An interesting exchange last week between first Elizabeth Wurtzel, then Amy Benfer in Salon’s Broadsheet. The Wurtzel piece is about her aging from a young blond sex symbol, looking back on her 20s with longing for the “hot number” (Wurtzel’s words) she once was. Benfer tries to couch her disdain for Wurtzel (more, women like her) with criticism of her writing, but she never really sounds out her argument for it being a bad piece. Here is an interesting passage. The whole thing is really worth reading.
Women’s beauty is a strange beast: It changes the way people deal with you, and at the same time it’s still virtually taboo for a beautiful person to write about what it’s like to be beautiful. Beauty is a thing to be observed from the outside, not commented on from the inside. There’s plenty of smart writing to be done from inside a beautiful woman’s head — ah, “House Of Mirth” — and I can imagine a great version of this particular essay. Unfortunately, Wurtzel hasn’t written it. She comes off as someone who has gobbled up the most hackneyed clichés of the beauty myth and come out the other side none the wiser. It’s a strange, sad piece that doesn’t even quite have the zing of schadenfreude.
There’s a certain type of woman who may start off as a funny-looking kid, lurking on the margins of beauty, and thus learn a thing or two about its dangers, developing a few character traits as compensation before blossoming into a great-looking woman. Not our Elizabeth. She would like you to know that she was always a pretty girl, “a remarkably adorable child,” and a “hot number” [emphasis hers] as an adult, whose publishers “put me half-dressed on the covers of my books to sell them” (like the aforementioned “Bitch,” in which Wurtzel appears topless). Having the slim, blond American good looks of the most conventional sort — she’s a dead ringer for the Barbie-cheerleader archetype Rachel McAdams plays in “Mean Girls” — Wurtzel naturally deduced that she “was meant to date the captain of the football team” and says, “I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way.”
And I’ll throw one more into the mix. On Beauty was the first of Zadie Smith’s novels I read, and it remains my favorite. In it, she draws so many different portraits of women with different kinds of beauty. There is the Wurtzel kind–the aging white woman who had an affair with the main character. The main character’s wife, an aging, overweight black women who had to compete with women like her husband’s mistress her whole life. Then there is the young Victoria, whom I always suspected was closest to the author herself, a young black woman who is the picture of sexual desire for the main character.
I give Wurtzel the benefit of the doubt, and wager that she is knowingly taking on the beautiful woman cliche–one that puts her squarely opposite bookish women who read and write on her. The courage comes in her owning up to it, Benfer’s criticism being the anticipated response.
I don’t have much to say in terms of debate. It’s something I come back to constantly, someday I’ll join in.
[...] to mind a recent article by another woman known very much for her beauty–Elizabeth Wurtzel. I wrote on her piece already, and promised that there would be a coda in the [...]