Bitch: An Essay
Desiree O’Crosslin
I took a trip to the beach by myself last year. It was in the middle of COVID and I couldn’t take a dip in a communal pool or anything so I picked a hotel with a hot tub/bath in the room. And once I found out I could hook my phone up to the speakers in the tub I got some noise complaints. I had been drinking hard cider and utterly blasting “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks and for some reason the family with kids in the next room didn’t appreciate that.
I’ve always loved that song. I’ve always been someone who was seen as bitchy. At first it was mostly irritability from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. Even my mother couldn’t be patient with me when it was bad. My sister called me a bitch one day and I yelled, “Mom she just called me a bitch!” My mom, at her wit’s end, with none of us realizing why I was always so uncomfortable and twitchy, just said, “Well then stop acting like one.”
As I aged, I refused to conform. I do my own thing. I just don’t like a lot of things other people like. I like to read and sleep and hang out with my cats and only leave my house like once every six months. I’ve actually really enjoyed quarantine. And when I see something I don’t like I can’t just let it go. I speak up about it. And, I’ve learned through the years, this is a very annoying trait of mine. I’m the asshole that brings up politics at Thanksgiving. I butt my nose in when I see people being discriminated against (remind me to tell you about the time I made a ten year old at the park cry… don’t worry he deserved it.)
At my old job, we had a doctor who was known for being openly misogynistic. My position was as a psychology associate, a master’s level employee who wrote behavior plans for clients with intellectual disabilities. While I was not, myself, a doctor nor a member of the medical staff I was often a part of medical meetings to speak to the mental health aspects of the client. Typically these meetings were very interdisciplinary, involving medical professionals, myself, and people who had nothing to do with the medical department like house managers. One day I was stuck going to a meeting by myself with otherwise only medical doctors, including the man known for his sexism who happened to also be the director of the entire medical department.
Of course all the doctors were men who were decades older than myself, so I, at 29 with just a shitty master’s degree in a soft science, wearing red lipstick and a leopard print ensemble over my fat ass, stood out like a sore thumb. It was an intimidating meeting, but I was determined to get through it with poise.
Now I didn’t have a lot to say, but I had a few opinions and I was in that meeting that morning sharing them, when the medical director interrupted me. I shut my mouth, let him talk, then began to say what I’d been trying to say before the interruption.
Then. That motherfucker interrupted me again.
The first time, I wrote it off as maybe just a mistake, not realizing I wasn’t done talking. The second time I was pretty pissed, but I still let him speak over me and dominate the conversation again. The third time? I had fucking had it.
I just started speaking more loudly, over his interruption, and said, “...EXCUSE ME WILL YOU PLEASE LET ME FINISH WHAT I WAS SAYING?”
The medical director was shocked. He was clearly not used to being spoken to like that.
I was panicked. I wasn’t used to speaking to people quite like that.
But he seemed impressed. He chuckled, a little condescendingly at my moxie, threw his hands up and said, “Yes, I’m so sorry. Of course. Continue.”
I had actually forgotten what I was saying during the stress of the conflict and stalled by slowly and dramatically saying, “Thank you.” Once I eventually remembered what I had been saying, I got it out, and then before the director started speaking again he asked my permission to do so.
Interestingly, after this experience, the medical director loved me. He always greeted me by name in the hallway and in subsequent meetings he would go out of his way to ask my opinion.
He eventually was fired or asked to resign, I’m not sure which, for, of course, being an asshole (to people more important than myself). I saw him once in town, walking his dog along the beach along my normal jogging route. He came up jauntily and said hello, enthusiastically introducing me to his wife. I remember looking at his dog and feeling bad for her. His wife was in charge of her own life. If she wanted to be married to a man who was a jerk, that was her choice. But this sweet little labradoodle, who looked at her dad with such love in her eyes? That poor sap. I wanted to take her home with me.
As he cheerily walked away with his family, I frostily watched him leave, still unable to believe a man that successful hadn’t learned how to treat women and hoping he was different to his wife and that sweet dog.
We’ve all heard the statistics. Women can speak for 30% of a conversation and still be perceived as “dominating the conversation;” men acting assertive are given leadership roles, women doing so are labeled bitchy; women in leadership roles spend x amount more time trying to be “nice,” so as not to be labeled a hard ass, etc. But it doesn’t feel real or hit home until you’re in a situation wondering, “Why did I even have to say that?”
I sent my partner, Jim, a meme about “kneecapping” the other day. It was about how women are typically expected to add phrases like, “Maybe you can…” or “I sort of think…” instead of simply asking a person to do something or stating declaratively their own opinion. It makes us sound less intimidating, but also less firm in our requests.
We had been arguing the other day and he had asked me, “Ok I see your point, but could you say it more nicely?” Then he rephrased what I had just said with a couple variations of kneecapping and I had simply said no I was not going to do that. He’d been upset at the time and not really understood what the “big deal” was, so when a mutual friend of ours (a female, of course) had shared this meme on the topic, I sent it to him pointing out that this is exactly what he’d asked me to do the other day. He was much more agreeable to my point in this context and agreed to try not to ask me to do that again, but he did point out he felt there was a difference in how he’d expect a person to talk at work and in their home. I told him that was fair, but if I started kneecapping my speech for him, I’d start doing it out of the home as well.
Because kneecapping, and other things women do to not be “bitchy,” are ingrained so deeply in us that if we want to break one of those habits we must focus on that breaking every second of every day. We are programmed to be nice and diminutive and I’m just sick of it. I reminded him of the time I was reported for being unprofessional for simply leaving one meeting to attend another.
“Kneecapping, and other things women do to not be ‘bitchy,’ are ingrained so deeply in us that if we want to break one of those habits we must focus on that breaking every second of every day”
I had been in my office, sipping some coffee and trying to decide if I wanted to check emails or sneak over to my window where I got reception to browse social media, when my program area team (PAT) director, basically my boss’ boss, called me. “Come to my office, Desiree. Now.” He didn’t sound happy, which was pretty weird because he and I usually got along well and typically had a lot of mutual respect. Had he known I was on Facebook??
I walked across the hall to his office. A colleague, Tina, was there seemingly just chatting. He asked me to sit down. “Why did I just get a call from the superintendent asking why one of my psychologists, and I quote, ‘threw her glasses on the table and stormed out of a meeting’?”
My jaw dropped and panic rose in my chest, but it was partially doused by the outrage in my colleague’s face. She said, “Um, I was there in that meeting and Desiree did nothing inappropriate whatsoever.”
The director, who was not known for being a patient man, seemed to calm a bit and asked me to explain myself.
“Well. I showed up to the meeting and the first thing I said was I was sorry, but I did have to leave in twenty minutes. I had a house team meeting that I had tried to reschedule, but this was the only time everyone was available, so I could only stay until 2. Then at fifteen-to I reminded her I had to go, then I stayed another five minutes past what I had said I could and when I left I just said I had to get to my other meeting and my colleagues could take it from there and I left her with Tina and Connie.”
“That’s true,” said Tina. “Call Connie. She said multiple times she needed to leave.”
“And so far as throwing my glasses? I mean the conversation I was having with her was frustrating, and we did disagree. I take my glasses off sometimes when I’m frustrated and kind of rub my eyebrows. Now that I think of it, that did happen yesterday and I think I dropped my glasses. Maybe she saw that as aggressive because I was disagreeing with her, but that’s it.”
Connie and Tina confirmed my story and the director and the superintendent were assuaged. But it was frustrating. I hadn’t spoken with phrases like, “I’m sorry but….” or “I kind of need to go.” And on top of that I had politely, albeit firmly, disagreed with the person with whom I was meeting. She probably wasn’t used to being disagreed with because she had higher credentials than myself and most people with my education probably just defer to her. But I certainly wasn’t mean.
So I reminded Jim of this story and told him I will not kneecap sentences when I am advocating for myself in any context. I don’t think he and I agree on the definition of mansplaining to this day, but we’ve hit a truce where he just accepts that if I feel insulted that’s close enough and he’ll stop what he’s doing.
I don’t know about you, but the moment Kamala Harris looked at Mike Pence and firmly said, “I’m speaking,” I bawled like a baby. To see a woman, a pretty, intelligent woman in power, have to say that… to simply remind a man that she had been speaking and he needed to let her finish… to see something so unfortunately familiar… was intensely cathartic.
I will always probably be perceived by most people as a little bitchy because of how I choose to communicate. But I’m in good company. There’s a Tina Fey/Amy Phoeler SNL skit that discusses the term bitch, and how women who are firm are labeled with the expletive. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was called a bitch on the steps of the Capitol, she spoke about it with a quote I have in the form of a sticker on the back of the laptop I’m using to write this piece. She quoted the last line of the SNL sketch, basically saying she was fine with the label bitch, because, “Hey, bitches get stuff done.”
Cheers, Bitches.
Desiree O’Crosslin is a writer and psychologist for people with disabilities. She is based in Seattle where she lives with her partner, step-daughter, geriatric dog, and two black cats.
You can read more of her work at desireedee.com.
