Dear Boys Who Refer to Girls as “B*tches,”
It has come to my attention lately, how often my guy friends use the word ‘bitches’ to talk about the women in their lives. About a week ago, I heard one of my closest guy friends say “wow, that bitch is hot.” Prior to that I heard my own boyfriend use the word “bitch” to talk about one of his professors. Now, I am not saying that every guy I know is walking around calling every girl he sees a bitch, and I am definitely not saying that there are no appropriate times to let me know when I am being bitchy. What I am saying is that derogatory words like “bitch” are being used as replacements for female pronouns, and this has got to stop.
To all the young gentlemen boys I know, when you use the word “bitches” to talk about women, you present yourself as disrespectful and uneducated. Derogatory terms like “bitch,” “hoe” and “slut” are not synonyms for girl, woman or lady. It’s disrespectful because it dehumanizes who you are talking about. When I hear the boys in my life speak about women like this, my only thought is, “can you really not think of any other ways to describe this girl other than calling her a “hoe?” By using these derogatory phrases to speak about women, you make yourself seem uneducated. Come on boys, you can think of some better nouns for women.
Not only does it make men sound uneducated and disrespectful, but it motivates women to talk about each other like this. As Tina Fey said in Mean Girls “we’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores.” Let’s take a lesson from Ms. Norbury and start calling the guys in our lives out on this useless derogatory language.