Bitch is a Slur
Both by definition and in practice, bitch has always been a slur imposed on women, often with violence.
“Words can be used to educate, to clarify, to inform, to illuminate. Words can also be used to intimidate, to threaten, to insult, to coerce, to incite hatred, to encourage ignorance…Words matter because words significantly determine what we know and what we do.” - Andrea Dworkin, Letters From A Warzone
Dworkin wasn’t the first to acknowledge the weight of words and she won’t be the last. Language is what made us human, more than animal, and without the power of words we would have never evolved past hunter-gatherers and built modern day societies. For all that words have given us, many have also taken away - our respect, our autonomy, our humanity. Slurs have been integral in the creation and continuation of false hierarchies - race, ethnicity, sexuality, intelligence, and yes, even sex.
The definition of slur is “to talk about disparagingly or insultingly”; the definition of bitch is “used as a generalized term of abuse and disparagement for a woman.” By definition, bitch is a slur - as are all other misogynistic terms situated in devaluing and disparaging women: cunt, whore, slut, motherfucker, son of a bitch. They all have different origins and present-day uses yet they all reinforce the power dynamic of male dominance over women. Consider what Melissa Febos argues in her book Girlhood: “In Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary (the precursor to the Oxford English) a slut is simply a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation. In the nineteenth century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the twentieth century its meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, "a woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive." It is a brilliant linguistic trajectory. Make the bad housekeeper a woman of poor morals. Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other act becomes a potentially immoral one. Make her a bitch, a dog, a pig, any kind of subservient or inferior beast. Create one word for them all. Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her.” (italics mine) These slurs were created by men to strip the humanity from women, to liken them to lowly animals, to reinforce the supremacy of men’s humanity over women’s.
Dworkin in Pornography: Men Possessing Women explains how the origins of these words create and enforce sex-based power dynamics: “Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual domination. Indeed, outside that framework the notion of whores would be absurd and the usage of women as whores would be impossible. The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as a whore. Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination.” You could substitute “whore” in this excerpt for any other misogynistic slur and the point remains the same - men created and primarily still utilize these slurs as an integral part of upholding the hierarchical system of male domination and women’s subjugation that benefits them at the expense of women.
Women don’t need theory or quotes to spell this out for them though - most women have experienced firsthand the way angry men weaponize these words against us, privately and publicly. When we say no, when we fight back, when we stand up for ourselves, when we prioritize ourselves, when we take up space or hold a position society believes is only for men; when we don't fit any individual man's idea of what a woman should be. It's obvious men understand this too, because when a woman has had enough and argues “bitch is a slur,” she's always met with men calling her a bitch in response. It's an acknowledgement, an agreement, that it is a slur - a slur that gives them the societal power that makes it socially acceptable for them to weaponize these slurs against her even after she's explicitly said no. It's an expression of their power; further validation of their dominance.
The stakes are often higher than linguistic power plays when men weaponize these slurs against women, because as many women know from experience men use these slurs in tandem with violence. David Buss discusses the direct correlation between misogynistic slurs and violence against women with this study in his book Why Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault: “Abuse works by hijacking the woman’s psychology in several ways. First, it lowers the victim’s self-esteem. Consider the statement “He calls you names [e.g., bitch, whore] to put you down and make you feel bad.” In a study of 8,385 mateships (married or living together), IPV and this type of denigration were tightly linked. Among women who reported no physical violence from their partner, only 3 percent reported that their partner undermined their self-esteem in this way; 22 percent of women who reported nonserious violence had partners who undermined their self-esteem through this form of verbal abuse; and a whopping 48 percent who had been seriously battered had partners who undermined them in this way.” (italics mine)
The correlation between these slurs and violence goes well beyond an interpersonal issue; there is a clear pattern of men using these slurs in conjunction with violence against women in institutional settings: “It was among dozens of disturbing findings made public Monday in a scathing report on conditions at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, where the U.S. Department of Justice concluded officers coerce prisoners into sexual acts, grope them during strip searches and “routinely” demean them as “bitches,” “dykes" and other slurs.” (source) It’s evident men always fall back on deploying these slurs in tandem with violence to reinforce their domination, even after decades of women’s attempts to reclaim them.
Speaking of the attempted reclamations, the arguments for reclamation are always the exception and not the rule for the use of these slurs: women using these words among friends gives men an easy excuse when they're called out for their use of these slurs against women, and it gives women an easy excuse when weaponizing these slurs against fellow women thus reinforcing the misogynistic meaning of these slurs; anyone, but primarily men, using these slurs against men don't use them because they're "gender neutral", they use them because the insult, the slur, is comparing a man to women, labeling him inferior, dehumanizing him to the lower position of women. Most importantly, the arguments for reclamation ignore the way these loaded slurs can leave scars on women; a woman who's been called a “bitch” while suffering physical and/or sexual violence will most likely have trauma linked to the slur and won't think it's a lighthearted, inconsequential pet name for her friends to call her. Arguing that the exceptional uses of these slurs should trump the typical uses to make them socially acceptable places the onus on abuse victims to spell out what these slurs mean to them in an attempt to reinforce their boundaries. Any argument that disregards abuse victims, especially when the topic at hand is inherently linked to the abuse the victim experienced, is inherently flawed and implicitly works in service of abusers.
Through attempts to “reclaim” these slurs we are ourselves reinforcing the supremacy and domination of men; we are molding our language and our lives around the misogynistic framework they created that places us below them. One cannot hold fast to what has made them a second class citizen and achieve true liberation from their secondary place in society. bell hooks said it best in Communion: The Female Search for Love: “A female who chooses to be a bitch is actually choosing to stay within the boundaries sexism has prescribed for us; she is neither a genuine rebel nor a revolutionary. She is merely capitulating to the sexist notion that to be powerful she must be a bitch.”
After years of attempted reclamations it’s time to let these words go. They remain loaded slurs that reflect still-prevalent power dynamics between women and men and are utilized in tandem with the routine male violence women experience. As Melissa Febos says in Girlhood, “I don’t want to take the word slut back, like I don’t want to own a gun. It was never mine.”