Kate Rothwell forwarded me a link to a very thought-provoking article in the Washington Post, and I’ll beg the pardon of our international readers because it is all about the word “bitch” as pertains to American politics. Look, folks, I know that there are other countries outside the borders of the USA – no, really, I do – but it’s election time around here, and American media is even more in the ignore-the-rest-of-the-world mode than usual. It’s like self-important navel gazing at its finest.
I personally vote, early and often, but I have sworn not to pay attention to any presidential candidate until 2008, which is the actual election year. Some of the current candidate bozos jumped into the race in 2006 and early 2007, and that’s just preposterous. So I refused to pay attention to any of them until the actual election year – and I have a month and a bit more to go of my self-imposed electoral peacetime. But for the Bitchery, I will break my vow, and look in on election doings.
Seems there’s a YouTube video of a John McCain campaign meeting wherein some anonymous woman asks him, “How do we beat the bitch?”
(That would be Sen. Hillary Clinton the woman is referring to.)
The room explodes into manful chortles, and McCain looks both amused and somewhat uncomfortable (though, I will say, that’s his standard look at any moment, probably because he is uncomfortable) and answers the question.
And yet again, the word “bitch” makes some headlines. Which is why Andi Zeisler of Bitch Magazine penned an article about the word “bitch” itself for the Post, because any time the word pops up in the news, people call her.
Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn’t respond to men’s catcalls or smile when they say, “Cheer up, baby, it can’t be that bad.” We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn’t back down from a confrontation.
So let’s not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we’ve done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine—and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world.
Well said, ma’am. Well said.
The funny thing is, I’m drafting a paper right now about how we here at Smart Bitches have tried to jokingly co-opt the word “bitch” at the same time we try to redefine the word “trashy,” and each time I sit down to write, I have to question whether the word “bitch” will ever lose it’s power. Other more famous examples of co-opted words, such as “nigger,” “queer,” or “gay” seem to have had more success with redefinition in popular culture than “bitch.” Within the communities described by those pejorative terms, there’s sometimes an almost celebratory use of the words, but then, those words are more often used to refer to men. I don’t see any lesbians saying, “Whee! I’m a dyke!” Words that apply pejoratively solely to women – those are some difficult words to subvert.
I read that article in The Post the other day. First thing I thought of when contemplating the current usage and “ownership” of the word was Smart Bitches.
Leonard Pitts had a really good column on this yesterday.
http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/310595.html
I really question whether “co-oped” words ever do loose their power. I think any word spoken with hate keeps it’s connotations.
I heard a discussion on Oprah once—someone asked “What is the difference if I use the “n” word and a black person does.” The reply was something to the effect of it’s OK for me to use this word, but not you. Which just tells me the word hasn’t been neutralized at all.
(I hate the extended political season too. It’s like Christmas carrols in stores while you’re shopping for a Halloween costume…)
When I think of the word “bitch” used in the context of “to complain about something”, it makes me realize that the core meaning is “a woman who speaks up and won’t take crap simply to be ‘nice’”.
I’m still uncomfortable using the word “bitch” in casual conversation or writing, but I understand why we want to have ownership of it.
Lesbians DO use “dyke” that way a lot, I think. Dykes on Bikes, for example.
Ooh, you’re right B. Nerd. I had forgotten about “dykes on bikes.” And one of my friends, a bonafide lesbian (card-carrying, she says, though I haven’t seen the card) says that she loves the word “dyke” and uses it frequently with much glee. So perhaps it’s “bitch” that holds on to the negative connotations so easily.
My girlfriends and I totally use bitch as an endearment amongst ourselves (yelling “Bitches!†under almost any circumstance will elicit a round of guffaws), but I feel very different when someone else uses it pejoratively. The last time a man did so I looked him up and down and said, “No, I’m a bitch and a half-half, asshole. Get it right. You’ve only just scratched the surface, but you’re well on your way to a full-blown bitchslap.†Need I tell you how quickly he piddled himself and scurried away (to tell all his buddies what a bitch I am, I’m sure).
OMG, sing it sister!!! I left a bookstore Friday after handing the two books I was considering to a clerk and informing her that I just couldn’t take another the Christmas music long enough to stand in line and pay for them. I went down the street and bought them somewhere else, where I wasn’t being assaulted by untimely holiday tunes (is it any wonder I’m always sick to death of Christmas by the time the actual holiday arrives?).
How did the word “minute” disappear from that last post?
I really like the last line myself!
I think JulieB is right that co-opted words don’t lose their sting entirely. If a particular group embraces a word as the SBs do here, the same word still feels very much like an insult when it comes from outside that context. I didn’t see myself as someone who thinks words can be used only by certain groups, but if the intent is to denigrate, no, I don’t want someone else using it.
“Lesbians DO use “dyke†that way a lot, I think. Dykes on Bikes, for example.”
When I was living in Virginia, a woman in our town had a personalized license plate that said “2 Dykes”. I think she had that plate for several years before someone noticed it and complained to the DMV that it was an offensive plate and she was forced to turn it in—it made the papers and local news when she fought it, complaining that it wasn’t considered offensive when the DMV let her get it to start with. (she lost and had to surrender the plate) It was never clear from the news reports if the person complaining was offended because it was a rude name for lesbians or because the woman and her partner were broadcasting their orientation.
A co-opted word doesn’t lose its sting for centuries, if ever. The best we can hope for is that a word just falls out of general use and is forgotten.
That said, there’s no denying that context is everything, and if we want to reclaim a word, we should be calling out people on context.
Bitch and nigger aren’t words that are “only okay when I use it.” They’re words that are only okay when you aren’t calling someone that as an insult. Calling a woman by a sexist epithet or a black person by a racist epithet is wrong. The specific word is not at fault; the intention of the speaker is.
For instance, if I were to correct someone, and they sarcastically said, “Yes, Mommy” to me, that would be a sexist insult, belittling me for being a worrywart and busybody. Contrast with “Yes, your majesty,” which carries insult (“stop acting like you’re better than me”) but not sexism.
Virginia is strict with its license plates. I remember a news article where someone was forced to turn in a license plate that said oui-oui because the person complaining thought it was a covert reference to urine.
Kid you not.
I am so glad to live in Canada, where election dates are not set in stone (they have to be less than five years apart, but other than that they can be any time) and the big fights are about local nominations. The last big story we had was that Arthur Kent, the Scud Stud (does anyone else remember him?), is running for the Tories in our provincial riding. Our current MLA is a talk show host, so we apparently know how to pick ‘em.
We do have a hot city councillor, who ran most of his campaign advertising through YouTube.
So, someone else’s ignorance is a basis for my choice of license plate? Boy would I have fought that one! Of course, I’d have fought the Dyke one too. Makes me want to come up with something outrageous for my new Jeep . . .
I am a bitch, and I’m proud of it. To me, even when they’re insulting me with the word, it will never, ever be as insulting as the days when I was a doormat (generally stated in the words “good girl.”)
I’d a million times over be cursed for being a bitch than coddled and kissed for being a good girl. At least that indicates to me that they a) take me seriously, even if it is as a serious threat to their authority, and b) have no logical or cogent arguments left to make to my point of view, other than falling back on taking personal pot shots.
Bitch power, unite!
I’ve always defined “bitch” as “a woman who can make a freakin’ decision.”
I am trying to co-opt it the only way I know how. I am teaching my daughter that it simply means a lady that will speak her mind/stand by her thoughts even if others don’t like it. Both my kids know I come here to SB (and boy does my son loving talking to me about it because he can say a generally verboten word). It is verboten more because of his age and ability to get in trouble for it at school than it’s generally accepted meaning (same with words like damn and fuck..he knows them and knows not to use them at school).
To be honest though, if bitch is directed at me with disdain, scorn or dislike, it still bugs me a bit…but that could be tone (and I actually do hate confrontations and/or ticking people off) more than the word itself.
Sam
—E seems on the right track: that co-opted words take centuries to loose their power, if they ever loose their power.
Steven Pinker talks about this in his new book “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” (which I haven’t read). In an article in the New Republic (which I did read) he talks about the physiological affects that certain taboo words evoke in humans. We physically respond, which is a powerful thing to overcome.
Perhaps the best we can expect in our own lifetimes is that we can also co-opt the pejorative words for our own use, thus muting their power, even if we cannot eliminate their power.
This sort of reminds me of the chicken/egg dilemma. Do we need to change cultural views of women (or different races or cultural groups) before these words can loose their power, or does changing the power of the words change cultural views of women? Maybe it’s a little bit of both.
When I saw this statement, I thought of how this association of women with “bitching” goes back at least as far as ancient Greece where it was a part of the personality of the mythological Hera to give the what for to Zeus whenever his latest bout of philandering became known. It was used for both dramatic and comedic affect to insert scenes in stories about Hera and Zeus – Hera was portrayed as a screeching, angry, revenge-laden fury of a woman whenever yet another incident came to her attention. Meanwhile, Zeus was portrayed as the hectored, hen-pecked, put-upon husband who was just doing what any man would do.
This lends a lot of credence to me to the thought that it takes a long time to change the connotations of words along with the stereotypes, associations and assumptions that are a part of those connotations.
And this stereotype of the judgmental, badgering wife up against the long-suffering husband persists in our entertainments down to the relatively recent movie You, Me and Dupree.
Hell. Yes. I’ve been called a bitch most of my life for these exact reasons… It most often happens when I don’t ooze into a puddle of giggling gratefulness when I become the focus of a male of the species. And god forbid if the word “No” crosses my lips and I mean it. All hell will break loose: let the slinging begin, with “bitch”, “dyke” and sometimes “cunt” thrown in for some flavor. And people wonder why I’m single.
haha! verword; called76… yes, I have been called 76 flavors of things
Hmm, I think co-opted words lose their power when the targets of the original epithet stop reacting to it when someone outside the group uses it. No reaction = no power.
With language, familiarity breeds blandness. Teens use the word douche, or douchebag without knowing the origin of the word. Scumbag and scum are also used in this way and kids have no idea what a “scum bag” is.
Bitch is much less powerful now as an epithet than it was 20 years ago. I think the verb (I bitch, you bitch, we bitch, they bitch) will lose gender implications very soon.
Case in point, who thinks of gender in the surfer’s “It’s bitchin!” idiom?
If we want bitch to lose its power, we should use it liberally and stop bitching when someone calls us one. Have a bitchin Thanksgiving!
Overally, I’m much more offended by “cunt” than “bitch.” I also get really irritated by the use of “pussy” when describing a man who is considered inferior or weak; whereas, “dick” describes a male who is “too much” and/or “in excess.” As the wonderful lesbian duo Bitch & Animal proclaim in their “Pussy Manifesto” – I, too, am tired of having my genitalia used as an insult!
However, what really underlies all of these words and their effects (whether positive or negative) is not simply intentionality but rather with power. If the intention is to render you powerful by seizing power, agency and even personhood away from another by using a certain word, whether it be “bitch,” “fag,” “nigger,” etc., then that word is an insult. If one is using the word to reclaim said power, then for the person USING it, it is not.
But therein lies the rub, for how can one person reclaim a word without perhaps offending (and undermining the power of) someone in turn by the very act of using it? I’m not saying that one must be “sensitive” (as it were); however, I would NEVER as a straight, white woman use either “nigger” or “fag” (in fact, I must say that I am more than a little uncomfortable even typing them), but a lot of this has to do with the fact that I was raised in the South and have seen these words in action and used in horrible ways.
Regardless, this argument is one of those that is at its most basic level circular – if the words are “wrong” in one context, then they should be wrong in all contexts. However, they are not, as I tell my mother every time I use “fuck” and get yelled at for being “unladylike” (whatever the heck this means), and so how can we ban contexts and not the words themselves? I’ll admit I’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, but the conversation is always fascinating!
And, on a side note, I love, love, LOVE Bitch Magazine. It is intelligent, intellectual, and most importantly, it is a magazine with a conscience that gives a big middle finger to any magazine that would ever encourage crash dieting, giving your man a blow job everytime he walks into a room, and/or say that somehow your life will seem a helluva lot better with Prada. They stick to their guns and their message is always loud and clear, and, in a world with so many hidden agendas, that is extremely comforting to me.
Colorado only recalled a couple of license plates that I heard about. One was “Balls.” They thought the guy was a Bronco fan. The other one was “Merde,” which they recalled after someone told them it was a naughty word in French.
Not that there are a lot of hicks (er, unsophisticated folks) in Colorado.
I have no problem with being called a bitch. If I can’t get what needs to be done accomplished through respect, I’ll take fear.
I’m a bitch!
I’m a bitch!
Oh, the bitch is back!
Stone cold sober as a matter of fact
I can bitch!
I can bitch!
Because I’m better than you
It’s the way that I move
The things that I do
Go Hillary! Behold the power of the Bitch!
I think that for me and all of my friends in school, bitch doesnt necessarily mean someone who stands up for themselves or voices their opinion and refuses to back down. It doesnt have a male vs woman connotation, its an entirely female attacking female word (for us at least).
For example, my most recent use of the word was in describing a certain girl in my class who is nasty. She is the type that will flirt with all the popular guys, sweet talk everyone around her, and turn around and gouge your eyes out for a laugh. There is no voicing of opinions that others find offensive, or the fact that she is higher in the social order. It’s what she does to stay that high in the social order, the back stabbing and sniping, and it is the fact that she is plain and simple a mean person that earned her the title.
At the same time, though, add an -es to the end and you get a comedic device. In my school you can tack bitches on to any part of a sentence and it will sound funny, even if later you have no idea why. It’s gotten to the point that I use it as a memory tool when studying, because for whatever reason it gets stuck in my mind. A recent example being my history class, I couldnt remember “Britain wanted to control the colonial trade” but I could remember “Britain said ‘we control your money bitches!’” Add those two letters just nullifies any kind of insult or negative connotation for the word. If anything, it gives it a more positive swing.
I think that the intent of the speaker does weigh in a lot of how the word is perceived, but at the same time the word itself caries power regardless of tone or intention. In all honesty, I will take offense to anyone under any circumstances calling me a cunt regardless of intent or tone, but if someone calls me a fucktard I’ll probably laugh and/or hit them. To me, certain words you just do not use, and cunt is one of them. Pussy also makes me uncomfortable, insult wise, and even as a slang term because now I cant think about kittens without having vagina running through my mind. Makes for some awkward situations. Plus, it seems that even if a guy is using the word pussy to demean another man, he is demeaning me just by suggesting that having a pussy makes you weak, less worthy, whatever.
In my school insults seem to run more on the creative side, rather than traditional,though, so words like bitch dont pop up that often I think they loose a lot of their sting as a result. Plus, if you are insulted by someone prone to swearing under everyday circumstances its not that big of a deal. My friends know that if I call them an assfuck I’m not insulting them, because the word usually follows me dropping an “oh, fuck monkeys”, and really how can you voice a serious insult after that?
Okay, completely off the subject, I have a picture of a vehicle in Salinas, CA with the license plate: IHAV2POO.
HAHAHAHHAHA!
And Shannon, I’m totally using your “bitches” memory tool for the rest of my classes this year. That is fantastic! Analysis310: Strong schemata aid long term memory and mind-set, bitches!
Well, I for one do run around yelling “Whee! I’m a dyke!” Based at least on my sample set, dyke has been reclaimed just as much as queer (for the record, so has fag).
The way I explained it to a friend once: “Look, I call myself a dyke, a queer, a bitch, even sometimes a faggot. You can call me any of those things, as long as you aren’t throwing a beer bottle at my head.” It’s not the word, it’s what goes along with it.
But maybe I’m not the person to ask: my nickname in college was Cunty McCunt.
Hey, don’t bitch to me about elections; ours is this weekend.
I enjoy hearing young blokes(late teens early twenties)calling each other soft cocks.
Aussies vote on weekends? Oh, MAN. I hope you have good voter turnout!
And I’m now going to run around my inlaws home tonight yelling, “Whee! I’m a dyke, bitches!” thanks to Shannon and Laurel. My entire family will SO be thankful.
Only slightly off-topic here, but there’s a license plate on a classic Mustang in my Florida neighborhood that says H07 5EX.
I’m amazed that one got past the censors at the DMV.
-Sarah
Anything I can do to make the Thanksgiving experience more fun for everyone ; )
Slightly off-topic PSA:
Since the Iowa caucus is January 3 and the NH primary is January 8, saying you’re going to wait until 2008 to follow the presidential election season is like saying you’re going to wait until October to start watching baseball (which is what I do, but politics shouldn’t be a spectator sport).
So get involved and informed now, or you’ll have to take whichever candidate your party’s machine and the mainstream media shove down your throat. Because by the middle of January, it’ll all be over.
Now back to your regularly scheduled bitchery.
I’m still in the midst of Pie Hangover (my mom made four for Thursday, and we have two of them left!), so I can’t be very thinky about the “bitch” word, but I can share with you the best license plate (read: unintentionally hilarious) I ever saw:
My friend and I were on a road trip in Wisconsin and saw a car ahead of us with what we assume was supposed to be interpreted as J IS LORD, with J = Jesus. However, due to the number of available spaces, this very religious lady’s license plate read (wait for it…):
JISLORD.
We tried for several miles to get close enough to take a picture, but the I-94 traffic wasn’t cooperating.
I find the very idea of proprietary language somehow wrong. Ask me how… no idea. But restricting which words are usable by whom is… well, dangerous territory. And sooooo often when false accusations of racism/bigotry/pick-a-phobia are flung, it is due to a knee-jerk reaction to something like this. Ralph can’t say THAT because he’s THIS. Susie Whitegirl said “homey” so she’s a racist.
Umm. No.
I don’t use “the N word,” but I feel like a fucking moron saying “the N word.” I am careful about how I use language with regard to sexual preference, gender, race, religion. But I really resent anyone slapping labels on every person who feels entitled to use language freely.
Dog the Bounty Hunter pissed me off and I’m glad he’s now an instant has-been. But it really DOES seem unfair to me that there seems to be an undefined Board of Appropriate Usage out there lurking, waiting to be seated across from Bill O’Reilly or Larry King with a big fucking wax seal of condemnation for anyone they decide deserves it.
How’s that for a completely useless chunk of prose?
SB Sarah,
Aussie politicians can do the election-on-a-Saturday thing because you HAVE to cast a vote. You can cast a ‘donkey vote’ if you want – deliberately filling in the preference boxes wrong or writing something crude on the ballot, for example – and your vote won’t be counted as valid, but a resident or citizen of Australia has to be on the electoral roll by the time they turn eighteen, and has to cast a vote in their local/state/federal elections, whichever one comes first.
It’s a pretty simple system, but it can be a right pain in the arse if you’re not going to be in your electorate on the day…
Chicklet, that totally deserves a :gigglesnort: ! 🙂