Bitchfest

"We love "Bitch" and think "BITCHfest" is an essential component of any feminist's library."--Guerrilla Girls "As delicious as a day spent with your funniest, smartest friend, this collection is also a call to action, inspiring readers to fight the fear of female power. As the many writers in here show, few wrongs are righted without a bitchfest first."--Cristina Page, author of "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex" "In a society as celebrity-obsessed and fad-saturated as ours, we ignore pop culture at our peril. Hurray for the women of "Bitch," who raised their banner of intelligence right at the intersection of pop culture and feminism. They've done so with humor, vision, fire, and guts, as this book of selections from their first decade proves. Read it, learn from it, enjoy it, argue with it, "revel" in it."--Robin Morgan "With humor and insight Lisa Jervis, Andi Zeisler, and their contributors explore what it means to be female, a feminist, a lover of pop culture, and that other thing that rhymes with rich but is so much more fun."--Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" ""Bitch" is my favorite magazine. It makes feminism fun, relevant and approachable--it's like the Marlo Thomas of our time."--Joel Stein, columnist, "Los Angeles Times"" ""We were working at "Ms." magazine in 1996 when a xeroxed pamphlet arrived at the office bearing the name "Bitch," We opened the zine and found what we'd been fearing didn't exist: feminist writing that was funny, engaged with pop culture, and yet intellectually rigorous. Eureka! "BITCHfest" is the greatest hits, and reading them is like hanging out with thesmartest people you know."--Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, co-authors of "Manifesta" "Essential reading for the modern woman."--Margaret Cho "This often mind-stretching, occasionally predictable and generally entertaining collection of articles from "Bitch" magazine has something for every feminist, postfeminist and reactionary. "Bitch" was founded in 1996 in response to 'post-feminism' by 'freshly minted liberal arts graduates with crappy day jobs and a serious media jones.' With refreshing depth, literacy and humor, these essays explore questions surrounding puberty, gender identity, sex, 'domestic arrangements, ' beauty, pop culture and mainstream media, and media literacy/activism. Tammy Oler examines menarche and female puberty in horror films";" Gaby Moss analyzes the media's obsession with 'mean girls'; and Lisa Jervis gives a rundown of sex scenes and pride in YA lesbian novels. Leigh Shoemaker puts down Camille Paglia's contention that males are superior due to their urinary 'arc of transcendence' by evoking the Virgin Mary's breasts squirting milk through the air into Jesus' mouth. Audry Bilger protests the use of 'guys' as gender neutral. Conspicuously absent is any discussion of women and aging. Maybe we'll just have to wait for "Bitch's" 20th anniversary, when its editors will be pushing 50."--"Publishers Weekly" "'Whenever anyone has called me a bitch, I have taken it as a compliment, ' writes comedian Margaret Cho in the foreword to this anthology from the self-proclaimed Queen Bee of Grrrl Zines. Positioned as an antidote to the patronizing pages of "Cosmopolitan" and "Vogue," "Bitch" revels in its power to provoke as it ponders the landscape of popular culturefrom a feminist perspective. In honor of the magazine's tenth anniversary, founding editors Jervis and Zeisler have amassed essays (including some specifically commissioned for the collection) on a bounty of brazen topics, from the ramifications of sexual abuse and rape to the l

Lisa Jervis is publisher of Bitch and a regular lecturer on feminism and the media. Andi Zeisler is Bitch's editorial/creative director.