All women are bitches

"The man sitting behind me on a plane uttered, 'All women are bitches.'  The earnestness with which the phrase was said to a nearby stranger startled me.  After all, no one in his right mind would be talking like that...in public...in light of political correctness...surrounded by women.  Nevertheless, here he was, shaking his head, raucously trying to convince his neighbor that you 'gotta to women what you know they're gonna do to you,' clearly an understanding of type and a confession of emasculation. 

What startled me about this man's declaration was the unexpectedness of this comment because men just didn't talk or think that way anymore.  Women as bitches were another era and certainly not part of the second wave of feminist thought current in the media...Susan Appleton Aguiar's book, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature attests to why it is possible to have this misconception. 

Aguiar observes that the 'bitch' as type, is absent from contemporary feminist literature because in the second wave feminist writers attempts to reverse these prevalent stereotypes, they homogenize their women characters.  She contents that 'for all her ubiquitous presence in every other form of the media, the bitch has been noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon.  Until recently.'"  Think Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Fay Weldon, and Jane Smiley.

---- Donna L. Pasternak, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002)

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So, yes, the bitch is back, in all her bitchy, nasty, slutty glory.  And not a moment too soon. 

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