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

prize—winning Middlesex are only the most mainstream manifestations of a new awareness of gender’s infinite complications.
    But most of us looking to celluloid for a reflection of ourselves will be sorely disappointed, no matter what our gender (even if we see ourselves as pretty standard males or females—Hollywood archetypes are limited about plenty more than the strict boy/girl thang). When nontraditional identities do make it onscreen, they tend to become confining and one-dimensional. Think Will & Grace’ s Jack, who was prime time’s first out-and-proud flaming fag, or Sex and the City’s unabashedly slutty (and always satisfied) Samantha: Both started off as interesting departures for TV but became insufferable caricatures when writers neglected character development in favor of recycled punch lines.
    But there’s meaning beyond the obvious in our quest to use our pop-culture screens as mirrors. We can’t ignore the fact that lack of cultural visibility often translates into political erasure; more important, this gender obsession clues us in to how our culture has dealt with the complex changes and pressure brought by the aforementioned feminist and queer agitation. And it’s mostly by playing up clear-cut versions of masculinity and femininity whose boundaries blur only for comic effect, or struggling against change with more and more lad mags, dating rulebooks, and other attempts at keeping us all in our “proper” place.
    Bitch has always been concerned with this struggle, arguing loudly for critical examination of how pop culture seeks to define us and for whose purposes—and how we in turn push back to define ourselves.—L.J.
    Urinalysis
    On Standing Up to Pee
    Leigh Shoemaker / FALL 1997
     
     
     
    AH … URINATION. BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY OR SOCIAL DETERMINANT? And you thought it was just something we all have to do six or seven times a day in direct proportion to how much and what types of fluid we consume. However, according to Camille Paglia, urination surpasses its mundane function of relieving the body of fluid wastes and becomes something entirely different. As she writes in Sexual Personae: “Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of male anatomy’s most efficient compartmentalizations … Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance [sic] . A woman merely waters the ground she stands on … There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self.”
    Of course, this judgment is based not on the mere act itself, but on the how of the process, the performance involved in the relief. It’s not just what you have, it’s what you do with it that counts. But are men of necessity arcshooters and wall-sprayers and women lowly puddle-makers? What are we to make of all this? Paglia has certainly added a new facet to good ol’ penis envy.
    Using Paglia’s logic, anyone who can shoot a stream of bodily fluid a few inches or a few feet away from one’s corpus is somehow superior, touched by the hand of God. All you need is a fleshly hose in order to transcend the horrors of embodiment. I am only assuming that she is choosing to ignore lactating women, whose postpregnancy breasts are so laden with milk that one
good squeeze could take out any person in the room. Perhaps superiority should be determined not by the ability to shoot a stream of bodily fluid, but by the type of fluid composing the stream. Personally, I believe the ability to spray milk to be on a higher level than the ability to spray urine. Perhaps this is merely my bias as a woman. However, I think that all those good Catholic artists who depicted the baby Jesus feeding at his mother Mary’s breast would agree: None of these pictures showed the holy infant with his mouth greedily slurping at the nipple; rather, he is shown kicked back at a distance, mouth open, a thin stream of white fluid coursing through the air toward the blessed mouth, propelled by the hand of