Recently a friend of my daughter came to visit. Two twelve-year-olds were typing half bored when the girl burst into the room screaming: “Yo, bitches!” I looked around the corner for a moment. It was not difficult.
I concluded that bitch is a perfectly accepted form of address among young teenagers. And that while the world was still shocked when the American Republican presidential candidate John McCain tolerated that his Democratic competitor Hillary Clinton was called a bitch†
According to the Oxford English Dictionary does the term bitch come from the word bicce what female dog means. Dog has long been considered an insult, but bitch adds a sexual, promiscuous dimension to it – think: bitch in heat on a sweaty summer’s day. Until the nineteenth century, bitch was just about the worst thing you could call a woman.
In the early twentieth century, usage of the word exploded. Cause: emancipation. Women asserted themselves in areas where men traditionally dominated. For these “brutal invaders,” the age-old swear word was dusted off and distributed liberally.
At the end of the twentieth century, bitch was thoroughly censored in the media, something Elton John in 1970 with his hit The Bitch is Back presented a modest challenge. The song still became a hit. Bitch crawls where it can’t go.
Nowadays Van Dale explains the word as ‘bitch’ or ‘bitch’. But since self-proclaimed bad bitch Beyoncé adopted the word as a nickname, is the barrier of the dam in pop culture. Bitch got a feminist facelift. Similar to the appropriation of the N-word by the black community. There are wines, socks, scented candles; there’s even a feminist culture site called BitchMedia. But, how sustainable is that facelift?
A word is never uprooted. Bitch has a checkered history and even if you use it in an emancipated way, you are referring back to the historical context in which it has been able to thrive. Doesn’t the use of such a tainted concept remain a sign of weakness? Language recovery or building on rotten, shaky boards?
Kanye West proved how closely it is with the load and the wind chill of bitch when he described Taylor Swift as such in one of his songs in 2016. Swift was not pleased. West invoked the feminist facelift. Well.
Where women appropriate the word, the opposite applies to men. A man called a bitch is dependent, subservient, servile. The common denominator: A bitch is someone who deviates from the traits traditionally associated with a specific gender. This once again sheds light on the stereotypes and retains its marginalizing effect.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 25, 2022
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