When women don’t comply with a smile when cleaning up your shit
By Katherine Needleman
Before I go any further, I need to say something obvious: a huge proportion of women have been called “fucking bitch” by a seething man. Some of us are “lucky,” like me, in that the damage shows up as professional fallout—quiet, untraceable, and impossible to fully quantify in my lovely shitstain of a profession. Others are not lucky at all. Some end up dead, like Renee Nicole Good. We cannot underestimate the violence men perpetrate against women.
Just today, I heard from a woman and advised her to sneak out of her apartment with her baby in the middle of the night. That is the continuum we are talking about. “Fucking bitch” is violent language. It is not casual. It is not harmless. It is not expressive language. It should raise every red flag and hackle you have when you hear a man use it.
Yesterday, I had a brief comment interaction with a self-described musical instrument repairman named Art Gale. He came to my page to explain the oboe to me and tell me how to care for it. I thanked him, because apparently I do not know anything about the oboe or oboes cracking and this was all new information to me.
After a number of people pointed out that I did not, in fact, need an education about the oboe from him, he eventually seemed to get it. I told him not to worry—I wasn’t upset. I told him I was naming something, not reacting to it, because I am deeply used to this. I told him that every single day, men who are less qualified than I am explain things to me that I am expert in.
He asked if it was really only men. I said yes. He didn’t believe me. I told him to believe me. Then he got upset and said that women also do problematic things.
For the record: I cannot recall a single woman ever giving me unsolicited criticism about my oboe playing or instructing me on how to do something with an oboe without my asking first. Men do it constantly—especially every time I post something with an oboe in it. And in the same vein, it is only men who have ever called me a “fucking bitch” with the kind of vitriol I describe in the piece below. It has never been women.
“Fucking bitch” is not a figure of speech. It is what men say when they believe you may not be fully obedient—when they may just be beginning to smell that you are not the woman they need you to be.
I am so used to being called “fucking bitch.” And I am naming it now. I need to today.
Sometimes “fucking bitch” just ends in professional damage that can never be fully traced. Sometimes it ends in fear. Sometimes it ends in women quietly planning exits. And sometimes it ends in death.
What follows is a story from decades ago, but it is not old. The language hasn’t changed. The entitlement hasn’t changed. We are in a constant loop. And I am naming it today because I need to.
This morning, watching the video of Renee Good being shot and hearing the officer say “fucking bitch,” I felt physically ill. I wasn’t shocked or surprised. I was sick with recognition. I knew this moment exactly. Renee Good’s murderer simply carried something I’ve heard on repeat my entire life to its lethal end.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life. A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation. No more political violence.
Senator Bernie Sanders is the senior senator from Vermont. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).
I have to believe that at some point soon a critical mass of those of us who cannot bear the reality of one more drop of a child’s blood on a little princess backpack or Minecraft lunchbox will awaken the national conscience and create a groundswell of clarity and empathy so powerful that common sense gun safety laws and regulations will be created almost overnight, and not a soul in Congress will ever take a dime from the blood money gun lobby again. I have to believe that.
If I don’t believe it, then I have to accept that the critical mass will stay with those who are willing to see children murdered by the score for their ‘right’ to own unregulated, easily concealed handguns and military-style assault weapons, or an entire arsenal of the same, and that they see this as a fair exchange for the price of ‘freedom’. And that is intolerable. Or, I have to accept that there are those who offer their perfunctory thoughts and prayers but think it will never happen to their child, and that other people’s children are just statistics, not real, so it doesn’t matter how they vote or if they make their voices heard. That is also intolerable— that there are people who think the suffering of others is irrelevant.
We hear from many leaders and pundits that school shootings are the result of mental illness. Absolutely true. Anyone who shoots children is mentally ill. No question, no argument. It’s the easy access to guns for people who should not have them that is the problem. We have the same rate of mental illness in this country as every other developed nation, but we are the only country that regularly has mass shootings, the only country where there are more guns than people in the total population, and the only country where the access to weapons is basically unregulated. Background checks are state by state, not federal, and transferring guns across state lines is legal if it’s a ‘personal’ gun. Private gun sales are unregulated and do not even require a criminal background check. You say we need more mental health services. Absolutely true, but the Trump administration just gutted access to mental health services and revoked the Obama-era gun checks for people with mental illness. They also revoked funding for anti-gun violence programs. Clearly, the talking point about mental illness is just something leaders say to avoid talking about how much money they get from the corporate gun lobby.
They say the 2nd Amendment is a sacrosanct right, not to be abridged. Bullshit. If amendments to the Constitution were carved in stone and could not be revised, repealed, or new ones made, then I wouldn’t be able to vote. The 19th Amendment giving me that right was ratified in 1920. There were 18 amendments before that. And none of us could raise a glass of wine at dinner before the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol. The 19th and 21st amendments were added and the 18th was repealed to respond to progress and the evolution of the concept of personal freedom. The 2nd Amendment was written at a time when a ‘well-regulated militia’ was armed with muskets that took a full minute to reload. They didn’t foresee the invention of high capacity ammunition magazines that outgun the police. In the Highland Park shooting, the shooter fired 83 rounds in the same minute it would take to reload a musket. The phrase ‘well-regulated’ in common usage is a wink and a nod to vigilantism. New technology requires new and thoughtful legislation, for the protection of the populace, the police who are dedicated to serve and protect, and for the republic at large.
When the massacre at Columbine happened in 1999, I turned to my then teenage daughter and said ‘My god, how did these kids get the guns?’ She looked at me incredulously and said, ‘Mom, I could get a gun easier than I could get cigarettes.’ That was 26 years ago. In 2000, I spoke at the Million Mom March in Washington, D.C. advocating for common sense safety and regulatory gun laws. In the last 25 years, I’ve attended dozens of marches, performed at fundraisers, benefits, and house concerts, participated in a lie-in in Times Square, written op-eds, joined boards of anti-gun violence organizations and more, and nothing has changed. In fact, it’s worse. The federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, and mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons have increased exponentially. That ban actually worked. There was a 66% reduction of the 19 specific weapons listed in the bans that showed up in crimes. Reinstating that ban would be a simple stopgap to at least reduce mass shootings. It wouldn’t fix everything, and it wouldn’t have affected the recent school shooting in Minneapolis, the 44th school shooting this year, but it’s a critical first step with proven results. There are mind-boggling hypocrisies in the United States regarding child safety. We have a law requiring small children to be in a carseat, but there is no law requiring safety locks on guns that are not in the control of the gun owner. We have child safety laws about the cords on window blinds, aspirin bottles, cribs, and toys, but no laws to prevent a child from accessing and using a gun in the house and accidentally shooting themselves or another child. (There is an outrageous irony in the fact that toy guns are regulated— they have to have a red dot at the end of the barrel— but real ones are not.)
You say it’s a slippery slope from regulation to abolishment. Also bullshit. There is no credible leader who wants to take a registered hunting rifle or personal handgun away from a mentally sound, responsible citizen. But if you think you need an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in your house, then, yeah. No. You don’t get to have that in the same way you don’t get to have a stockpile of nuclear weapons-grade plutonium in your basement or a B-52 bomber in your garage. If you have a documented history of violent or unstable behavior, in person or online, then no. If you want a civilized society, where people feel safe around their neighbors, where mutual trust is a given, and where you feel confident that when you send your child to school that they will come home that day, or send them to play at another kid’s house without fear that there are loaded and unlocked guns lying around, then you have to give up your military arsenal and the bizarre idea that deadly weapons should be less regulated than toys or cars. If you think you need your arsenal to protect yourself from ‘the government’, then, as Steve Hofstetter says, ‘You don’t know how tanks work.’
You say it’s an infringement on our freedom. What kind of freedom? We make 5 year olds do active shooter drills. We inject fear and trauma into the nervous system of an innocent child and set up the conditions to make her permanently anxious—the same child we wouldn’t let watch a movie with the kind of violence we ask her to role-play in real life. There is more gun violence in America than in the other 26 industrialized nations combined. Those other countries don’t have less freedom. They have more, because they have less fear of being shot in a school, shopping mall, church, concert, nightclub, parade, or any other spot where people gather. Fear truncates freedom. I gave a speech years ago in which I said, ‘The life of a single child is more important than your right to own a military style weapon.’ A man wrote me after that speech and said simply, ‘No it’s not.’ That comment still chills me. I wanted to ask, ‘Does that include the life of your child, or just the imaginary children of other people?’ Every other developed country has figured this out— they don’t allow unrestricted access to deadly weapons, and they don’t willingly let children die of preventable causes. This is a choice we have made: to allow our elected representatives to get away with murder by deregulating weapons, so they can have unregulated campaign contributions from the gun lobby.
Who will we be if we give up the guns? Will we be a decent parent, a hard worker, a compassionate friend, a good daughter, an upright son, a visionary, an artist, good with numbers, strong and brave, shy, emotional, resolute? Will we be an informed citizen, a mentor, a volunteer, a hermit, a social butterfly? Will we feel vulnerable? Is that a bad thing? Who will we be if we give up the guns?
Once again, as we go through the nightmarish ritual of wiping the blood of children off the church pews and the princess backpack and the superman t-shirt and the Minecraft lunchbox and the fairy necklace and the friendship bracelet and the lighted sneakers, isn’t it time to find out who we’d be? Is the country of the future that belongs to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren an even more dangerous place to live? Don’t we owe them something? Can we learn to have zero tolerance for sacrificing children? Who will we be if we give up the guns?
It has always been tempting to think of Donald Trump as an infection. A rare bacterial strain that emerged out of nowhere (or Queens) and began to sicken the American body politic. To turn us meaner and nastier, to corrupt our institutions, to rig our systems, to divide us, to inflame our hatreds, to delude us, to engross us with lies, to make enemies of friends, to neglect, to grift, to leech a nation for profit.
The alien-invader thesis could be soothing when so little else was. He was a gift from Russia, a Manchurian candidate, a plant, a puppet dangled by shadowy possessors of kompromat. Or: He was not a real Republican. He was a thrice-married, pro-choice New York Democrat who had infected the Republican Party and colonized it. “This is not who we are,” you used to hear. People really seemed to believe that for a while.
