When the Babes Beat Up the Boys

By Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet. Posted January 31, 2002.

Hoping to score a few publicity points in what seems to be the worst magazine market in the history of humankind, the neanderthal rag Maxim is teaming up with bimbo bible Cosmopolitan to declare the war of the sexes over.

The truce was Maxim's idea, and no wonder -- after all, the caricatured men they pander to are regularly getting their asses kicked all over the culture, from Janet Jackson videos to art house films like "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" and "The Business of Strangers." Online, it's easy to see the enduring affection for Valerie Solanis, shooter of Andy Warhol and author of the SCUM Manifesto, which declared, "To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo ... The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one has the right to live at someone else's expense." The Manifesto is reproduced on a dozen websites in several languages by adorers who agree with the San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist who wrote last year, "I may not follow in her footsteps, but I definitely light a candle for her on occasion, as do many women. She may be a wacky somewhat addled saint, but she's a bit of a saint to me."

Clearly, a rapprochement about toilet seat covers won't go far towards dampening such anger. Before any gender truce is possible, we need to figure out why so many women are so enraged, and why the image of a frenzied female attacking a callow guy has become such a media staple.

It all started innocently enough, with cute, courageous post-feminist icons like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Powerpuff Girls, Tomb Raider's Laura Croft and Charlie's Angels. These were girls on the side of good, able to get along with the nice guys who came their way but unafraid to take on villains of either gender. Buffy never used her awesome strength against men who were merely caddish -- she saved it for homicidal monsters.

Of course, for many women who know the sharp, desolate fear of walking home on empty streets late at night, it's viscerally satisfying to watch Buffy demolish the (usually) male demons lurking in dark alleys. Yet creator Joss Whedon never casts the fights as explicit sex wars. In one episode last year, she gets her heart trampled by a campus player, but viewers hoping that Buffy would give him a kung-fu comeuppance would have been disappointed. Instead, later in the season, she saved his life.

Lately, though, girl power has gone awry. Now, men are being punished not for violence, but for betraying promises they may never have made. Take the recent Janet Jackson video for "Son of a Gun," where, backed by a posse of stone-faced glamazons, Miss Jackson uses telekinetic powers to lay waste to a hapless guy while a sample from Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" loops ominously.

Then there's Pink's 2001 video "You Make Me Sick," in which the scarlet-haired singer rams her motorcycle through the plate-glass wall of an apartment belonging to the man who did her wrong.

In mainstream movies, there's Cameron Diaz trying to kill both herself and Tom Cruise because he dissed her after a one-night stand. On the indie circuit there's Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles assaulting and degrading a corporate headhunter for his supposed sexual offenses -- or just his potential to commit them.

This new wave of violence against men is no longer about empowered heroines protecting the world from metaphorical rapists and pillagers. This is about raw, crazy, Fatal Attraction-style vengeance. But in this era of the swinging single girl, of hook ups and friendly fucks and Sex and the City, what exactly are women getting revenge for?

Despite what the right wing says, these fictional females don't represent the castrating succubae unleashed by feminism. Rather, they represent the rage and betrayal born from a very bad deal that post-feminists struck with Maxim-like men.

In the mid-90s, it suddenly became very fashionable for feminists to loudly proclaim their love of sex. The term do-me feminism was coined by Esquire, Maxim's predecessor, to describe figures like Katie Roiphe, Susie Bright and other strong, aggressive chicks who went out of their way to knock down the straw woman of old-school feminist prudery. An explosion of randy female sex columnists followed, people like Details Anka and The New York Press's Amy Sohn. They made clear that they wanted to come, not to commit.

Thus one of the key archetypes of the 90s was born -- the power-slut in designer heels, savvy, horny as hell and on the prowl. "Where does it say that women can't act like men?" asked Fox's iconic Ally McBeal. Candace Bushnell, whose Sex and the City column was the basis of the hit show, put it this way: "If you're a successful single woman in this city, you have two choices: You can beat your head against the wall trying to find a relationship, or you can say 'screw it' and just go out and have sex like a man."

But shouldn't the point of a feminist sexual revolution have been to make it ok -- to make it fabulous -- to have sex like women, whatever that might mean? What Bushnell was talking about wasn't freedom, it was capitulation -- agreeing to men's terms in order to pre-empt disappointment. Women weren't challenging the old idea of seduction as a contest between predator and prey -- they were just demanding to play a new role.

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