Rating: 
Summary: Nice photo.
Review: I wanted to like this book. I really did. I actually liked the cover photo, which some people found distracting from the book's supposedly empowering theme. If you can get past the bare <gasp> breasts, you will notice Ms. Wurtzel has her left, middle finger gracefully raised. I thought that was funny. "Im being provactive and you are shocked' she seems to say. "Here's what I think about that".From the buzz I heard on the book, I thought, or hoped, anyway, that the book would explore the mysteries of feminity, that certain sexual essence that makes us fearsome creatures. It's not. (If you dont think girls are scary, just ask a teen age boy getting ready to ask a girl out on his first date.) Instead, the book is a 413 page rationalization for not being a decent human being. Worse yet, it's a 413 page rationalization for using sex to not be a decent human being. Sex doesn't always have to be about love. Fun, for example, comes to mind. The one thing I don't think sex should ever be about is destruction. Wurtzel writes on pg.89... "...every so often some guy will come along whom I find terribly attractive and he feels the same way about me and anything can happen, anything goes, and the strange thing is, that the strongest urge I will get is to make a mess of him." She lost me there. Those intimately familiar with the book will note that there are 414 pages, not 413 (This does not include the bibliography, the acknowledgments and permissions). On the 414th page, Wurtzel redeems herself (kinda) by saying she wishes she could be a better woman. Don't we all. A word on the actual writing. This book could have used a tighter outline or some judicious editorial input. Stylistically, it has the pinpoint accuracy of a sawed off shot gun. This is not an excrutiating read, however. Wurtzel is funny, in places. (pg285) "Honestly, I could not tell you what possessed Michael Douglas to cheat on lovely, throaty, elegant Anne Archer in 'Fatal Attr! action', but it has occurred to me that maybe the woman ought to get a job." I laughed.
Rating: 
Summary: The most ironic book i've ever read.
Review: this book is terrible. this woman has more [dangerous] misconceptions than perhaps any i've never met. i understand her premise -- (or at least i think i do) --- that it's not cool to be a woman if you can't do what you want to do and express yourself -- as in, if you want to cut loose for a while, cut loose... as a woman you get shortchanged and so you need to do what you *need* to do to to be able to do what you *want* to do. [quote from Naomi Campbell] "I'm a hardworking bitch. I do what I want to do. Life is too short--you have to go for it." [quote from Wurtzel] "You have to go for it." ...but the only thing she seems to want to do when she wants to express herself and cut loose is seduce men and then f*** them. She buys right into the very "rules" that oppress her and all women who don't play by them. [the rest of the quotes are Wurtzel] "...who wants to wear fishnet stockings..." "...the mousy and meek secretary by day who uses leather and lamé to become Catwoman by night, to flip and strut, to scratch and bite, to be the mouse that roared with dangerous curves" "...went from natty housecoat to negligee in a perfume commercial" "...this was the homecoming queen by day and the hooker with a heart of dope-pumping ventricles by night." she seems to want to buy into an ideal created by men for men's amusement and their pleasure... either i'm missing something profound or this book is unbelievably ironic. she wants attention, and the way she wants to get it is to be used...to sell herself out... to buy into the very [absurd, hypocritical, male-dominated, male-created] ideal that her book was written to [apparently] shred, to protest. "If a woman is good enough to be good, she is also good enough to be bad." "Sandy has become your basic 1958 model ho: the girl who, after suffering months of rejection for being a party-pooper prude who didn't drink ! or smoke, has finally realized that you do have to pet to be popular, that you do have to put out to get the guy, that it isn't the blondes who have more fun--it's the sluts." You call being a slut "having more fun"? Getting used by a man [or a woman] is fun? Using a man [or a woman] for sex is fun? That's pathetic - and quite preverse. It certainly isn't *my* idea of fun, it's actually my idea of pain, not joy. "After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home." You want someone to carry you home? That's what you want? Perhaps you want a man to carry you home? And then are you gonna "have fun" with him and then send him on his way? Do you want to depend on someone else to carry you home...or are you gonna carry yourself home, with your head held high. Wurtzel is actually terrified of: - What she would do if she actually could do what she professes to want to do (i believe that she doesn't know). "Bad girls don't wait around--one doesn't get to go everywhere by sitting by the phone." - How to survive in a man's world. "We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar." - Not finding love/marriage. "We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of thirty-five had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married..." These fears come out as anger, and if she wants to be a bitch, and that's what she thinks will get her what she wants, then that's too bad. I know a lot of "non-bitches" that are doing just great. Wurtzel is [ironi! cally enough] buying into the primary establishment she claims is oppressing her in the way that is most to her detriment.
Rating: 
Summary: Takes one to know One
Review: Okay--so Wurtzel's ultimate interest is in her own self-image as a hiply disgusted, crybaby Bitch whose talent for getting laid is a redemptive, interesting quality. Don't read it as if it were interesting. Read it because the writing rocks.
Rating: 
Summary: not a pretty picture
Review: This book should be called "Idiot", and Wurtzel should substitute her middle finger for the second "i". What a dissapointment after the brave, interesting "Prozac Nation." She rambles, she bores, she has trite epiphanies...This is a poorly written piece of junk, especially her smug, self-congratulatory tone.
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Summary: Good book for bible study, too!
Review: Sure this is a book about the "history of mannipulative female behavior," and necessarily also about male mannipulative behavior, but it's worth the read alone just for her harvest of bible stories.
Rating: 
Summary: Bitchy and proud of it ...
Review: Finally, somebody is giving a voice to all those difficult women in the world! Having read "Prozac Nation" at least ten times, if not more, I was dying to read Bitch and it did not disappoint me. We all put up with difficult men: those who are moody, unwilling to commit, those who keep their distance for way too long and those who are so intruiging that we can't NOT pay attention. At last there is a voice to all of those women saying, Wait a second, I don't HAVE to get married, I don't HAVE to have children, why slave myself to a man? Wurtzel is funny, she's smart, she's independent and she does as she feels. Between Bitch and Prozac Nation she comments on just about every element of our culture and raises ideas that I had never even thought of. Bitch made me laugh, it made me think, it made me say "Hey you have to read this!" to every single person I spoke to. Wurtzel's witty writing style and blase attitude was one that I've been struggling with for ages and I have finally decided that I have spent too long trying to keep myself in check, and playing the good girl. While cataloguing famous "bad-girls", Wurtzel also points out that being "difficult" IS NOT A BAD THING. In her chapter about Amy Fischer, she brings up the point that by sleeping around and doing as she pleased, Amy was only doing what every other male teenager does, only instead of being a "slut", men are cool. Women who do what they want should not be labeled as a "depressive" or a "drug-addict", but their behavior ennunciated. After all, why should men have all the fun?
Rating:
Summary: Wurtzel speaks the truth!
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel is speaking the truth, as someone who will turn 30 before the year 2000 I can definately say she speaks to some 30 something feminists. Her insight and mix of pop culture and classical literature is fresh and although unconcerned about being politically correct she does not come off as condescending as she has been wrongfully accused. Witty, hilarious, sad and insightful, I have read this book three times and is a must read for any woman ready to throw out binary theories of women's studies.
Rating:
Summary: Being a "Bitch" takes hard work
Review: It is what it is. Which is a massive rant more than an organized piece of literature. But, it's also incredibly thought-provoking (even if you disagree), and passionate. Which makes great reading. Her voice is representative of a generation of twenty-something women, struggling with age-old misogyny, their feelings on feminism, and the constant reflection, and influence of pop culture. Her obsession with these cultural figures (Amy Fisher, Nicole Brown Simpson, Delilah) is about allowing them their complexity. The result is a book that's hard to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Bummer
Review: Though I champion what I thought was her cause, Wurtzel's book is a grand disappointment. Surprise!: the book doesn't have a "cause" -- it's actually an journal entry encompassing manifold encompassing manifold, perfunctory observations and little in the way of insight. One wonders if her incessant, disjointed, almost masturbatory rambling (why even carve it into paragraphs, let alone chapters) is supposed to be a genre unto itself. Doubtless, we need a book that celebrates women's ability to not give a flying f---; yet I can't help but think that the contradictory impulses (i.e. Society is screwed. Being a bitch is good for the self, good for society/Being a bitch guarantees perpetual/reactionary/suicidal depression) that course thru Wurtzel's sloppy (anti)argument will have the opposite effect. Texts this egoistic and confused (why should we congratulate her on her own inability to exorcise self-denigrating demons?), no matter how well intentioned, tend to galvanize rather than subvert the dominant paradigm lest we forget that our patriarchal status quo is an product of a particular brand of "rugged individualism". She sounds more like Ayn Rand venting after a nasty break-up than a prophetess with any real solutions to the problems women (and men) of the West (and, increasingly, the rest) face in the late 20th century.
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as Prozac Nation....but
Review: okay, most think Wurtzel is a whinny little white girl who doesn't know half of what she's talking about. Obviously that's not true and she proves it with her latest book, Bitch. I didn't agree with everything she said but I respected her well backed up opionions. Well all except one. I think Elizabeth needs to remember that Amy Fisher who she praised in her book was also the same Amy who raised a gun and fired a bullet into a womans face.
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