Now, I don’t think that that holds true in every situation, but for dealing with day to day bullshit, it’s fairly effective. There’s something about a person going completely cold and calm that seems to freak out the same people who would laugh at her if she were to lose her shit.

People who call you a bitch or tell you to stop being rude or whatever are obviously trying to remind you that you are not behaving in a feminine enough manner and could you please go back to being all sugar and spice right now, dammit. My response, on the rare occasions that I have been told to stop being rude has been to state very calmly that I have not yet begun.

Anyway! I don’t care what random men might say or think about me, because “bitchiness” saves me a hell of a lot of energy. Maybe they think I’m a bitch because I’m basically telling them they’re wasting my time…?
Usually I whip it out in classes or other situations with peers where guys are mansplaining my fields of expertise* or blabbering on about just how fucking awesome they are. I stop humouring these jackasses as soon as it starts to feel the least bit taxing. Bam! Waste of my time: avoided.

*One of these fields is Chinese (Mandarin). In Chinese, one word you could use to express “being a bitch” (at least the kind I just mentioned–though the Chinese doesn’t have the bad/female connotation) is 干脆，which literally means “dry & crispy/crunchy”, like food. I am definitely super dry and crunchy when necessary.

I fully believe this wonderful “inner bitch” is a good thing to have. It let’s me have confidence in saying what I feel I need to say instead of waiting for a while later to calm down enough to re-think what the subject was in the first place. Ain’t a worst feeling than when you let yourself down.

Anger is totally natural. It can be a warning that something isn’t right, a response to injustice or threat, a hot energy that can be used to break out of a rut. As with any emotion, it can be overused, and it can settle into the bones too much so that it calcifies into permanant rage, which I don’t think helps anyone.

I have always, without exception, been called a bitch by men who wanted to have sex with me and to whom I was saying no. When I was younger, in my twenties, I always flushed and felt huge shame. Now, it might make me laugh. I have reclaimed myself and my personal power, and such a sling is so clearly about the other person that I would be able to see that it had nothing to do with me.

So, to me, “bitch” has become mostly positive; a women who won’t take crap from men and who is centered in her strength. I now aim to internally cultivate my bitch and give her tasks to do so she doesn’t get stuck in rage, but is there if I need her.

So I guess that’s my style. I thought about it and decided the “bitch” was undeserved. I have not been able to fully reclaim the word & don’t like to use it except in a good way (example, as synonym for cool – “Bitchin’!”)

For me I *try* to channel anger into more pointed rebuttals if it’s possible. Think about weak points in the other side’s arguments & go for those. That works if you’re having an argument, but what if you just plain don’t like each other?

Well then that’s another story & I’d probably resort to similar name-calling & psychological warfare.

I get that you don’t like being angry, you don’t like how it makes you feel or act. Fair enough.

I don’t have the same relationship/ response to anger that you do. For me, anger doesn’t equal lashing out, or being out of control. It doesn’t mean sprouting horns or calling names or anything of the sort. It means sticking to my guns when faced with backlashy patriarchal bullshit.

This power thing is a red herring. You can’t possible think that all kinds of power are equivalent, anyway. Power can only be used to oppress or dominate, not liberate? I reject that out of hand. It’s like saying that not tolerating sexist/racist/ableist/etc. intolerance makes me the intolerant one.

Ah, I think here that we’re talking about different things. For me, anger is a thing that exists–it isn’t a behavior. I don’t “become” angry, I am angry. Something specific will set off and unleash my anger, if it’s the right situation–someone using the word bitch, someone making a bigoted joke, whatever. The anger is already there. It exists in my brain, it just is. It’s there and there really isn’t anything I can do about it. But the fact that it’s there isn’t a justification for anything. Well, except itself, I suppose. I can use my anger to energize me, to allow myself to act in ways that I wouldn’t if I wasn’t angry. If I wasn’t angry, I wouldn’t call people out on their shit. The anger is what allows me to overcome to social awkwardness and the socialized politeness and make me say, “Hey, that’s a fucked up thing to say.” If I wasn’t angry then I would just be polite, and my aversion for conflict (middle child syndrome like whoa here) would negate any prickle of conscience when someone says something fucked up–but the anger trumps my aversion to conflict. Not like a gun trumping a bat, or a fist trumping a face, but like paper covers rock in rock/paper/scissors. The anger is stronger than any of my other emotions, or any of the other stuff that controls my behavior.

And I think my anger is justified. I was listening to some old CDs the other day, and there’s an Ani song detailing a variety of experiences she had growing up, from old men flashing her to a guy groping (assaulting? it’s ambiguous) her on a bus, and one of the lines is something like, “girl, next time he wants to know what your problem is / girl, next time he wants to know where the anger comes from / just tell him this time the problem is his / just tell him the anger just comes / it just comes.” And I was like, Oh, Ani, this is why I fell in love with you when I was 14. The anger is a response to injustice.

I suppose it would be a problem if the anger caused me to do bad things. It was like that once, when I was in college. A semester of depression and anger and misery and misdirected anger. And I had to get over that shit, and I did, and stopped letting my anger control my behavior in a way that was destructive (and also apologized to a bunch of people for my shitty behavior the previous semester). But my anger isn’t destructive now, and that anger is part of what controls me and keeps me from getting angry about other shit. I’m way angrier than I’ve ever been in my life–way, way angrier. But I’m also more mellow than I’ve ever been, because once I became the type of person for whom feminism is a defining feature of my personality–once I was really radicalized–it was like the anger just settled into this big whole inside of me, a hole that was carved out by the injustice of the world, and instead of a fucking crazy storm of chaotic anger it just filled the hole and became a very deep lake from which I can draw whenever I need to.

Yeah, ok enough with my weird analogies. My point is that abuse is behavior, and I think it’s a behavior that’s usually controlled by rage. And rage is chaotic and misdirected and confusing. My anger isn’t behavior, it’s what allows me to do things I couldn’t normally do. And it’s not chaotic, it’s very, very precisely directed, though it’s often difficult for me to articulate exactly what it’s directed at.

I do see what you’re saying though. My “angry semester” at college is exactly the kind of anger and exercise of power that you seem to be against, and I agree with you entirely. But for some reason they seem like, for me, two totally different things. Maybe it’s not just anger, maybe it’s like this mix of anger, indignation, horror, sadness, and righteousness. And I know that righteousness can have a horrid connotation, and your point about people who, if I understand you correctly, exist in a perpetual state of righteous indignation, is sort of a different thing altogether. I agree with you that the type of person who tries to shut down conversation is frustrating and counter-productive, but when I talk about righteousness, I’m talking about being righteously indignant when someone makes a joke about bitches in the kitchen. Righteously angry.

I don’t think that this anger (my anger) is about taking power for myself, or about dismantling power in order to instate other power. It’s about smashing power hierarchies altogether. Like a hammer! My anger is like a hammer. It can smash a window, but it can also built a birdhouse. I think that maybe the concerning thing about anger is about what happens when you try to build a birdhouse but accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer and break it. Ok, seriously, I’ll stop with the analogies.

It’s a word I like to reclaim, as the Harpies have done here, and I often have to remind myself that it can be very damaging and misogynist. I have such a weird reaction to it that it becomes very easy for me to dismiss that.

More often than not, someone asserting their “power” has unintended consequences for others. So, for example, here, if you are “asserting your power,” and your power intimidates someone else – and let’s not use just men here because I have a feeling it’ll turn into “but he’s oppressing me!” – let’s talk about other axes, i.e. women of colour, the disabled, trans people, and on and on, because those are all risks we take – that’s a problem. Even if you didn’t intend to do it. It’s a problem.