Years ago, I was in an online chatroom on AOL – that’s how far into the past it was. A group of newish parents had formed an email group to share experiences and offer support at a time when a new mother could feel very isolated. I had made several good friends and had introduced a friend from my real life into the mix. Most of the participants were women, but there were a handful of men including the friend I had brought on board. Jamie had been a college pal with whom I had reconnected in the early days of internet searches. He was funny, gentle, the sort of guy women called harmless. All women were nice ladies in his book, worthy of respect, even admiration. Certainly he managed to see my better qualities at times, frequent in those days, where I saw only lack.
He was a good guy and a better friend.
He and I were chatting online back in those AOL days when another friend joined us. She was one of the moms from the parent group, Lynn, a tough-talking 40 year old from Queens NY, generous and sharp, with a tongue like a successful bookie. THe three of us bantered for a while, and at some point, Lynn called me a bitch I don’t recall the context, but I’m sure some iteration of the F-word was included. This was normal, however, just how we talked, she and I. It passed without notice.
Then, after some tart remark from me, Jamie typed, “oh shut up, bitch.”
“Whoa” both Lynn and I sent simultaneously. “What??” Jamie asked genuinely confused. He had done nothing wrong, nothing different from Lynn. He meant nothing different; he was just being “one of us girls.”
Except he wasn’t one of us and for that reason alone, his words had an unintended sting. A slap that both Lynn and I felt instinctively.
That wasn’t his fault, but his actions regardless of his personal intentions hae the additional load of history. Of years of misogyny. Ta-Nehisis Coates in his book, The Message, wrote in reference to whiteness and other concepts of historical supremacy: “Without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime.” I felt that in my soul when I read it and felt it for Jamie at the time. He couldn’t understand the impact of those words in the context of hatred and violence that we as women sense so viscerally.
Thirty years later, I watch videos of an ICE agent shooting a woman in her car. The videos are everywhere, from multiple angles, with multiple explanations. In my algorithm, there is mostly outrage over the killing of this young white mother, who is nearly the same age as I was when Jamie jokingly called me a bitch. She had dropped her children at school and landed in an immigration raid somehow. By purpose? I’m not sure. Nor am I sure it matters. We have the right, no the obligation, to help our fellow humans in distress, surely.
She sits in her car, jawing at the agents along with her wife. Suddenly several masked agents surround her, trying to open her car door, moving around the front of the car, gun drawn. She backs the car up slightly, turned the wheels to the right and tries to pull away.
The agent fires three times into the open window.
THe car speeds off then and crashes into a car parked to the side, its driver mortally wounded if not already dead.
Then in the agent’s own video, we hear him growl, “Fucking bitch.”
His POV video was released as an exoneration. He was terrified, fearing for his life as she wielded her SUV as an immanent threat. The poor man had previously been struck and dragged by a car and was traumatized. He was rammed, wounded, racked with pain.
He might have sold that too, except that “fucking bitch” belied every other word expressed.
That was the fucking bitch of a man in fury, not pain. That was not the breathless gasp of someone in fear or the exhalation of relief for a life spared.
That was the Fucking Bitch of a man scorned. A man whose frustration had been slated, who had gotten a little of his own back.
That Fucking Bitch wasn’t his first. He’s said it plenty of times before. He said it when the high school girls turned him down. When some woman at a bar didn’t smile back or accept his offer of a drink. When he was up for a promotion and the chick with the big tits got the job instead. In those two words, he sums up half the world’s population.
For me those words once again hit hard. But also for me, only a slap, not three bullets to the face.
Making this solely about misogyny is to diminish the scope of the cruelty of this administration which cuts deeper than gender or ethnicity or skin color. It’s a vision of a world articulated by power, a world as Steven Miller puts it: “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” In his world, those with the power act with plenary authority, with absolute immunity, answerable to only their own sense of morality.
In a movie I watched with my kids as a young mother like Renee Good, A Bug’s Life, the lead Grasshopper tells his minions about the ants they are terrorizing “”You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life.”
Mr. Miller might do well to heed that warning. For surely we the people, do outnumber them. Don’t we? We who want to live in a world of global cooperation and interdependence. We the people who want a world of peace, liberty, equality, who want to welcome the tired on the Statue of Liberty, the hungry that need to be fed. The voiceless. The everyman. Time for all of us ants to stand up.
