Fridae

We have every right to be bitchy. When we grow up being told that our sex is dirty, our love inauthentic, and our loneliness a punishment, it is no wonder we grow up botched, bitter and bitchy. Our bitchiness is an expression of righteous anger, a return threefold of society's irrational malice toward our sexuality. Our bitchy wit comes from queer people as diverse as the Irish poet/novelist/dramatist Oscar Wilde ("America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.") to American writer/comedian Bruce Vilanch, ("To be gay and out of shape is almost as much of a stigma as just being gay used to be.") and Rita Mae Brown, ("My lesbianism is an act of Christian charity. All those women out there praying for a man, and I'm giving them my share.").

Indeed, our culture is one to be proud of, one that has syntheticised our unique, syncretic mix of anger and insight, into a wisdom in the form of a scathing sarcasm, a form of cultural commentary we think of as 'bitchiness.' We have venerated the drag queen, the 'cross-dresser' who straddles the fine line between male and female, putting on a show in which we are entertained by her passion, her sardonicism in the service of politically-charged, survivalist entertainment. Her drag performance is commentary about the strange rules of femininity that society imposes upon women, through an over-the-top charade; the thick make-up, the eyelashes long as paintbrush-bristles, lips smeared blood red so thick it cakes underneath the glimmer. The best drag queens speak difficult truths. For those of us born in the generation where religion has died; she is our modern Goddess, our Kali-ma.

The drag queen's bitchiness bridges the divide between a wrath so deep it threatens to swallow her up entirely, and the easy humour of one who is above it all. In Singapore, we had drag-queen Kumar, who, in a 2004 interview with fridae.com, spoke a painful commentary about the lessening homophobia of his audience, "They don't beat me up as much as they used to."

Drag queens quip freely about the hypocrisy of dominant culture, the ills of government, the disgusting delicious perversions of nasty sex lives, all to the delighted thrill of applause from a titillated audience who deeply crave their own transgression, who crave a voice for their own bitterness, one that they can only live out vicariously through worship. All hail the bitch!

Reclamation as Revolution (or: "Fuck You, I'm Fabulous")
The word 'bitch' is one in a growing list of 'reclaimed' lexicons (like the word 'guai-lo,' literally 'ghost-man' by white people living in Hong Kong, or 'slut' by people who like having sex with many people). Reclaiming a word assumes the word has been used as an insult (see my other articles: "Faggot Faggot Faggot!" and "That's So Gay" for my more traditional breakdown of the hurtfulness of ignorant, derogatory word choice).

Clearly however, words change meaning through time, being used differently by different people within different communities. An example is the word 'gay,' which once meant 'happy' or 'carefree,' and was generously applied (without derogatory intent) toward people, male and female, who simply lived with a degree of unusual, but not unrespectable, frivolity. In time, the word came to suggest a 'fey' ('fairylike' or 'magical') quality, which in turn led to an association with increasingly taboo perversions, not the least of which was homosexuality.

That we now take for granted the acceptability of the word 'gay' to describe ourselves shows that we have reclaimed it. We have legitimated the role of noble anger and radical disenchantment in empowering a sense of selfhood. For we have said to ourselves, "If being gay means being odd, a little bit fairy-like, a little bit different, and quite homosexual, then by all means call me gay, because that is exactly what I am!"

So it is with 'bitch,' ordinarily a word that literally means 'female dog,' typically used in a misogynistic (woman-hating) way to refer to women who do not 'know their place,' who are outspoken and assertive (characteristics typically associated with men), and who hence wield a power that men are unprepared for and want to subdue. Indeed, like the word 'gay,' some might well say that: If bitch means being a woman who knows what she wants, knows how to get it, and is going to pursue it despite the odds, then by all means call me a bitch, because that is exactly what I am.

Like female angst, gay male angst seems to come from living with the straight male-dominant society that has wanted to 'put us in our place,' deny us our sex, our pleasure, our love, our culture, our affections, our relationships with one another, and so our expressions of dissatisfaction have had the aftertaste of the rage we stereotypically associate with wrathful women. Our anger is that of Kali in Vedantic India, Eumenides in Ancient Greece, the Furiae in Ancient Rome, and the wrathful female deity Lhamo in Buddhist Tibet. Their wrath terrifies and terrorises male order, and so our bitchiness is a mimicry of theirs, a noble rebellion against repugnant social structures that we loathe yet have little choice but to remain within. Here we wait, spouting words and artistry so caustic that they are alkaline, with the rigorous impatience of scantily clad warriors waiting for our next battle and a jerk off.

We too, can be bitchy.

Ressentiment (or: "Fuck You for Noticing my Inferiority")
The problem is that as a 'gay community,' we have so taken for granted the nobility and clever sarcasm behind 'bitchiness' that we have glamourised it beyond its original potential. Less and less are we bitchy toward mainstream society; less and less is our anger a righteous one, a direct commentary on injustice. Much pop culture has produced reality television shows like America's Next Top Model, Big Brother and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, to name a few, that have capitalised on the wit of bitchiness, disarming it from its more radical potential to challenge social conventions. Instead, we have steered a whole generation to venerate the needlessly vapid bitchiness of media celebrities, whose bitchiness serves no further purpose than a mockery of itself, in the name of apolitical entertainment.

"Oh my gawd, what is she wearing?": We now act out of bitchiness toward each other, in the phenomena of women's 'catfights' or gay male competition, all of which are 'bitchy,' and all of which harness the raw energy of our anger to serve the ends, not of our liberation, but of our own annihilation. So addicted to our anger and our propensity to smart-mouthed bitchiness as an innate characteristic of ourselves, that perhaps we are guilty of what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has called "ressentiment" (pronounced 'ree-sahn-teh-mahn'), from the French word for 'resentment.'

"Ressentiment" is the idea that we have become so used to our experiences being treated as inferior, coupled with the attendant feelings of anger and spite, that we no longer experience authenticity in our identities unless we recreate the conditions of our own inferiority. One way we do this is through our over-veneration of the double-edged sword of bitchiness. Witness the dropping of malicious, bitchy quips all over the forums of fridae.com, like fragrant bombs of our own shit, in the name of empowerment, democracy, and community.

But my cynicism is not intended to be mean or dispassionate, though it is certainly bitchy. Indeed, I identify with that impulse, the addiction to righteous anger that characterises many of our lives. And this is not just unique to gay people, of course (to assume so would be the homophobic assumption, which I would prefer to have disappear entirely, taking with it the last vestiges of my own hostility). Clearly there is still a legitimacy to our dissatisfaction, though it remains an ongoing project to see where and how we can properly engage with it.

Deal with Our Shit (or: "Fuck You, Calm Down")
I am reminded of the Chinese Ch'an/Japanese Zen Buddhist "gong-an"/"koan" (a type of parable in which the rational intellect is challenged and undermined as a hindrance to wisdom). A young disciple goes to his master Zhao Zhou to instruct him most effectively on the intricacies of enlightenment; to which Zhao Zhou's reply comes across as dismissive, but which displays a corrective wisdom that cuts through the disciple's obsessive attachment to the formal structure of his earlier practice.

It goes:

The student implores (and I'm paraphrasing) "Master master, I have been meditating so long and still I have no glimpse of Enlightenment."

Zhao Zhou looks serenely at the disciple, and after a moment, asks "Have you had your dinner?"

"Yes," the disciple responds, bewildered.

"Then," Zhao Zhou continues, "Go wash your bowls."

At that, the disciple attains instant enlightenment.

Zhao Zhou's arguably bitchy irreverence, as it turns out, was sublime.

The enraged dance of Kali (who is the 'untamed' manifestation of the Supreme Goddess Devi) leads to the destruction of the preceding world order, in which the male Gods sexually humiliate Devi (in her manifestation as Durga), by requiring her to strip to nakedness to defeat the buffalo demon. However, this destruction is necessarily followed by her creation of the world anew. She is destruction and creation both.

In other words, I am inspired by the redemptive potential of our discontent. Perhaps our 'bitchiness' can be in the service of the 'Zen' knowledge of cultivated wisdom - the wisdom from having understood the traps of previously insufferable existence and acting out of that. A bitchiness in the service of extinguishing addiction, not fueling it. Like Zhao Zhou, we might make use of a wry, ironic, 'bitchiness' in the form of a soft, prodding sarcasm, not to perpetuate the horrors of facile bitterness, nor in the service of annihilating ourselves/each other, but instead to demonstrate compassionate understanding. Like Kali, any destruction that follows our quips must be followed by the noble desire to genuinely commit to creativity. Can we be so optimistic as to believe that our 'bitchiness' too can come from wisdom in the service of renewal, rather than from malice in the service of annihilation?

Or perhaps... you have something really nasty to say to me.

Shinen Wong is a high calorie product of globalisation and lives in Sydney, Australia en route from Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA. In his fortnightly "Been Queer. Done That" column, Wong explores gender, sexuality, and queer cultures based on personal anecdotes, sweeping generalisations and his incomprehensible libido.