BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (33 page)
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Meet the Single Girl, Twenty-First-Century Style
Andi Zeisler / WINTER 2000
“I’m single because I was born that way.”
—Mae West, 1967
“I am going to die. But I will die married.”
—Suzanne Finnamore,
Otherwise Engaged,
1999
Otherwise Engaged,
1999
STANDING IN LINE AT THE MOVIES, I’M LISTENING TO A friend chat with an old acquaintance behind us. As they bemoan the state of San Francisco housing, the acquaintance mentions that her older sister just purchased a hunk of East Coast real estate. “She bought a six-room apartment,” she says proudly. A dramatic pause, and then the kicker: “Without him.”
Him? Who’s him?
Oh, him. Right. I feel as though I’ve been transported into one of those General Foods International Coffee ads, where a knot of women sit around someone’s living room with their Café Hazelnut Mochas, reinforcing female stereotypes for all they’re worth. This woman is waiting for my friend to respond excitedly, but what is she supposed to say? “Gosh, it’s great that your sister isn’t afraid to look like a pathetic spinster, what with having her very own apartment and all”?
It’s weird to hear women still mouthing the kind of stuff that even
Cosmo
seems to know better than to print these days. But then, it’s kind of a weird time to be a single woman. On the one hand, the choice to be single
is acknowledged and validated in ways that seemed unthinkable as little as a dozen years ago, when the famous you’ll-have-a-better-chance-of-being-killed-by-terrorists-than-getting-married-in-your-thirties reports flowed in from every media venue around. Slowly, the ranks of the never-married are swelling, and with about forty million single women in America, it’s a demographic that’s getting noticed.
Cosmo
seems to know better than to print these days. But then, it’s kind of a weird time to be a single woman. On the one hand, the choice to be single
is acknowledged and validated in ways that seemed unthinkable as little as a dozen years ago, when the famous you’ll-have-a-better-chance-of-being-killed-by-terrorists-than-getting-married-in-your-thirties reports flowed in from every media venue around. Slowly, the ranks of the never-married are swelling, and with about forty million single women in America, it’s a demographic that’s getting noticed.
On the other hand, what’s getting noticed about single women in 1999 can be summed up with two words: Bridget Jones. The current era of the single woman might as well be described as post-BJ, since it seems that no pop cultural mention of either women or singlehood can pass without trotting out her booze-swilling British ass as evidence that we’re all thigh- and marriage-obsessed neurotics. Never mind that single women are owning their own businesses in record numbers, matching men dollar for dollar in spending, and remaking the arts in their own image. It’s much easier to market to single women by dwelling on what they aren’t—married, and by extension settled comfortably into society. Pick up a book, peruse a diamond ad, watch your television, eavesdrop on people at the movies: We’re tapping a well of long-extant stereotypes, fears, and assumptions about single women and selling them back to ourselves at a bargain price.
Bridget Jones Superstar
The publication of 1995’s
The Rules
may have set the wheels of pop culture’s retro-cycle in motion, but the unprecedented success of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
sent it into hyperdrive. Helen Fielding’s
London Independent
column–turned-novel put a goofy, semi-ironic face on the same story women have been fed for years—the one about the single career woman who, rapidly approaching thirty, goes into what can only be called a marriage frenzy. But whether the million-plus women who bought and loved the book were responding to its gently satiric prodding of the beauty myth or letting its sarcasm fly right over their heads is beside the point—marketers everywhere saw a publishing zeitgeist waiting to happen and quickly positioned Bridget to be its patron saint. The newish crop of books featuring single female protagonists, all released in the spring and summer of 1999, testify.
The Rules
may have set the wheels of pop culture’s retro-cycle in motion, but the unprecedented success of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
sent it into hyperdrive. Helen Fielding’s
London Independent
column–turned-novel put a goofy, semi-ironic face on the same story women have been fed for years—the one about the single career woman who, rapidly approaching thirty, goes into what can only be called a marriage frenzy. But whether the million-plus women who bought and loved the book were responding to its gently satiric prodding of the beauty myth or letting its sarcasm fly right over their heads is beside the point—marketers everywhere saw a publishing zeitgeist waiting to happen and quickly positioned Bridget to be its patron saint. The newish crop of books featuring single female protagonists, all released in the spring and summer of 1999, testify.
Take Melissa Bank’s
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,
a book of interrelated
short stories that, according to its promotional copy, “explores the life lessons of Jane, the contemporary American Everywoman who combines the charm of Bridget Jones [and] the vulnerability of Ally McBeal.” Or Suzanne Finnamore’s
Otherwise Engaged,
a comedy of prenuptial manners that replaces Bridget’s now-famed fear of “dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian” with the more prosaic “I’ll die a spinster, a gaggle of cats sniffing my bloated corpse.” Or Amy Sohn’s
Run Catch Kiss,
the story of a sex columnist courting relationship disaster with her tell-all dispatches (the
Independent,
in a slice of praise that takes the fiction-as-reality thing to an unreasonable level, dubbed Sohn “the thinking person’s Bridget Jones”).
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,
a book of interrelated
short stories that, according to its promotional copy, “explores the life lessons of Jane, the contemporary American Everywoman who combines the charm of Bridget Jones [and] the vulnerability of Ally McBeal.” Or Suzanne Finnamore’s
Otherwise Engaged,
a comedy of prenuptial manners that replaces Bridget’s now-famed fear of “dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian” with the more prosaic “I’ll die a spinster, a gaggle of cats sniffing my bloated corpse.” Or Amy Sohn’s
Run Catch Kiss,
the story of a sex columnist courting relationship disaster with her tell-all dispatches (the
Independent,
in a slice of praise that takes the fiction-as-reality thing to an unreasonable level, dubbed Sohn “the thinking person’s Bridget Jones”).
There are others:
In the Drink,
Kate Christensen’s darker-than-dark-humored tale of a hapless, lovelorn, and unappreciated ghostwriter with an unbridled hankering for the sauce; and
A Certain Age,
Tama Janowitz’s story of a woman whose ridiculously high standards preclude finding the Right Man. Finally, there’s Melissa Roth, who, in the nonfiction book
On the Loose,
tracks three single women through one year in their lives in order to capture the “‘real world’ of single living.”
In the Drink,
Kate Christensen’s darker-than-dark-humored tale of a hapless, lovelorn, and unappreciated ghostwriter with an unbridled hankering for the sauce; and
A Certain Age,
Tama Janowitz’s story of a woman whose ridiculously high standards preclude finding the Right Man. Finally, there’s Melissa Roth, who, in the nonfiction book
On the Loose,
tracks three single women through one year in their lives in order to capture the “‘real world’ of single living.”
If these books have any individual characteristics to separate them from one another, you wouldn’t know it from their reviews and marketing. True, the characters share certain things: They’re attractive women in their twenties or thirties; they’re educated, self-aware, and quick with a wise aside; they live in New York, San Francisco, or London; they work in publishing or advertising; their families appear every few chapters, Greek chorus–style, to shake their heads in synchronized dismay. Within their pages, the characters are small-s single; with the exception of
On the Loose,
their singleness is simply part of a narrative life that doesn’t itself purport to define the word. In a marketing context, however, they are Single Women—shameless, hapless, man-hunting single women—and their subtleties and differences are ignored in the spotlight’s glare.
On the Loose,
their singleness is simply part of a narrative life that doesn’t itself purport to define the word. In a marketing context, however, they are Single Women—shameless, hapless, man-hunting single women—and their subtleties and differences are ignored in the spotlight’s glare.
Where Are We Going and Why Am I in This Borders Handbasket?
Don’t blame the authors. As long as women have been writing, they’ve been writing about young, single women searching for love, success, and
happiness (though, please remember, not necessarily in that order). Still, it’s hard to recall a time when so many female authors have been hyped so arduously and favorably all at once, and this Lilith Fair of literature would be wholly gratifying if not for one major thing: The books, marketed by their publishers as the spawn of Bridget Jones and addressed by reviewers as the direct result of Fielding’s success, are made weaker on their own (in most cases considerable) merits.
happiness (though, please remember, not necessarily in that order). Still, it’s hard to recall a time when so many female authors have been hyped so arduously and favorably all at once, and this Lilith Fair of literature would be wholly gratifying if not for one major thing: The books, marketed by their publishers as the spawn of Bridget Jones and addressed by reviewers as the direct result of Fielding’s success, are made weaker on their own (in most cases considerable) merits.
New York
magazine’s rundown of the trend, titled “Success and the Single Girl,” crowned
BJD
“The Gold Standard” before dismissing the new crop of books as no more than clones. (
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing
becomes “Intellectual Bridget”;
In the Drink
is “Dipso Bridget.”) This easy categorization makes for snappy copy, but in doing so it dispenses with the literary context in which these books exist. It’s as though everyone from Jane Austen to Alice Adams has been completely wiped from the cultural blackboard and the only ones left to represent in the single-gal arena are this year’s girls.
magazine’s rundown of the trend, titled “Success and the Single Girl,” crowned
BJD
“The Gold Standard” before dismissing the new crop of books as no more than clones. (
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing
becomes “Intellectual Bridget”;
In the Drink
is “Dipso Bridget.”) This easy categorization makes for snappy copy, but in doing so it dispenses with the literary context in which these books exist. It’s as though everyone from Jane Austen to Alice Adams has been completely wiped from the cultural blackboard and the only ones left to represent in the single-gal arena are this year’s girls.
“One reviewer called
Run Catch Kiss
‘A wobbly attempt to follow in Bridget Jones’s Manolo Blahniks,’” says Amy Sohn, whose
New York Press
column, “Female Trouble,” formed the basis for her cheerfully potty-mouthed debut novel. “She doesn’t even wear Manolo Blahniks! What frustrates me is the idea that anyone who sits down to write a book is doing it to mimic someone else.” It doesn’t matter that
Run Catch Kiss
has more in common with
Portnoy’s Complaint
than it does with
BJD,
or that Melissa Bank’s subtle writing recalls the prose of Lorrie Moore far more than it channels Fielding’s sugar-high stylings. The single-girl market is hot, and it behooves publishers to shoehorn as many books as possible into the demographic while the fire’s lit.
Run Catch Kiss
‘A wobbly attempt to follow in Bridget Jones’s Manolo Blahniks,’” says Amy Sohn, whose
New York Press
column, “Female Trouble,” formed the basis for her cheerfully potty-mouthed debut novel. “She doesn’t even wear Manolo Blahniks! What frustrates me is the idea that anyone who sits down to write a book is doing it to mimic someone else.” It doesn’t matter that
Run Catch Kiss
has more in common with
Portnoy’s Complaint
than it does with
BJD,
or that Melissa Bank’s subtle writing recalls the prose of Lorrie Moore far more than it channels Fielding’s sugar-high stylings. The single-girl market is hot, and it behooves publishers to shoehorn as many books as possible into the demographic while the fire’s lit.
It’s worth noting that certain commercially undesirable factors disqualify a book for hard-core Bridgetized marketing.
My Year of Meats,
Ruth Ozeki’s novel about a single Japanese-American television producer who unwittingly stumbles into a massive beef-ranching scandal—one of the smartest and most original books to come out in the past few years—hasn’t found itself linking arms with BJ and her ilk. All the elements are there—the almost-thirty heroine, her noncommittal boyfriend, her neurotic mother, and her quirky coworkers have zeitgeist written all over them. But both its author and its main character are Asian American; add to that an
explicitly political premise and you don’t even have to start doing the math to know that Meats wouldn’t reap the same caliber of PR booty as its single-girl sisters.
My Year of Meats,
Ruth Ozeki’s novel about a single Japanese-American television producer who unwittingly stumbles into a massive beef-ranching scandal—one of the smartest and most original books to come out in the past few years—hasn’t found itself linking arms with BJ and her ilk. All the elements are there—the almost-thirty heroine, her noncommittal boyfriend, her neurotic mother, and her quirky coworkers have zeitgeist written all over them. But both its author and its main character are Asian American; add to that an
explicitly political premise and you don’t even have to start doing the math to know that Meats wouldn’t reap the same caliber of PR booty as its single-girl sisters.
Slingin’ Singles
What these books do have in common is that they center on single women, and, as such, provide ruminations on what it means to be single. Duh, right? Sure—the problem is that the marketing doesn’t reflect the fact that characters like
In the Drink’
s Claudia and
The Girls’ Guide’
s Jane don’t, in fact, spend the entire narrative plotting to snag the honeymoon suite. Their version of singlehood doesn’t necessarily treat the term “single” as a provisional tag, something to be endured until they find the person who lifts that semantic albatross from around their necks.
Otherwise Engaged’
s Eve, on the other hand, flaunts her equation of marriage = salvation on every page with ruminations like “The ring is my lump-sum payment for everything bad that has ever happened to me. I don’t feel I can tell people this, or they will spoil it.” Another entry in the genre, Kathy Lette’s
Altar Ego
, presents us with a group of characters whose brain-free couplings and decouplings prop up every prejudice about both single women and marriage (women only marry rich; feminists discard their principles when Mr. Man comes calling; women concentrate on their careers only when they can’t get a husband, etc.). And
On
the Loose compares and contrasts the lives of three single women in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—or at least attempts to. For all the diversity that could be gleaned from both the premise and the locations, Roth gives us a trio of central-casting white girls, each working in the corporate world (two in entertainment, one in advertising), and all of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. The writing makes it almost impossible to tell whether these women have any characteristics that set them apart from each other, and in the course of following their interchangeable lives—a mélange of bad dates, film premieres, record-release parties, and expense-account vacations—it becomes difficult to care. If this was fiction, we’d simply write them off as caricatures. But
On the Loose
is a nonfiction work that claims to capture what it’s like to be a single woman in the ’90s, so the fact that its one-dimensionality is meant to resonate with actual women seriously rankles. You can’t even get past the jacket blurb without stumbling onto a played-out cliché of singlehood:
“Jen … adopts kittens despite the old-maid stereotype.” The upshot is that while some of these books do support the stereotypes that fuel the parade float of marketing, the ones that don’t are swept up for the ride, smiling and waving in bewilderment.
In the Drink’
s Claudia and
The Girls’ Guide’
s Jane don’t, in fact, spend the entire narrative plotting to snag the honeymoon suite. Their version of singlehood doesn’t necessarily treat the term “single” as a provisional tag, something to be endured until they find the person who lifts that semantic albatross from around their necks.
Otherwise Engaged’
s Eve, on the other hand, flaunts her equation of marriage = salvation on every page with ruminations like “The ring is my lump-sum payment for everything bad that has ever happened to me. I don’t feel I can tell people this, or they will spoil it.” Another entry in the genre, Kathy Lette’s
Altar Ego
, presents us with a group of characters whose brain-free couplings and decouplings prop up every prejudice about both single women and marriage (women only marry rich; feminists discard their principles when Mr. Man comes calling; women concentrate on their careers only when they can’t get a husband, etc.). And
On
the Loose compares and contrasts the lives of three single women in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—or at least attempts to. For all the diversity that could be gleaned from both the premise and the locations, Roth gives us a trio of central-casting white girls, each working in the corporate world (two in entertainment, one in advertising), and all of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. The writing makes it almost impossible to tell whether these women have any characteristics that set them apart from each other, and in the course of following their interchangeable lives—a mélange of bad dates, film premieres, record-release parties, and expense-account vacations—it becomes difficult to care. If this was fiction, we’d simply write them off as caricatures. But
On the Loose
is a nonfiction work that claims to capture what it’s like to be a single woman in the ’90s, so the fact that its one-dimensionality is meant to resonate with actual women seriously rankles. You can’t even get past the jacket blurb without stumbling onto a played-out cliché of singlehood:
“Jen … adopts kittens despite the old-maid stereotype.” The upshot is that while some of these books do support the stereotypes that fuel the parade float of marketing, the ones that don’t are swept up for the ride, smiling and waving in bewilderment.
Subtext and the Single Girl
What the marketing of these books shows shouldn’t come as any surprise: Single women may be a blossoming demographic, but the industries courting our cash are the same ones whose doors still swing on the flimsy hinges of stereotypical gender difference. Advertising to women has only recently barely begun to address the idea that some women choose to stay single.
In a
Village
Voice article called “Women Are Easy: Why TV Ad Agencies Take Female Viewers for Granted,” Susan Faludi mused on the gender bias that still rules advertising: “For all the talk about market research, when it comes to gender, people switch from the local part of the brain to creaky nostrums about what works for men and for women, and what doesn’t.”
Village
Voice article called “Women Are Easy: Why TV Ad Agencies Take Female Viewers for Granted,” Susan Faludi mused on the gender bias that still rules advertising: “For all the talk about market research, when it comes to gender, people switch from the local part of the brain to creaky nostrums about what works for men and for women, and what doesn’t.”
Which is why, even when we see a lone woman in a car commercial, the car itself isn’t being marketed to her. (That’s to say nothing of the one that features a mother palming off her single daughter on a nearby man by faking her own car’s brake failure.) The ads that are slowly popping up to address the single woman, in fact, fit right in with the same conception of singlehood advanced by the trend in single-girl lit—that is, they play on the twin specters of marriage and physical insecurity, reframing them to flatter the single woman. De Beers, the company that essentially invented the concept of the diamond engagement ring (“A diamond is forever”), is now wooing the women who may not be accepting an emerald-cut one-carat from Mr. Billfold, but who are sporting enough cash and pride to purchase their own rocks. In one ad, a semisilhouetted woman in a diamond solitaire necklace smirks opposite this copy: “It beckons me as I pass the store window. A flash of light in the corner of my eye. I stop. I turn. We look at each other. And though I’m usually not that kind of girl, I take it home.”
The ad recasts diamond craving as something naughty; the single woman eyeing the stone isn’t a demure bride-to-be but a coy, self-assured hussy. On the one hand, it’s a nod to self-sufficiency and sexual agency: the
Sex and the City
of ads. On the other hand, De Beers knows full well that
women associate the company with engagement rings, and this ad serves as a reminder of the buyer’s marital status: She’s defined against the company’s bread-and-butter customers, and what’s reinforced is her singleness.
Sex and the City
of ads. On the other hand, De Beers knows full well that
women associate the company with engagement rings, and this ad serves as a reminder of the buyer’s marital status: She’s defined against the company’s bread-and-butter customers, and what’s reinforced is her singleness.
Then there’s an ad featuring a close-up of a smiling young woman and the message “Amber O’Brien, 25, is having the time of her life. Recently, she decided it was time to have breast augmentation.” The ad, for Mentor breast implants, cloaks its hard sell in a contrived fact file ostensibly about Amber herself: It lists her “Pet Peeve” (“People who pressure you into doing things”), her “Proudest Achievement” (“Buying a condo”), and her “Life Mission” (“Always be open to new ideas”). The total effect is as subtle as sequined pasties on a pair of silicone double-Ds: Amber is successful and solvent, and buying fake hooters is simply another achievement in her life.
Like the recent glut of single-girl fiction, ads like these give unpartnered women the oh-so-generous gift of recognizing them as a viable consumer entity while simultaneously emphasizing their insecurities (or what are assumed to be their insecurities). Positioning diamonds and breast implants—things that are generally assumed to be done with or for a man—as choices made for their own sake, without the phantom “him” to influence the purchase, validates the single woman while still trying to exploit her fears. The ads apply positive signifiers of empowerment and well-being to products loaded with negative associations for the single woman (dangerous implants, rings that only “the lucky ones” get to wear), so that we think we’re seeing a reexamination of single women in consumer culture. But the De Beers ad doesn’t fundamentally change the line with which we connect its conceptual dots; it simply takes the familiar progression of relationship + diamonds = happiness and excises the first element.
On the other hand, almost all of the entries in the post-BJ era of chick lit go where the ads can’t afford to—revising assumptions of what it means to be single and coupled, recognizing societal strictures and how they affect our own ideas of what is or isn’t “normal.” Books like
The Girls’ Guide
and
Run Catch Kiss
present us with relatable, smart heroines whose search for love is only one part of a larger need to find a comfortable place in a world they know full well rewards those who settle into the status quo. And only a very small number of their heroines ask us to believe that they’re walking off into the sunset, ring on finger, in the last paragraph. But the marketing purposely masks this, ignoring the picture painted by the books themselves in
favor of the single-girl shill proclaimed by Bridget-boosters as the Real Thing. Marketing hoodoo that relies on a conception of singleness that still translates to “looking for a man” rather than “alone and fine with it, thank you” will never offer the single woman a fair vision of herself—one that acknowledges that there’s more than one route to happiness, and that the road there isn’t always paved with empty bottles of gin and Slim-Fast.
The Girls’ Guide
and
Run Catch Kiss
present us with relatable, smart heroines whose search for love is only one part of a larger need to find a comfortable place in a world they know full well rewards those who settle into the status quo. And only a very small number of their heroines ask us to believe that they’re walking off into the sunset, ring on finger, in the last paragraph. But the marketing purposely masks this, ignoring the picture painted by the books themselves in
favor of the single-girl shill proclaimed by Bridget-boosters as the Real Thing. Marketing hoodoo that relies on a conception of singleness that still translates to “looking for a man” rather than “alone and fine with it, thank you” will never offer the single woman a fair vision of herself—one that acknowledges that there’s more than one route to happiness, and that the road there isn’t always paved with empty bottles of gin and Slim-Fast.
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