Gross-out girls

Young female novelists now take us, literally, into the bowels of their heroines, but does all this bodily frankness carve out a bold new honesty or dredge up the same old insecurities?

By Suzy Hansen

Oct 9, 2000 | When Cameron Diaz mistook Ben Stiller's semen for hair gel and daubed it on her hair in "There's Something About Mary," she broke down one more barrier for women: They, too, could revel in the gross-out comedy world of excrement, vomit and other bodily emissions.

But Diaz, like most of the women in gross-out comedies, never herself knowingly does anything really gross. That's left to the guys; for the most part, women still admit to embarrassing physical moments only among themselves. Diaz is just a tourist in the world of freewheeling farting and belching, a world where most women fear to tread.

Yet a glance at recent first novels by young women shows a striking number of authors who write frankly about the gory details of bodily life. These books, like Amy Sohn's "Run Catch Kiss," published last year; Shannon Olson's recent "Welcome to My Planet"; Anna Maxted's "Getting Over It"; and Lucinda Rosenfeld's new "What She Saw ..." use gross-out details to assert something gritty, tangible and human about their characters. The protagonists, after all, never confront poverty, disease, racial strife, abuse or struggle (besides with relationships and their own self-esteem). Searching, perhaps, for some other kind of depth, the authors -- all witty and capable practitioners of the now full-blown single-girl genre -- freely expose their characters' nasty but natural acts, their destructive nervous habits (like finger chewing and pubic-hair plucking) and their secret eating disorders, as if these were all symbols of fearlessness and freedom. With guns blazing -- Hey, look at the kinds of things I'm willing to write about -- Sohn, Olson, Maxted and Rosenfeld seem to want to banish shame by the use of shock tactics.

It's a laudable goal, but too often their strategies don't work. These writers, like the writers on "Sex and the City," end up simply reinforcing women's body obsessions by flimsily repackaging them. (On the HBO series, the fabulous foursome may boisterously confess their flatulence faux pas and sexual idiosyncrasies, but as Judith Shulevitz pointed out recently in Slate, they completely buy into the idea that women can't be gross or natural in front of men.) Of course, female writers have long exploded social mores by being physically, or more often sexually, outspoken. In her 1963 novel "The Group," for example, Mary McCarthy wrote graphically and with anatomical precision about a single woman's first adventures with a diaphragm. Using the phrase "parting the labia majora" made a few cheeks burn back then, for sure; clearly, McCarthy wanted to stir up a discussion about premarital sex as a way to show her readers new possibilities about the lives of her unmarried female characters. But what happens to the latest bearers of risqui physical information, is rarely as liberating as their authors seem to hope.

In "Welcome to My Planet" and "What She Saw ..." Olson and Rosenfeld have created heroines who fret endlessly over their bodily dysfunctions. It seems almost inevitable that the characters' problems accepting their bodies develop into physical self-destruction. Phoebe Fine, the protagonist of "What She Saw ...," is, like Rosenfeld herself, a Jersey girl, and she comes with lots of built-in self-deprecating material. In fifth grade, Phoebe is "scared of boys in general and what they might require of her, but perhaps even more terrified of finding herself attracted to the very thing her daffy, well-meaning, culturally contemptuous parents had worked so hard to protect her from -- namely, the world out there in all its crudest, crassest, most inglorious expressions of animal need." Naturally, it's that animalistic, crass world that she finds interesting; enter Stinky, the aptly named first love of Phoebe's life: "She had always been attracted to men who showed no shame when it came to bodily functions. Maybe because they deflated the shame she felt about her own bodily functions. She found menstruation unseemly. She failed to see the point of pubic hair."

Some years and some guys later (the novel is organized on a guy-per-chapter basis), Phoebe has taken to plucking out these useless pubic hairs, likening them to her own stagnant existence: "She plucked them one at a time and it was an arduous process and sometimes it hurt but it had to be done but they always grew back it was the same thing over and over again there was never any progress never any resolution." Besides her hair-plucking fetish, Rosenfeld keeps the reader up-to-date on Phoebe's "chronically mutilated cuticles," which serve as benchmarks throughout the book, monitoring just how screwed up she still is. During Phoebe's affair with a married professor, Rosenfeld writes, "an ugly period of Phoebe's life was to follow. She chewed her fingernails into a bloody pulp."

Next Page: Puking, farting and peeing in their pants: This is progress?

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