Hill on compact discs.

The nostalgia strategy Nickelodeon is banking on seems inspired by how we hear the music of our youth. Brain-imaging studies reveal that the deep attachment we feel to the music from our adolescence isnt a conscious preference or reflection of critical listening, but the result of a host of pleasure chemicals bombarding our brains. Despite our tastes maturing, 1990s daughters and sons will likely prefer TLC, Smash Mouth, and New Kids on the Block to new hitsnot for their quality, but for their emotional wallop. Perhaps thats one reason why clubs from Brooklyn to Portland have found success with 90s Nights, drawing thousands to reminisce and dance to the songs they once loved.

This onslaught of 90s nostalgia is no great surprise, as kids of the 90s tumble into adulthood, bidding reluctant farewell to their younger zine-reading, Game Boyplaying, Rugrats-watching selves. They are pondering having children of their own, or are newly minted parents. Nostalgia is a gift and affliction of every generation. It eases the collective identity crisis as adulthoods mundanities gel.

Its also unsurprising that 90s Fest presents a version of the 90s that doesnt attempt to deviate much from historys script. And the children of the 90s dont seem to want it to. Reheating and serving the commercial culture that we 90s kids remember is just fine, thank you. In between band sets, a jumbotron plays a montage of clips from 90s television shows, movies, music videos, and advertisements. Festival goers intermittently sigh and aww at the Saved by the Bell credits, Sunny Delight ads, and Freddie Prinze Jr. But the pull of the past has clouded our critical minds. Are the 90s really as great as we remember them to be?

THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED DECADE OF WOMEN

As the decade dawned things were looking up for women. Daughters of second-wave feminism came of age and chose new paths unavailable to their mothers: delaying marriage and children, pursuing higher education, joining the workforce, and assuming independence and identities outside of the home. The gaps between men and women in education have essentially disappeared for the younger generation, declared a 1995 report by the National Center for Education Statistics. At that time, female high schoolers bested their male counterparts in reading and writing, took more academic credits, and were more likely to go to college. By 1992, they earned more bachelors, masters, and associates degrees than men. The equal education promise of Title IX was coming to fruition.

In the 80s, women began marrying older, or not at all. For more than a century, the median marriage age for women swung between twenty and twenty-two, but in 1990, it nearly jumped to twenty-four. By 1997 it reached twenty-five. Carefree sex outside of marriage became increasingly acceptable. Access to birth control expanded. Postponing marriage and kids liberated women sexually; it also gave them increased economic power and paved their entry into male-dominated careers. By the decades end, women accounted for close to 30 percent of lawyers, nearly half of managers, and more than 40 percent of tenure-track professors. Almost half of married women surveyed in 1995 reported earning half or more of their total family income, leading the studys sponsor to declare, Women are the new providers.