when "bitch" became a man’s word
Medium | 27.01.2026 08:02
when "bitch" became a man’s word
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A Linguistic Leash We Never Asked For: How the patriarchy turned a noun into a weapon
I wasn't planning to write about misogyny today.
I was actually mid-scrolling on TikTok, half-watching while folding laundry, when @_gellifish appeared on my screen and said something that made me pause the video, rewind it twice, and abandon the laundry entirely. She was talking about the word "bitch"—specifically, why it hits differently when it comes from a man’s mouth than when women reclaim it among ourselves. And suddenly, all those times I’d been called the word, all those moments I’d watched it deployed like a tactical strike against women who dared to disagree, snapped into focus.
The thesis was deceptively simple: the correlation between a man's anatomy and the term "bitch" lies in the power dynamics embedded in patriarchal society. But the implications spiraled outward like cracks in glass.
According to Dale Spender’s Man Made Language, the dictionary itself—that supposedly neutral repository of meaning—was constructed by men as a tool of oppression. Slurs like "bitch" weren’t accidental linguistic evolutions; they were crafted, deliberately, to keep women contained. Judith Butler takes this further, arguing that slurs derive their force not from the words themselves but from the hierarchy standing behind the speaker. When a man calls a woman a bitch, he’s not just naming a behavior—he’s invoking an entire architecture of dominance.
I thought about this for days. Couldn't stop thinking about it, actually.
We’ve always known that context matters with language. The same word can be a term of endearment between friends and a slur from a stranger. But what @_gellifish articulated—and what Spender and Butler illuminate—is that the speaker’s position in a hierarchy fundamentally alters the word’s weight. A woman calling another woman a bitch can be playful, affectionate, even empowering in its reclamation. A man calling a woman a bitch is something else entirely. It’s a reminder of the place. A correction. A punishment.
Men are socialized, from boyhood onward, to police women's autonomy. To reward compliance and punish defiance. The word "bitch" becomes a convenient shorthand for this policing—a way to dismiss, diminish, and discipline women who make men uncomfortable. Too assertive? Bitch. Too angry? Bitch. Won't smile on command? You can guess.
I started noticing it everywhere once I knew how to look. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood doesn’t need to use the word "bitch" to show us this dynamic—the entire structure of Gilead is built on the premise that women who assert autonomy must be broken and reshaped.
In Fleabag, the protagonist’s stepmother wields gendered expectations like weapons, but when Fleabag pushes back, she’s labeled difficult, inappropriate, a problem. The word "bitch" hovers just offscreen, implied in every disapproving glance.
Even in music, where women have reclaimed the term brilliantly—Meredith Brooks' "Bitch" comes to mind, or Lizzo’s entire discography—the reclamation only works because we understand what we’re reclaiming it from. The power of a woman saying "yes, I’m a bitch" lies in her refusal to be diminished by a word designed to diminish her. But that refusal only makes sense in a world where the word was first weaponized against her.
What makes this particularly insidious is how invisible the mechanism becomes. We're so accustomed to hearing "bitch" used against women who assert themselves that we stop questioning it. We internalize the lesson: if you don't want to be called a bitch, stay small. Stay quiet. Don't make anyone uncomfortable.
I've caught myself doing this calculus. Softening my tone in meetings. Prefacing disagreements with apologies. Monitoring my facial expressions to ensure I don't appear "too" anything—too intense, too opinionated, too present. And every time I've done this, I've felt a flash of shame at my own complicity, followed immediately by exhaustion at the impossible bind: assert yourself and risk the slur, or disappear yourself and lose your voice entirely.
Butler argues that the force of a slur comes from its repetition—from the accumulated weight of every previous time it's been used to harm. Each time a man calls a woman a bitch for speaking up, he's not just expressing momentary frustration; he's drawing on centuries of linguistic architecture designed to keep women subordinate. He's reaching into a well that patriarchy dug deep and keeps filling.
This is why the speaker's anatomy—or more precisely, their position in the gender hierarchy—matters so profoundly. A man using "bitch" isn't reclaiming anything. He's not subverting power; he's wielding it. He's reaching for a tool that was made for his hand, that fits his grip perfectly, that was designed to do exactly what he's doing with it.
I keep thinking about language as inheritance. We don't choose the words we're born into, the meanings already embedded in them, the power structures they carry like genetic code. But we do choose—or can choose, with effort and awareness—how we use them, whether we reinforce or resist their original intent.
When women reclaim "bitch," we're attempting to strip the word of its sting, to transform a weapon into a badge. Sometimes it works. Sometimes we succeed in making the word our own, in laughing at the absurdity of being punished for qualities that would be praised in men: confidence, directness, refusal to apologize for existing.
But reclamation is exhausting labor. And it only becomes necessary because the word was weaponized in the first place.
What @_gellifish helped me see is that we can’t fully understand the violence of gendered slurs without understanding the power dynamics that give them force. A word is never just a word. A slur is never just a sound. Both carry the accumulated weight of who’s allowed to say what to whom, who gets punished for speaking, who gets believed, who gets silenced.
Scrolling through TikTok, looking for distraction, and instead finding the kind of clarity that disrupts your entire afternoon. The laundry never did get folded.
Maybe that's the gift of good thinking, wherever you encounter it—it doesn't let you look away. It doesn't let you stay comfortable in your half-awareness. @_gellifish offered me an articulation I'd been reaching for without knowing it, a framework that made sense of patterns I'd been living but couldn't quite name. And now I can't un-see it: the architecture of language, built by those in power, designed to keep the rest of us in line.
The question, as always, is what we do with that seeing. Whether we keep reaching for the tools that were made to harm us, or whether we build something new entirely—a language that doesn't require constant reclamation, that doesn't measure women against their willingness to make men comfortable.
I don't have an answer yet. I'm still folding that laundry, metaphorically speaking, still pausing mid-task to think about power and words and who gets to wield which against whom. Still learning to pay attention to what I'm actually paying attention to—not just the words themselves, but the weight they carry, the hands that hold them, the world they build with every utterance.
Infinite gratitude to @_gellifish on TikTok for articulating what so many of us have felt but struggled to name. Your insight gave me something to write about—and more importantly, a lens to see the world more clearly. Thank you for the labor of thinking out loud.
