The Use of the Word Bitch in Society

Bill Nesbitt

English 102-069

Major Paper 2

In order to gain an adequate perspective of the types of slang words used among my peers, I decided to hangout with my friends for a night, taking note of the slang used without letting them know. The group of friends consisted of all males, six including myself to be exact, in the library, which made my note-taking less obvious. We had gotten a private study room, and this allowed for the conversation to be amongst ourselves, permitting the language used to be similar to if it were going on in one of our houses. If we had been in a large, public study area, the language, I imagine, would be quite different. While in the library, studying gave way to casual conversation before long, and my list of slang began to flow. The language was as one would expect to come from a group of college-aged males. Topics shifted from sex to drinking to drug use to food and back to sex again. Reflecting back on the language I had heard, I realized how much the maturity level of males can drop when not in the company of females. My list consisted largely of dirty, crude sexual terms, and derogatory words and phrases to describe females and their roles in sex and society.

A sentence used by a friend of mine that grabbed my attention in particular was, “guys, let’s go out this weekend and get some bitches.” The slang word that he used was bitch, a word that has been commonly used in the English language for many years. It’s not just this word that inspired me to study it, for it is rather common, but rather the wide variety of usages for the word bitch that have evolved. Depending heavily on the context it is used in and who is using it, the word bitch can mean anything from its literal meaning to something positive to something considered very depreciative and belittling for women. In my group of friends, its use has evolved into the latter of the three. The use of the word bitch among college aged males has evolved into use as only negative slang towards females.

The dictionary defines a bitch as “a female dog or any other member of the canidae family.” It is used among dog lovers and breeders, but in today’s society, the slang usage of bitch has greatly outweighed its literal meaning. Bitch can be used in a negative or a positive way. It is “often employed insultingly to describe a woman who is malicious, spiteful, domineering, intrusive, or sexually promiscuous... it can also refer to a woman who is mean or inconsiderate.” However, bitch is also employed by some women as a feminist usage. Some women call themselves bitches to show that they are tough or strong-willed, capable women. Some women will call one another bitches in a friendly manner, or to greet one another, such as “hey bitch”. In general, when men use the term bitch, it is almost always in a negative manner, whereas the term can go either way when used by a female. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch)

The sentence in which I encountered the word bitch was undoubtedly intended to refer to girls in a negative way. “Going out and getting some bitches” refers to the act of going out to a club or bar, getting drunk, finding a girl there, and taking her home and fooling around or having sex with her. So, in that context, bitches refer to girls who are easy or promiscuous, which is never a good image for a female to have. It infers disrespect towards these particular females, and these are girls who we might lower our standards for or we wouldn’t consider dating due to their reputation of sleeping with a lot of men. Often, these “bitches” are girls who will not hesitate to sleep with someone on the first night of meeting them and are notorious for not being able to maintain a relationship because they cheat on significant others or have an undesirable, sometimes bland or sometimes raucous, personality. The conversation leading up to this sentence being spoken had to do with sex, and who had been having sex and with whom. The male who said the sentence had been complaining that he had not had intercourse in a while, so he suggested getting some bitches, most likely due to the reason that they are easy to have sex with. After this sentence, it sparked conversation of which girls we know were on the promiscuous side, and who had been getting around lately. Judged by the context of the conversation, the negativity of the usage of the word bitch among my friends is implied.

When used by males as a derogatory word to describe females, there is a wide age range of uses, spanning from when the word is first learned around adolescence all the way to old age. Though used most commonly around the younger ages or around 15-25, I have heard many older men describe their wives or ex-wives as bitches. The usage here is clearly