What it Feels Like for a BITCH

According to social norms, according to my peers, and, of course, according to my mother, I am a societal anomaly, a thread that sticks out of a hideous tapestry, a painful haemorrhoid in the metaphorical bum of life…

Whilst I may have lost you at haemorrhoid, I pray that you’ll at least hear me out long enough before you make up your mind to turn me off altogether.

Being a bitch is hard work. It really is. It requires dedication and a relentless persistence to never take the easy road towards something or away from anything.

Just to be clear… being a bitch does not mean you actively commit to a lifestyle of being an arrogant, self-righteous, condescending piece of shit individual that does things like:

- Send back every main course in every restaurant because the food there is simply not gourmet enough for your refined taste-buds, which should only ever taste food directly cooked and served by angels from heaven or at the very least, by Gordon Ramsay.

- Feel the nagging need to constantly remind everyone of how much there is in your multiple bank accounts at every given opportunity.

- Constantly talk in an over-the-top, Miley Cyrus would be proud American accent at all times, particularly whilst on the phone in a large group of people, even though you’ve never even left the country and consider going to Ain Sokhna as going abroad.

Being a bitch also does not entail cheating on every partner that has bothered to put up with this crap (boyfriend, husband, traumatized nerd that’s been in love with you since  adolescence) simply to prove that it is possible for you to get ANY GUY OUT THERE by being (to put it mildly) a sleazy whorebag.

That’s NOT being a bitch. Those girls just want the bumper sticker.

Being a bitch, quite simply, is being a non-conformist.

Again, this confuses some because we often tie non-conformity with hippies or with men with excessive amounts of chest hair riding Harleys. Or Charlie Sheen. But being a non-conformist is not about being ‘cool’, or being ‘rebellious’ or justifying shooting all sorts of hard-core drugs into the system using syringes or straws or whatever the hell is being used these days to slowly commit suicide; it is about shunning the meaningless and the superficial, it’s about embracing a critical way of thinking and of living on a day-to-day basis.

Non-conformity is to try and wrap one’s head around the existential questions that many have dedicated their lives to understanding, and being audacious enough to reach conclusions (or not) and to share those conclusions (or the lack thereof) with a society that will, more often than not, raise its eyebrows and middle finger at you and scream ‘BITCH’ in your face, just because you’ve discovered that the gooey mass in your cranium can be used for more than deciding which club to go to next week or trying to work out what that guy meant when he said, “I’ll call you later” that one time four years ago on a balcony during sunset while the seagulls flew on the horizon, undoubtedly throwing up at the thought of you obsessing about this scene and telling your grandchildren about it a gazillion years later….

I’m just saying I didn’t grow up wanting to be a bitch or wanting to be labelled as a bitch. When my teachers at school asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, believe me, I didn’t raise my hand and say, “Mr Collins, sir. I want to be a bitch!” I didn’t fantasize about the time when large audiences would rise up and chant, “Bitch, bitch, bitch” at the very sight of my face. It’s not on my resume and I don’t have the tattoo.

Nevertheless, that’s how I’m labelled by society. So rather than shunning it, I’ve decided to embrace it! I’m making it my own; I’m redefining it and giving it a little sugar and spice!

When I was in university, a professor of mine asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I looked him straight in the eye, and practically deafened him exclaiming, “My name is Sally and I’m going to change the world.” After the explosion of laughter had died down in the classroom (although, if you listen quietly sometimes, you can still hear the occasional snigger), I was left wondering what was so funny.

I went to my father for words of wisdom and I shared with him what had happened, hoping for some guidance. He told me something I would never forget, “Leave changing the world to God. Just live a good life and keep to yourself. You’re nothing in the grand scheme of things. You don’t want to be labelled a bitch, do you?”

Needless to say, I ignored him completely. I knew and know he meant well, but what he said had the ring of a generational lie passed down from one person to the next, to keep them helpless and in line with a world system that isn’t really working very well in the first place.

I think daily of all the women that are labelled as ‘bitches’ by people in their communities.

I think of Malala Yousafzai, the fifteen year old Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting the education of females.

I think of the amazing writer and activist, Eve Ensler, who wrote The Vagina Monologues and then dedicated her life to ending the brutal cycle of violence against women worldwide.

I think of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white woman at the height of segregation in the middle of the twentieth century in America, the ‘land of the free’.

I think of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman who travelled across the world to Palestine after reading of the struggles and the oppression of the Palestinians and was run over by an Israeli tank because she would not back down and be silenced.

I think of the nameless women in Egypt who get raped and/or harassed and then are blamed by their societies for bringing it upon themselves.

According to their societies and according to the times that they lived or live in, these women are by far the biggest fucking bitches in the playground. They are whores. They are cunts. They are full of shit. They are conspirators.

What they really are is inspirational. They are revolutionary. They are bold. They are strong. They are independent. And most of all, they knew and know that being labelled a bitch is hardly the worst thing in the world. Not by a long shot.

On matters of this nature, (as always) Oscar Wilde says it best: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

Being a bitch is an ideology and being a bitch is in! And as for the haters, as the never politically correct comedian, Kathy Griffin would say, “They can all suck it!”