Or, How I’m Still A Bitch Despite Being @barely.private
Or, A Verbose Anti-Capitalist, Pro-Technology Feminist Manifesto in Seven Micro-Essays That Was Meant to Be Just a Few Slides on My Instagram Story
And, A Little Bit of Why I Left Academia
I. Teacher Vs. Performance Artist
In my barely employed, barely private life, I’ve found myself on social media a lot. In fact, the last time I was online so frequently, I was writing my dissertation in Taos and living with my bestie @ohdamienmoreau. At that time, I changed my private Instagram handle from @babygrandmother (as a young lady flaunting the grey hair trend) to @privately_being_a_bitch.
BITCH (noun): a reappropriation of a misogynist slur used against opinionated women. Many languages use their word for a female dog as a pejorative. No equivalent term exists for men. I use “bitch” to ironically describe myself despite increasing tone-deafness to irony.
My ongoing bitch era began as a quest for a voice, which I never found as a bitch-effacing academic. Indeed, being a professional professor required me to don a mask I couldn’t breathe under. Some people know how to choreograph this dance beautifully, but I never figured it out.
For those of you who aren’t teachers, being in front of a classroom is like being on a stage without the freedom of the performance artist. Your young, college-age audience sees you as a target for their social-political frustrations (and maybe even an assault rifle). They make you the accountable adult for the complicated, fraught world they’ve inherited. At least, that’s what happened to me when I failed to perform to their standards.
Since, at the overpriced university level, “the customer is always right,” your students’ standards, forged in their undeveloped brains, count, and it’s on you to harmonize what they want with what the university wants. Thus, bad student evaluations evidence your bad teaching and directly affect your performance in the (already impossible) academic job market. 1 I imagine in the public school context (in which teaching elementary through high school might be more lucrative than being an adjunct professor), you’re judged by capricious parents. Plus, you’re at the whim of ever-changing U.S. legislation that determines school funding based on standardized test performances–rote training that leads college students to expect rewards for regurgitating information. When I put it this way, I sympathize with those students who thought I was bad at my job for attempting to wring out original thoughts from them (@being_an_olde_crotchety_bitch).
In part, I couldn’t hack the teaching life because it was an anit-bitch life. You had to grit your teeth and smile as your students got trigger-happy with trigger warnings. Additionally, I had to fight for visibility as an authority figure because of my age, sex, and skin color (as a white lady teaching Black literature concurrent with the Rachel Dolezal scandal).
For these reasons, I took away an unwavering respect for teachers at all levels of education. Except those of you whose white male bodies make you unquestionable as you spout elegiac praise for Abraham Lincoln. Students seem to always love you for performing your authentic self. It’s too easy for you.
Being a bitch was, therefore, the first step I took leaving academia and claiming any identity I wanted without worrying about being too privileged or not privileged enough, too opinionated or meek, or utterly unhireable.2 In full disclosure, I also wanted to explore a slut era that I couldn’t reconcile with my professorial side. In Taos, Damien Moreau, of short-lived erotic video performance acclaim, pulled me into his world, and I was maybe a little too eager to undress for his camera. Once those tasteful images consensually found their way onto the Internet, I knew I transgressed from art critic to art itself, or, to an author of a very different genre.
II. Roe Vs. Wade
Currently, with widespread feminist backlash spotlighted by the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, women don’t have to do anything to be seen as bitches. This backlash also constantly exhibits itself in pop culture. For instance, it’s apparent as men and women alike (and probably non-binary people too since we’re all misogynists just like we’re all racists) defended Johnny Depp over Amber Heard (lying bitch) and, more recently, Jonah Hill (who has never even played a distractingly loveable character) over Sarah Brady (insensitive, surfer bitch).
Amidst slumps of feminist fervor, being a bitch might ostracize you. Yet, I’ve never felt more connected to like-minded people than I have as @privately_being_a_bitch. And I connect with people over the very topics of having to pick up my jaw off the floor after reading the comments regarding Depp vs. Heard and Hill vs. Brady.
In other words, I know I’m preaching to the feminist choir about all of these things, but it’s nice to know that the choir is composed of REAL people and not a fantasy I perpetuate to cope with an inhospitable world.
III. The Bitch I Am Vs. The Bitch You Deserve
Single while launching @privately_being_a_bitch, I discovered that I was really good at trolling men who displayed despicable deportment on dating apps. Revealing the absurdities of patriarchy felt like my calling and a small public service.
Moreover, I was never a mean bitch to these men. Sarcastic? Sure. Over-zealous? Sometimes. Absurd? Absolutely. Insulting? Uh-uh.
If, for instance, you told me you needed to know how much I weigh before a first date, you deserved a sincere, public lambasting over your sexist, superficial, controlling entitlement to women’s bodies:
But most of the time, I just went off the deep end with these guys to see how long they’d pursue me:
To my delight, my social network understood and enjoyed my performances. They assured me that I wasn’t alone in my anger and frustration and that my perceptions were not synaptic misfirings. And, honestly, this feedback is life-saving.
IV. Gaslighting vs. Gaslighting
Sometimes we inherently know certain things to be right or wrong, true or false, but the world gaslights us into believing that we’re the problem because we’re too lazy (not hustling enough for capitalism), crazy (too opposed to mainstream narratives about identity and relationships), or bitchy (too militantly adverse to patriarchy). On the other hand, sometimes we shout, “Gaslighting!” when we’re trying to evade accountability for our own shortcomings.
In fact, “gaslighting” is a revived and trending idea because of social media and our collective turn toward popular, woo-woo-inflected therapy that lets us off the hook for accountability like the confession booth lets Catholics off the hook for sin (former Catholic school girl here). For instance, if we’re all victims of a growing population of narcissists, why are we bombarded with guides for identifying sociopaths instead of information on recognizing our own lack of empathy and abusive tendencies?
In other words, I understand that social media scrambles our social-moral compass and self-awareness. It tricks us into thinking solipsism is self-care. Moreover, it does these things as it also offers the supportive, objective perspective we might otherwise seek from a trained and licensed therapist. It’s a confusing world to orient one’s self in, for sure.
Yet, it’s not impossible to find true healing and friendship on social media. With good discernment, you might find it, but no guarantees.
One thing is for certain: an encouraging yet un-sycophantic community won’t try to influence you with viral buzz phrases and over-identifying with your astrological chart or personality type. This isn’t to say you should snobbily upturn your nose at your cultural zeitgeist. I’m unapologetically guilty of complaining about being a misunderstood introverted Leo. But, even as I self-identify in those terms, I know I’m contributing to my own misidentification, which doesn’t perfectly fit these templates.
These terms might boost my inclusion in a larger cultural discussion and make me feel seen and accepted (or, unjustly persecuted as others label me the most obnoxious sign in the zodiac), but, ultimately, isn’t it better if I take full responsibility for my bourgeois tastes without dismissing it as Leo sumptuosity? Don’t I want your friendship because we’re inexplicably compatible and not because your air sign fans the flames of my fire sign?
V. The Man vs. Individual Men
I imagine people who believe in a flat Earth or that Satanic child molesters worked to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency feel the same way that I do regarding finding “my people” online. Thankfully I’ve found an affinity with people who don’t lie and spread misinformation. Yet, if I was desperately lonely, disempowered, and unloved, who knows what belief systems I’d subscribe to just to feel seen and autonomous?
Being a discerning bitch means questioning conventional normality as it threatens your life and the lives of those around you. Case in point, I live in Wyoming, the bonafide reddest state in the country, littered with Pro-Trump paraphernalia. Such sloganeering is always plastered on the side of the most dilapidated living situations. To me, this shows that a pussy-grabbing billionaire with a vague platform of nostalgia for America’s white supremacist past powerfully appeals to people who see no other options for fighting the class inequality and poverty that directly oppresses them. Live free and die disempowered.3 I know that this phrase is a distortion of New Hampshire’s state motto, but it’s a very Make-America-Great-Again concept. Ironically, Wyoming is the Equality State–I explain the irony here.
Of course, ideologies that support the Man will never give us power and freedom. It’s essential to basic survival and, maybe more importantly, thriving that we find a community that uplifts us in our psychic struggles against the Man; a community that knows saying things like “the Man,” or the white cis het Elon Musk Man, is not a hate crime. It can’t be–no one but the Man has the authority to produce and proliferate hateful ideology.
I’m using Musk as an example to poke fun at him for his recent flagging of the term “cis” as hate speech on Twitter. Twitter (under Musk’s tycoon stranglehold) and Meta (under the other sallow guy who wants to cage-fight Musk) don’t get why it’s OK to label the Man as the Man. This is why a lot of my posts on Instagram are flagged for “harmful language” as I sarcastically whine that “men suck.”
But they DO suck, and it is crucial to publicly underline how this impotent utterance (I’ll repeat myself and let you read this again slowly) has zero ability to overturn and restructure social hierarchies. The only hate speech that does things in the world is the hate speech volleyed at the already prone. And, since women have centuries of disenfranchisement behind them, our hate speech–like our offensive nipples–counts least of all.
VI. The Media vs. Social Media
Despite the monopolizing men running the show, though, social media makes me more hopeful about the extensive possibilities for encountering and sustaining healing intimacies. For this reason, I can’t fully relate to headlines proclaiming how horrible social media is for our mental health and self esteems. I also can’t fully trust when the mainstream media discusses the effects of social media on depressed, suicidal, anorexic-bulimic teen girls as if they aren’t part of a longer, outstanding history of dispersing body-dysmorphia-inspiring “news.”
Extant, pre-Internet media has always affected girls who are just learning to cope with a culture that regularly devalues them and incites violence against them. Do you remember when America’s Next Top Model convinced us that anything above a size six was not a normal body (and what even are women’s clothing sizes based on)? Remember when “heroin chic” was a thing? Thankfully 1990s nostalgia hasn’t resurrected that trend–yet. But, even when it does, one major pro of growing up with the Internet over oligarchically controlled cable television and print publications is that trends come and go as fast as Tik Tok videos are uploaded. Moreover, you’re at liberty to subscribe to body-positive accounts as much as you’re at risk for wallowing in the bogs of unattainable-body fitness accounts.
Perhaps because I’m no longer a highly vulnerable, impressionable teenage girl trying to fit into a cruel social milieu, I’m a bit disconnected from this dark side of the virtual world that claims to make it even harder on girls and women than previously. Or, perhaps I’ve effectively blinded myself by curating my own egregiously politically and socially biased online social bubble. And if I have, who cares? I see nothing wrong with cultivating the good company I prefer to keep.4Unfortunately, we’ve always been made to feel less for being female. This is why, to pursue yet another tangent that deserves its own 2,000-word essay, I hate seeing women jump on non-binary identity as a way to circumvent the social degradation that comes with being legibly a “woman.” As an anti-heteronormativity bitch, I consider myself queer and female. I use she/her pronouns to resignify she/her through my weird-ass, everyday performances of unconventional femininity.
VII. Life vs. Death
My one, fleeting taste of bullying in cyberspace occurred after the deaths of Damien Moreau and Alex Small. At this time, I briefly made @privately_being_a_bitch a public account to share my unguarded, complicated feelings about their suicide pact. In doing so, I offended people. I’m not apologizing for my public displays of ongoing grief, for which I was called an attention-seeking narcissist. One anonymous person also created a fake IG account pretending to be me in an attempt to shame me for being so selfishly impertinent about the dead.
While my account is private again (as a direct result of this incident), I’ve taken up commenting on popular meme account posts and making myself visible to abusive people once more.
Honestly, I don’t know why I need to engage in public discourses about jokes. Why can’t I see a meme about how Wife cat is “on her period” while Husband cat suffers her irrational aggression by getting clawed in the face WITHOUT needing to comment: “What an unhumorous display of gender-and-sexuality-bias projection.”
That’s not my best work. My displays of critical outrage are not always so equally unhumorous. But, come on, relating to spade creatures in holy matrimony is surely the height of heteronormative dystopia.
To be more concrete, I recently had a very small, unnoticed “spat” with some strangers about a meme. I’ll share the story through screenshots:
This exchange prompted me to change my handle from @privately_being_a_bitch to @barely.private. It’s not an act of resignation or cowardice. I just want others to assume my primary tone is humor before they assume I’m an overly disgruntled troll bitch.
And maybe I AM an ODTB to some extent, and maybe that is a fantastic Instagram handle, but I get to point that out, not YOU.
I’m done begging the question by titling myself a bitch. We’ll just have to see how much of a bitch I can be without calling myself one.
- 1I imagine in the public school context (in which teaching elementary through high school might be more lucrative than being an adjunct professor), you’re judged by capricious parents. Plus, you’re at the whim of ever-changing U.S. legislation that determines school funding based on standardized test performances–rote training that leads college students to expect rewards for regurgitating information. When I put it this way, I sympathize with those students who thought I was bad at my job for attempting to wring out original thoughts from them (@being_an_olde_crotchety_bitch).
- 2In full disclosure, I also wanted to explore a slut era that I couldn’t reconcile with my professorial side. In Taos, Damien Moreau, of short-lived erotic video performance acclaim, pulled me into his world, and I was maybe a little too eager to undress for his camera. Once those tasteful images consensually found their way onto the Internet, I knew I transgressed from art critic to art itself, or, to an author of a very different genre.
- 3I know that this phrase is a distortion of New Hampshire’s state motto, but it’s a very Make-America-Great-Again concept. Ironically, Wyoming is the Equality State–I explain the irony here.
- 4Unfortunately, we’ve always been made to feel less for being female. This is why, to pursue yet another tangent that deserves its own 2,000-word essay, I hate seeing women jump on non-binary identity as a way to circumvent the social degradation that comes with being legibly a “woman.” As an anti-heteronormativity bitch, I consider myself queer and female. I use she/her pronouns to resignify she/her through my weird-ass, everyday performances of unconventional femininity.