Lots of things in life are dirty—thoughts, laundry, my car because I only wash it like twice a year. Several years ago, I started a little blog called “Two Bitches and a Dirty Lady,” with this vision of all the stories I would tell and zingers I would share. Since I am obsessed with Alli and Joey, my Bitches, they had to be headliners.
Bitch is a word I use a lot and I’ve been called out for my love of using the word. It’s a little amazing what some people let knot up their panties. My use of bitch is at times playful, at times serious, and most of the time, literal. Words only have the power you give them and the offensiveness of a word lies more in the tone that the speaker uses. If I walk up to a group of my friends (mixed gender expression) and say, “Hey bitches!” or if am telling a story about my fur babies that starts with, “You’ll never guess what the Bitches did today,” most people won’t care. You certainly don’t care, as you’ve chosen to read this. It isn’t like the time when I worked at an after-school program and a first grader, whose parents were going through a rough divorce, referred to me as a “fucking bitch” as he threw a toy at me.
The point here is that most of the time when I am using the word, it is in reference to the female canines that live with me. The Bitches. Perhaps technically, they are altered females, since I decided they wouldn’t be mommas and had them spayed. But I think that is sort of like telling a woman who had a hysterectomy that she is no longer really a woman. Alli and Joey will always be Bitches to me. Bitches, the plural of bitch, which, I am using correctly according to Merriam Webster’s website:
Definition of BITCH
1: the female of the dog or some other carnivorous mammals
2: a: lewd or immoral woman
b: a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman —sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse
3: something that is extremely difficult, objectionable, or unpleasant
4: complaint
Examples of BITCH
1. That word is a bitch to spell.
2. <tiresome members of the tour group who had one bitch after another>
Origin of BITCH
Middle English bicche, from Old English bicce
First Known Use: before 12th century
(You'll sleep better knowing that.)
Related to BITCH
Synonyms: beef, complaint, bleat, carp, fuss, grievance, gripe, grouch, grouse, grumble, holler, kvetch, lament, miserere, moan, murmur, plaint, squawk, wail, whimper, whine, whinge [British], yammer
So all the synonyms are related to the verb. I guess they didn’t want to put in slut, hussy, or any of the thousands of women of historical/intellectual/spiritual importance from Eve to Frida Kahlo to bell hooks to Hilary Clinton who bore the brunt of its negative meaning.
Interestingly, if you click on the definition of bitch for kids… drumroll…
One entry found for bitch.
Main Entry: bitch
Pronunciation: bich
Function: noun
: a female dog
I guess kids are only supposed to know that a bitch is a girl dog. I couldn’t imagine where they would possibly learn about definitions of bitch other than a student dictionary anyway. I almost want to ask some of those super sheltered, home-schooled kids, like a pack of the Duggars and ask them what a bitch is…
It isn’t my fault that society has taken a word and made it insulting or negative. I am probably overbearing and immoral to some people, so call me a bitch. I’d wear that title with pride since the same aggressiveness or moral code would make me someone else’s hero.
The bitch contemplating made me contemplate being a dirty lady. The juxtaposition of wanting to be a lady but still having my potty mouth sounded fun. But what did “dirty” mean there? I was in that post-relationship stage where I’d had enough time to realize just how bored I’d been with the relationship and it had dissolved into more of a roommates who occasionally put forth the effort to have sex phase. I was employed, but bored. I was writing, but nothing particularly interesting. Of course I auto-piloted to dirty being about sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. I would write about sex! Sex sells everything from hamburgers to cars, so why wouldn’t people want to read a blog about sex? I envisioned myself as some sort of Carrie Bradshaw, romping my way through the Midwest, except I was far more likely to be wearing Sperry rain boots than Manolo Blahniks.
Then I remembered that about 12 people live here and in a small town, so not having everyone know whom I was writing about was sort of like delivering lettuce via rabbit. Couple that with the fact that I don’t really meet a lot of people with whom I want to have sex and I had to put that baby to bed. But not a bed with any of the sex stuff.
I ended up keeping the “Two Bitches and a Dirty Lady” since I have a potty mouth and have been toying around with it since, poking at the cobwebs in my brain and putting down thoughts on everything from the Bitches to running to politics to family and all sorts of stuff that falls in between. That’s how we got here, at this intersection, where I’m getting close to 40 and starting to feel like my brain fires better on the daily. Amy Poehler talks about this age as being a space where you are too old to get away with being cute and not old enough to be wise. That bitch is so right. But it’s also a space to get grounded and not be afraid of who you really are anymore.
So here I am: Jules. That means lots of things—dog mom, feminist, runner, writer, maker of cakes, advocate, former of opinions, professional auntie, dirty lady—but I don’t want to hide behind the labels anymore. We’re defining ourselves. Being Two Bitches and Jules is pretty cool, so we’ve moved to this page to share our life. It can be fun, messy, and exciting, sometimes simultaneously—we didn’t choose the #bitchlife, the #bitchlife chose us.