Strong opinions, delivered without the padding of soft compliments, might feel mean, too. Or afraid you could not rise to the occasion. Which takes me to the root of my aversion: Why, in women, was (and is) strength equated with meanness? A woman burning with sexual desire might, I suppose, seem scary, if you were guarding societal norms that tried to constrain the wanton. “I know you’d like it if I stayed home and cried/But that ain’t gonna happen, here’s the reason why.” She has calculated the choice and decided to risk sounding like an unapologetic bitch: “Sometimes you know I gotta call it like it is.” “Said it, did it, hit it, quit it,” she sang. When Madonna recorded “Unapologetic Bitch” nearly half a century later (on her Rebel Heart album Rebel, in which the word “bitch” is used forty-four times), nobody blinked. When Miles was about to change the face of jazz with his new album, she suggested the explosive title “Bitches Brew” instead of his milder “Witches Brew.” The album is now immortal, but at the time, even some music critics winced and kept their distance. Miles Davis’s wife Betty Davis, managed to own the word “bitches” back in 1970, maybe because it was already used more easily in Black slang. “It’s easily recognized due to its curious facial phenotype,” they reported: “lips and brow not quite angry or sad, the lip tightened and raised more strongly on one side than the other.” Yet we do not call it Resting Jerk Face. Behavioral researchers used Noldus Information Technology’s FaceReader to measure RBF and found just as many unconscious expressions of contempt in men. Are women trying so hard-smiling so brightly, glossing our lips and widening our eyes and composing an interested expression-that the minute we relax, all the contempt we have stifled slides across our faces?Īh, but wait. I tried to make myself like the word “crone,” knowing I was aging into it, but “resting bitch face” undid me. The only male name so privileged is a Chad, who is an attractive, confident, sexually active alpha male. A Karen, for example, is White, entitled, racist, and, yeah, bitchy. Ogilvie also noted that the latest set of pejoratives is female first names. Slang words for women outnumber slang words for crime, for drugs, for drinking, even for sex. “There are more than 3,000 pejorative words for women in English slang.” Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist and lexicographer who directs the Dictionary Lab at the University of Oxford. It was downhill from there.Ī handful of language experts associated with the Oxford English Dictionary had great fun a few weeks ago at a discussion titled “‘Bitch,’ ‘bint,’ and ‘maid’: exploring sexist language in the dictionary.” “There are 1,500 words for vagina,” pointed out Dr. But by the fifteenth century, the word was applied to women who dared show intense sexual desire (like an unleashed bitch in heat). The Old English bicce was the word for a female dog and was probably used as casually as dog-show people use it today. You can feel the affection in the exclamation, made in 1896, “Oh great-hearted sweet bitch Emily Bronte.” In 1785, “to stand bitch” merely meant to make tea or perform a female role. Or rather, the behavior always repelled, but the word was softer. ![]() We all step back, eager to avoid Mom’s wrath.Īpparently it was not always thus. ![]() Permanent, full-time bitchiness repels anyone in its vicinity. “Does it say bitchy, Ray?” she retorts, knowing full well what drove him to the pharmacy. ![]() Not the kind suggested on Everybody Loves Raymond, after Ray finds Debra a PMS remedy and triumphantly lists the symptoms it relieves. That is the kind of bitch I would like to be. “Pola Oloixarac is a bitch,” writes Adam Morris in The Point, explaining, “While a satirist endeavors to reveal that the emperor has no clothes, a bitch will point out when he is very badly dressed.” “Queer” is by now so amicable, it would make lousy ammo for a sniper. Even partial success means there is one less insult in our vocabulary (at least until someone invents a new one, see below). But directed at one woman, the word still trails its old sense: snarling meanness, and before that, a dog crazed with lust.Ĭan you ever fully reclaim a word? Some activists and social theorists say is dangerous even to try you will weaken your cause. The card relaxes my resistance applied to a group of women, “bitches” creates instant camaraderie, neutralizing all negative connotations. The casual use of “bitch,” with fondness or in teasing, has taken me some getting used to. I buy the card and leave it on the kitchen table for days, reconditioning myself. “Namaste, bitches!” calls the blowsy, purple-clad yoga instructor on the greeting card, pulling all the sting from the word.
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