Ask a Bitchy Feminist

This time we have a delightfully fun question from a newish blogger with a pink pony and a five o'clock shadow.

Dear Bitchy Feminist,

Hi! I'm an avid reader of your blog and was wondering if you would care to offer your perspective on something for my friends and me (or at least direct me to previous posts where you've already addressed the topic).

My questions center around the word "bitch." A few of us have been having a rather extended conversation surrounding its use, and the general consensus is that it's an extremely gendered term (and not in a positive sense) used to oppress opinionated women and to marginalize stereotypically feminine behaviors in men and women. The controversy we've been discussing surrounds the reclaimation of this term and if it's even possible to do without having to explain your gender politics extensively. (Let's face it, cunt was a lot easier in this respect...)

As an opinionated woman who embraces an online identity as a bitch with gusto (which I share as well), what is your perspective on the term? Toward men? Toward women? Do you see this word as able to be reclaimed? If so, how? Any sepcific/unique obstacles? What about women who use the word as a term of endearment amongst each other? Or gay men referring to themselves as being bitchy? What about it's bearing on class/power (for example, to make someone your bitch)? Are there any unique manifestations or uses of the word you've encountered?

Any input on this topic (or just completely random information) you'd like to bless our little contingent with would be much appreciated. Feel free to espond in your own time. There's no hurry. Most likely my friends and I will still be arguing about it a year from now...haha.

I agree. "Bitch," which as everyone and their dog knows means an unspayed female dog, gets used colloquially not so much to oppress opinionated women (who don't give a rat's ass) as to oppress women who hesitate about observing, commenting on, or arguing about the world around them. No one wants to be a bitch or, as the kids are calling it nowadays (and dear god, how I hate it), "beyotch." Let us declare a moratorium on "beyotch" immediately; it only gets used in a nasty, mean way and if you're too delicate to just come out and call someone a bitch, you have no business bitching about them.

Now, bitching means complaining ceaselessly and fruitlessly, much like whining or nagging, which no one wants to do or suffer through. But the thing is, it's the fruitless part that differentiates bitching from critique, polemic, and argument. And, as we all know, the primary reason bitching is fruitless is because it's dismissed as bitching. The primary reason people bitch is because they don't really expect whatever's bugging them to change, and so they fall back on frustrated and frustrating complaint. I recommend against this activity.

Ironically, though, I started the blog under the pseud "bitch, ph.d." because I was feeling kinda stuck in academe, not sure I wanted to be there, and not sure I really had the right to feel that way. After all, I'd gone through this grad program, my husband had faithfully supported me the whole time, I'd gotten a t-t job my first year out, I was teaching in a department that had a new grad program I'd have the chance to help shape, I wasn't especially worried about my ability to get tenure. I'd won the grad school jackpot. How dare I look the gift horse in its toothy mouth? How dare I mix my metaphors this way? How dare I spend my office hours blogging and web surfing rather than writing my next article, punching my not-half-bad dissertation into a monograph, revelling in my ability to spend the rest of my life researching, thinking, writing, and teaching about stuff that I genuinely think is kinda interesting?

And yet, here I was, bitching about it. Ah well, I thought flippantly, in that shruggy way of mine, fuck it. If I want to bitch about shit, I will; no one is going to read this damn blog anyway, and if they do, then that's fine too. Whatever.

And lo, not two weeks into the thing I ran into a few like-minded bitchy academic women: Profgrrrl, Dr. Crazy, and a few other folks who weren't quite so bitchy, like New Kid, Mel, and Becky Hirta. And over time, we ran into other like-minded academic men, some bitchy, some not. And then I started bitching about Big People, like Larry Summers and Kevin Drum (well, he's big in blogland), and boy howdy, nothing gets you noticed like bitching about important guys. And then, like, all of a sudden people were paying attention to my bitching!

Which, does that make it less bitchy, by definition? No, and yes. No, because when you start bitching big, and people start actually paying attention to it, a lot of people will respond to your bitching by telling you what a bitch you are. That is, they'll try to define what you're doing as "bitching"; as pointless, uninformed, and petty. But, see, they're doing that because in fact your bitching is getting noticed and is in danger of actually making a difference to someone. After all, the bitching of academic women contributed to Larry Summers losing his job, and the bitching of blogging women led Kevin Drum to reconsider his blogroll and the ways he thought about women opinionators, and the bitching of other blogging women led to BlogHer and the death from ridicule of the "where are the women bloggers?" question and a lot of raised consciousness around the notable absence of women on op-ed pages everywhere. And the more I realized that my own personal bitching was, in fact, interesting to read, the more I realized that I don't have to be a good girl and follow the yellow brick road of academic achievement. I can use my fancy red shoes to go home, to move back and forth between home and Oz, or to go find some new path, and my friends will help me if I just ask.

So I think that's kind of the thing about bitching. If you're doing it all alone, and it's falling on deaf ears, and you feel powerless, it's easy to feel like bitching is pointless. And that, of course, is why some people call other people bitches--to try to isolate them, marginalize what they're doing, keep other women from joining them in bitching. But when bitchy women start bitching at each other, and then bitching together in a kind of bitches coven, it does make a difference. It makes you realize you're not alone, and you do have the right to feel ticked off about whatever's twisting your knickers, and hey, now that you mention it, my panties are in a bunch too, and why the fuck don't clothing manufacturers make underwear that doesn't ride up your crack? It's not that my ass is uniquely wedgie-prone! It's that bikini panties suck! Fuck this shit, we want briefs, and damn the idiots who try to tell us that "granny panties" are unflattering--like pulling your bikinis out of your ass is becoming, give me a break. And some of us want boy-type briefs, darn you, and I don't care if you think that's dykish: I am a dyke, or at least some of my best friends are. Or maybe we actually do think thongs are comfortable and don't care if you think they're slutty, or look cheap if they ride over our waistband, or reveal our cellulite-pocked ass cheeks.

Okay, I went kind of off-topic there. But you get the point. If being a bitch means being isolated and shoved to the margins, then that fucking sucks, and most reasonabe people will try not to end up there. But then again, if enough reasonable women reason out that it kind of sucks to wear stupid underwear, or hear that women are innately untalented at math and science, or be told that they don't exist when we are standing right here, damnit, and the lot of us start bitching about whatever it is, then we get used to hearing ourselves complain and it sounds a lot less unreasonable to do so. And the cacophany of bitchiness gets so loud that everyone else finally hears it and realizes that they need to move the hell over to where we are and include us in their conversations, and join our conversations, bring us into the party, or else the party is effectively over. Man.