Let’s talk about the term, fucking bitch. And why it’s triggering to women. Or more specifically, how often women hear it and why. These are just the times we hear it, not the times it’s said.
Yes, I’m actually spelling it out. If spelling the whole words out is truly offensive to you, ask yourself if you’re equally offended by what the words mean and how they’re used.
When was the last time you heard it said to YOU? What were the circumstances? It seems to come in response to a woman not complying. Not that she’s just existing, but that she’s not doing something she’s told to do or pressured to do.
When was the last time someone said it to you?
I’ll go first—and this doesn’t include times I’ve heard it said to waitresses who said no-thanks to a line or female bartenders who cut a guy off after he got aggressive.
The most recent time for me was a couple of days before Christmas in my new neighborhood. I woke to someone banging on my door with his fists, hard enough to shake my bedroom wall, and ringing the doorbell repeatedly, despite my little sign that says I’M A DAYSLEEPER: DO NOT DISTURB. I literally thought there was an emergency or maybe the guys working across the street at my neighbor’s BnB had hit my car or something.
Nope. The guys working across the street were offering their services to others on my street, or so he said from my front steps when he saw me through the front door and was all fake-nice. I wasn’t buying and I knew my landlord wouldn’t either. I just shook my head, so then he stood in front of my house yelling, before saying, “Fucking bitch!” and stomping off.
I still watch for him in my neighborhood.
There have been plenty of other times, and I’m not sure which was scariest.
It might have been the time a married colleague with control over my career took several of us on a business trip to someplace snowy, and none of us knew how to drive on icy roads. He drove the rest of us back to our hotels after a mandatory group dinner and dropped us off one by one. When I was the last one in the car, he tried to take me back to his hotel instead of dropping me at mine. I insisted he take me directly to my hotel, not out for a drink or any of his other suggestions. I was married at the time, in case you’re wondering. When I finally got back to my hotel and couldn’t get out of the car fast enough, he said just loud enough for me to hear, “Fucking bitch.” I had to work with him for several more months until I could get moved off the team. It was him or me, and he was the technical expert, so I was replaceable. I was willing to risk my career path to steer clear of him.
It might’ve been a Defense contractor who thought he could belittle me enough that I’d give in on a negotiation and hand him taxpayer dollars he couldn’t justify. He waited until there were none of my male colleagues in the room before he gathered his notebooks in a huff and stomped away, right before turning and saying, “You know what? You’re a fucking bitch.” For not giving away the farm in a negotiation deal. I had an ongoing, unrelated contract with him that I administered, so I still saw him daily in my office area, sometimes when I was alone, working overtime after hours, for the next year. He was scary when he was mad, threw folders, kicked things. You didn’t want to be the brunt of his fury. But the guys I worked with thought I was “overreacting.”
No, I remember the scariest:
I had just given evidence about a guy to the military investigators because my job required me to (security reasons). It was ethically the right thing to do, but I could have lost my own clearances for looking the other way. He was an outgoing, “fun” guy. His bosses not only protected him and helped him destroy evidence he had on him minutes before the investigators arrived at his workplace, but told him who had given evidence against him. After he called me a “fucking bitch out to ruin my life,” I ended up with the military equivalent of a restraining order for him to stay away from me as well as my kid. His girlfriend told me about his violent history, and he knew where I lived, so I looked over my shoulder until I moved away years later.
Or the scariest time might have been—yes, this is it, definitely—when I had a dozen furious men at my front door (of the house I sold) who were subcontractors to a certain roofing company I cannot talk about (part of our settlement agreement). The old shingles had been removed from the entire roof and the new ones weren’t on. Rain was coming in the next day or so. There was a ladder against my house and an open skylight. Nothing tarped. Though the roofers took 11 days to “finish” the job (2 more for someone else to redo it), this was, like, day 2, and my roof was unprotected.
Close to quitting time on Friday, the men came to my door with a document to sign that they’d finished and I was satisfied. Their foreman said I needed to sign it so they could get paid. I told them I’d sign that they had finished the job when they actually finished the job—because once I accepted it, the company got the money and I had no recourse.
They went berserk. “Fucking bitch” was only one of the things they called me, but the most prevalent. I had my kids slip out the back door and down the jogging path to safety while I talked to the men. Then while they were blocking my exit through the front door and threatening me, I slipped out the back with my keys and wallet, met up with the girls a block away, and we left unseen in my car, which was down the street. Neighbors—who had not been helpful—told me later that they were there long after I’d driven to safety, beating on the door and yelling profanities. They took buckets of roofing nails and scattered them across my front yard. When I returned days later—after a rainstorm—the upturned nails on my driveway were so thick that we had to pick our way to the front door. That was definitely the scariest time, though, because it wasn’t just my safety at risk but my pre-teen daughters’.
But just looking at a handful of times of the many times I’ve heard it said directly to me, always in anger, it seems to be a response to not complying with a man’s wishes/demands. It’s so second-nature to these men to respond this way that there is always an element of wondering how, if, and when a woman’s non-compliance will be punished. Once it’s said, a woman knows he’s not a safe person—that he’s reactive when told no.
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