Bitches and bimbos: Why do we reclaim the slurs of the past?
One fateful night almost two decades ago, three pillars of early 2000s pop culture came together for what the New York Post dubbed as the "bimbo summit."
Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton emerged from the latter’s Beverly Hills hotel and crammed into the back of a limousine to head out for a night of reckless, raunchy partying. Frankly, the wording was tasteless and would not pass modern ethical standards in journalism: After all, to be a bimbo was to be an airhead, a ditz, a woman who has failed to make something of herself.
But if the press cycle had resembled this over the past year, girls all over the world would have been quick to dub it "iconic behavior." Some women today embrace the bimbo label, leaning into their supposed stupidity and shocking their naysayers with radical viewpoints and intelligent comebacks. It’s the latest in a collection of slurs and insults that we have taken back for ourselves, sitting pretty beside bitch, slut, and cunt. (If you flinched while reading those, it’s time to get with the program.)
“Language, as a tool, has always served as a way to both reflect and reinforce cultural practices. The fact that a mid-1900s study revealed that there were more derogatory terms directed towards women than men just shows the gender norms as well as the opportunities afforded to us back then,” said Liberty Balanquit, a sociolinguist and doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, told PhilSTAR L!fe. But as women began their fight for emancipation, they started seeking ways to protest or resist discrimination, like linguistic reclamation. Through this process, stigmatized groups transform derogatory terms into neutral words, taking the power away from the majority to offend and oppress them.
Take, for instance, the word whore. Geli, a 25-year-old advertising professional, was slut-shamed as a young student of an all-girls Catholic high school—and, at that time, it was hell on earth. “The purity culture in such an environment made it seem like exploring my body at a young age was the biggest sin I could ever commit. But now that I’m older, I’ve adopted a ‘So what?’ mindset towards the whole thing,” she said. What once was an effective mechanism for shaming and silencing is now owned by any woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to go after it.
As long as we put in the work to level the playing field for women in our day-to-day lives, we stand a chance at a society where being a bitch is universally synonymous with being powerful, where being a slut is being free, and where being a woman is anything we want it to be.
Studies have even found that the likelihood of positive identification with a generally negative label increases when around other stigmatized members. “Unfortunately, I've noticed that this kind of situation isn’t unique but it becomes a trauma bond among women who share the same experience,” Geli said. “I have friends whom I refer to as ‘slut’ out of affection or they’re proud of the fact that they’re a ‘whore’ or in their ‘hoe’ era, and it doesn’t hurt or damage us in any way.”
This collective change in meaning also becomes a point for reflection among those who may not have been as progressive in the past. Kyla, a 20-year-old college student, was another product of a religious educational institution. “I was in the kind of friend group that didn’t want to be ‘like other girls,’ and it was only when we got older that we had more open-minded discussions about the girls we used to call ‘whores,’” she shared. “Because of how people have reclaimed the word, we’ve used it to stand with those we used to insult and now see it as their way of exercising agency over their bodies.”
It’s worth noting, though, that every sword aimed at us, women, is double-edged. If we’re not careful, it could promote the reductive stereotypes that reappropriation seeks to dismantle. One way content creators rode on the latest wave of bimbo feminism was by making viral explainer videos “for the girls”—watering down Wall Street terminologies or likening the existing conflict in Gaza to the plot of Mean Girls. While well-intentioned, these promote the idea that women can’t learn about contemporary issues on the same level as their male counterparts.
@_so.you.dont.have.to original "Nikita girlsplaining Israel and Palestine" vid :) // vc: nikitadumptruck // #foryou #original ♬ original sound - so you don't have to :)
Once misogynistic men catch wind of this trend, chances are they could also miss the point completely and take this as a free pass to insult us again. “I’ve noticed that as soon as women started to reclaim these slurs, men did, too. Soon enough, it seems that people lost the plot and started using them in a derogatory way again,” said Rose, a 28-year-old employee. Balanquit gave a disclaimer that this practice can only be indexed within a very particular subgroup of the community. “Not everyone will find empowerment from using such words, so I can’t say it has reached a point where we use this as part of a movement. Imagine your mom or teacher referring to themselves as a bitch?”
So while linguistic reclamation may serve as a source of empowerment for a selected few, this can’t be considered the end-all, be-all in our fight for equality. A slur will retain its original definition and purpose until systemic injustices are effectively addressed and women are embraced as true equals. This means fighting for a world where we do not only enjoy gender parity in terms of educational attainment or employment opportunities, but where men no longer use “bitch” to belittle peers who don’t meet their standards of masculinity or terrorize women who ignore them on the street. “Without real policies that would actually protect women, this will remain a linguistic battle instead of one that challenges misogynistic views that people still hold,” Balanquit warned.
But that’s the fun part about language—its power can easily be challenged by its malleability and its evolution is a mirror of our continuous interactions with those around us. As long as we put in the work to level the playing field for women in our day-to-day lives, we stand a chance at a society where being a bitch is universally synonymous with being powerful, where being a slut is being free, and where being a woman is anything we want it to be.
