The Bitch is Back, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

February 24, 2014 Martha Thomases 10 Comments

Let us now praise famous bitches.

Well, they don’t have to be famous.  They just have to be bitches.

Calling a woman a bitch is supposed to shut her up.  No woman is presumed to want to be demanding, assertive, and opinionated.  Men won’t like us, and that is the standard by which women’s behavior is often judged.

The older I get, the less I care about what men, as a class, think about me.  In fact, I also care less about what the specific men I know think about me.  Coincidentally, the more I get called a bitch, the more I get done.

A bitch is a woman who gets shit done.  Whether it’s calling out the racist hypocrisy of Stand Your Ground laws or looking at actual facts in the discussion of the minimum wage, some women on television news don’t worry about being called names.

This is a big change from how things were when I was a girl.  If I saw a woman on the news, the only opinions she would express were about dishwashing detergents.

And women are standing up for themselves even when there are no =television cameras around.  In a story that gets not enough national =attention, the prosecutors in Missoula, Montana, apparently think rape isn’t a real crime. Because bitches got angry and wouldn’t take it, the Justice department is now involved.  To quote from the link, “According to the Justice Department’s letter, in one instance, a deputy county attorney in Missoula allegedly quoted religious passages to a woman who’d reported sexual assault “in a way that the victim interpreted to mean that the Deputy County Attorney was judging her negatively for have made the report.” In another case, the Justice Department spoke to a woman whose daughter was sexually assaulted, at the age of five, by an adolescent boy, who was sentenced to two years of community service for the crime. A prosecutor handling the case allegedly told the mother that ‘boys will be boys.’ Another sexual-assault victim discussing prosecution options was allegedly told by a deputy county attorney, ‘All you want is revenge.’”

Really?  A man is walking around free whom the woman thinks assaulted her, and her desire to get him off the streets is merely vengeful?  How selfish of her!

You know what else is selfish?  Not wanting to step over homeless people when one goes about one’s business.  Certainly, that is my preference.  In Thursday’s paper, there was a story about a new experiment to take the homeless off the street, and the bitch who helped to make it happen.  To quote. “Ask the residents about Ms. Severn, 66, and they will describe her as a Trotskyist, a second mother and a saint.”

Anyway, I could go on indefinitely.  And my point is not to say that men never stand up for themselves.  Absolutely not.  Nor do I wish to imply that men never stand up for others.  Rather, men don’t usually worry about having their masculinity called into question by people who disagree with them in the same way that women do.

A friend of mine recently asked for my advice.  A mutual friend of ours was just diagnosed with a particularly horrible kind of cancer (not that there are any fun kinds) and, as his medical proxy, she was scrambling to track down all the ephemera one needs to navigate the hospital system =we enjoy so much in this country.  Because she is his friend and not his wife nor a blood relative,she was having a terrible time.  At first, I racked my memory, trying to remember what worked and what didn’t when I had to do these things.

And then I remembered.

“Be a bitch,” I sold her.  “This is what it is for.”

Too often, we worry about upsetting doctors or administrators.  In fact, =they work for us.  I’m not suggesting that she have a temper tantrum =on the floor, or scream out for someone to move a little faster.  Those behaviors are not effective.  (They are human, and medical professionals are not fazed by them, but they don’t get us what we want.)  Stating =firmly what she wants, and making it obvious that she expects to get the =material right away should do the trick.

I couldn’t have done that in my twenties.  I didn’t know I could do it in my fifties, but I had to.  Twice.  I don’t want to do it again, but I will if I have to, and no name-calling man is going to scare me.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases tries to choose her battles.  Sometimes, they choose her.