A Brief Meditation on the word Bitch

[carbonatedwit]

Bitch is bad
Bitch is a word with lots of negative connotations. It's a gendered insult that often means "how dare you, female gendered person, for stepping out of your socially assigned place" or even simply "you female gendered person didn't give me what I want, and now I am going to reassert social dominance over you".

The verb form is also gendered, and also not okay to use. It's a gendered slur, even when it's applied to male gendered people, because the action it describes is a behavior that is coded as female, and is thus devalued. There's lots of words as good or better: complaining, griping, whining, arguing, demanding... use something else instead.

Except when it's good
But because the word has a history of being associated with strong female-gendered people who stood up and stood out, it's being reclaimed. Plenty of people are using the word to positively describe strong, assertive, powerful people. Not that this is unproblematic; these people are still usually female gendered, for instance, and the kind of strength connoted by bitch tends to be limited by archetype.

Still, since reasonable people are taking bitch as a positive word, I don't want to ban the word on the board. Instead, I'm going to ask that people refrain from using it as an insult towards anyone of any gender. People who want to reclaim the word are free to use it for themselves.

Eating crackers
As for the Bitch Eating Crackers meme -- I love the meme. I love having a word for that feeling of intense dislike and frustration, because once I can name it, I can control it in myself. I can remember "oh hey, I may not be right about that person being obviously the evilest evil ever, because I am at the eating crackers stage with them!"

Fortunately, we can keep the meme and fix the language. Instead of using bitch in that phrase, we can cut it right down to eating crackers. Or replace it with jerk or something that is not full of gender-based hatred.

Other uses
The only time to use any kind of dog-breeding exception for the word bitch is if you are in a thread about the literal production of infant canines, and are speaking of literal female canines. Someone always asks about this. If you're not in a thread about dog breeding, find another word for your canine companion.

[Rose Fox]

This seems really reasonable as a policy--thanks for being so thoughtful about it!

[mooocow]

two hundred years later, but still: Very good policy.
I like using the crackers with a slot: X eating crackers. That can be extended to co-worker eating crackers, professor eating crackers, dude eating crackers, ex eating crackers, etc.