BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Unknown

with flat chests or, God forbid, facial hair get properly ladyfied. (Putting butch women in prom dresses is also a favorite of daytime talk shows.)
    When gender expectations are being reversed, the reversal itself becomes the focus, again demonstrating loud and clear how central gender is to our understanding of the world around us: The pivotal scene of G.I . Jane came when Demi Moore kicked her drill instructor in the nuts and said, “Suck my dick.” Commander in Chief is built around the novelty of a person with tits occupying the Oval Office. Even nature films get in on the act—wasn’t March of the Penguins as much about the supposed novelty of dad warming the egg for months while mom is off eating as it was about the resourcefulness of adorable flightless birds in the brutal Antarctic winter?
    A reliable category of punch lines has always been the transgression and/or maintenance of gender and sexuality’s boundaries: Think Ross and Joey’s naptime snuggling habit on Friends , the 2004 Chevy commercial in which a truck passenger sows discomfort among his friends by singing along to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle’ s title characters catching each other singing along to Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On,” 2005 Emmy presenter Conan O’Brien’s quip that “every young girl dreams of winning an Emmy—and I am no exception.”
    There’s a lot going on in this little cultural obsession with gender. There’s the superficial stuff like the division of multiplex fare into chick flicks and, well, everything else; at the bookstore, it’s chick lit versus regular ol’ fiction. This is just one of the many cultural hangovers of the age-old notion that the concerns of mankind are universal but stories about women are just, you know, about women; the result is a persistent belief among culture makers and marketers that women (and girls) will happily consume stories about men (and boys), but the guys won’t do the reverse. Its corollary is the assumption that lack of a Y chromosome means an automatic affection for sappy sisterhoods (think Ya-Ya or Traveling Pants, not Is Powerful). Then there’s slightly deeper stuff like the whims of advertisers and the circular arguments of their commercial imperatives. They like our tastes—both in media and in products—divided into pink and blue camps, because it’s so much easier to figure out what to advertise where.
    But that’s far from the end of the story. Gendered identities are more than simply male or female, masculine or feminine. The tomboy and the sensitive guy have been with us as long as the delicate flower and the manly man, and the feminist and queer movements have made room for many more. Title IX brought women onto the playing fields in droves, carving out a female athletic identity far more nuanced and enduring than the tomboy. Organizations as diverse as the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, whose mission is “to end discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes by changing public
attitudes, educating elected officials and expanding human rights”; the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides services to queer youth; and Camp Trans, the protest-cum-alternative festival that developed in response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s womyn-born-womyn-only policy are loosening the gender binary’s stranglehold on our popular imagination. A decade ago, drag queens and high femmes started making it onto the mainstream radar: Bound; Friends’ Carol and Susan; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; RuPaul. These days, a memoir of male-to-female transition can become a modest bestseller, and its author can be treated with respect on Oprah. Butch dykes, tranny bois, intersex folks, and the wide range of genderqueers who refuse to check either the M or the F box are moving in—however slowly—from the subcultural fringe: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Transamerica, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer