Reclaiming "Bitch": When Language Becomes a Weapon Against Women

In 1997, Meredith Brooks released "Bitch," an anthem that resonated with a generation of women who were tired of being boxed into narrow definitions of femininity. For Gen X women and beyond, reclaiming the word felt like an act of defiance—taking a slur used to shame and control women and transforming it into a declaration of complexity, strength, and refusal to be diminished.

But the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good demands we examine the darker side of this word—not as reclaimed by those it targets, but as wielded by those with lethal power. And when we trace the history of how language has been used to dehumanize women before violence, we find a pattern as old as the pyres that burned accused witches across Europe and colonial America.

Women Enjoying Freedom

A Legacy Written in Ash: Witch Hunts and the Language of Female Destruction

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe, with some scholars suggesting the number may have been far higher. Approximately 75-80% of those killed were women. Before these women were burned, drowned, or hanged, they were first linguistically transformed from human beings into something else: witches, harlots, scolds, shrews.

The word "witch" did more than describe an accusation—it unmade a woman's humanity. Once labeled a witch, a woman became a servant of darkness, a threat to community and godliness, someone whose elimination wasn't murder but purification. The linguistic transformation preceded and justified the physical one. Her body could be tortured, displayed, and destroyed because the word "witch" had already removed her from the category of beings worthy of protection.

This pattern—name, dehumanize, destroy—has repeated throughout history with remarkable consistency. Women who spoke too freely were "scolds" who required the humiliation of the scold's bridle, a metal cage locked over the head with a spiked plate pressed against the tongue. Women who resisted sexual control were "whores" and "harlots," terms that justified everything from social ostracism to execution. Women who didn't submit to male authority were "shrews" who needed to be "tamed."

Women need to be Tamed

The Etymology of Dehumanization

The reclamation of slurs is a well-documented phenomenon across cultures and marginalized communities. When a group takes ownership of language once used to demean them, they attempt to strip that language of its power to wound. This linguistic judo—turning an insult into an identity—has been practiced by LGBTQ+ communities, racial minorities, and women throughout modern history.

But there's a crucial distinction between reclamation and weaponization. When Meredith Brooks sang "I'm a bitch, I'm a lover," she was asserting the right to be multifaceted, human, and unapologetic. When someone in a position of power uses that word against someone they're harming or killing, they're doing something else entirely: they're denying that person's humanity—just as "witch" once did.

The Psychology of Dehumanizing Language in Violence

Military historians and psychologists have long understood that soldiers often use dehumanizing language as a psychological coping mechanism. By reducing the enemy to something less than human—whether through racial slurs, animal comparisons, or gendered insults—combatants create emotional distance from the act of killing. This linguistic dehumanization precedes, accompanies, and follows violence, making it psychologically bearable for the perpetrator.

The same mechanism operated during witch hunts. Trial records show accusers repeatedly emphasizing the accused woman's otherness: she consorted with demons, she transformed into animals, she had unnatural marks on her body. These weren't just accusations of specific acts—they were systematic attempts to place the accused outside the boundaries of human community. Once successfully othered, her torture and execution became not just permissible but necessary.

The word "bitch" serves this function today with devastating efficiency. When applied to women, it transforms a human being into an animal—specifically, a female dog. And in our cultural imagination, what happens to dogs that don't obey? The same thing that happened to witches who wouldn't confess, to scolds who wouldn't be silent, to shrews who wouldn't submit.

The Good Case: When Rhetoric Meets Reality

The shooting of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Johnathan Ross brings this dynamic into sharp, horrifying focus. According to reports, after shooting Good, Ross referred to her as a "fucking bitch." The linguistic move here is telling: Good, as a woman refusing to comply with Ross's demands, becomes in his language what she literally was not—a disobedient animal deserving of what he just did to her.

This isn't just offensive language added to a tragedy. It's the verbal manifestation of a worldview in which women who don't obey authority aren't fully human and therefore their elimination can be rationalized, even in the moment it occurs.

We've seen this script before. The accused witch who wouldn't confess. The scold who wouldn't be silent. The shrew who wouldn't submit. The bitch who wouldn't obey. In each case, a term of dehumanization precedes or accompanies violence, transforming what would otherwise be recognized as murder into something the perpetrator and his society can accept.

Renee Nicole Good

The Noem Context: Dogs, Obedience, and Dominance

Former South Dakota Governor now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's public revelation that she shot her dog for being untrainable provides a disturbing cultural touchstone for understanding how "bitch" functions as dehumanization. Noem's defense of killing a disobedient animal as a matter-of-fact necessity reveals a worldview centered on dominance and the expendability of beings that don't comply.

When women are linguistically reduced to "bitches"—female dogs—by those in positions of authority, especially in moments of violence, they inherit this same logic: you obey, or you're put down.

Kristi Noem

Why This Matters Now

The dehumanization of women through language isn't a relic of less enlightened times. It's happening now, in cases like Good's, where the word "bitch" was used not just as an insult but as a justification—a way to reframe a woman's death as the inevitable outcome of her failure to submit.

The progression is chillingly familiar. In the 1640s, Matthew Hopkins, England's self-proclaimed "Witchfinder General," traveled from town to town identifying women as witches. The word itself became a death sentence. Once applied, the woman ceased to be a neighbor, a mother, a person. She was a witch—and witches burn.

Today, we don't burn women in public squares, but the linguistic mechanism remains the same. Call her a bitch, and suddenly her death becomes explicable, perhaps even necessary. The word does the work of dehumanization so efficiently that it can function as its own justification, spoken in the same breath as pulling a trigger.

Women and allies must reject this dehumanization categorically. There's a world of difference between a woman claiming "bitch" on her own terms and a person with a gun using it to rationalize taking a woman's life. The first is empowerment; the second is erasure—erasure written in a script centuries old.

The Path Forward

Reclamation has its place. Meredith Brooks' anthem still resonates because it asserts women's right to be complicated, difficult, and uncontainable by others' expectations. Modern witches have reclaimed that word too, transforming it from an accusation into an identity of power and spiritual connection. But we must also recognize when that same language is being used not to describe women but to dehumanize them—to reduce them to animals, demons, or threats that can be disciplined or destroyed when they don't comply.

The language we tolerate shapes the violence we accept. When women who resist authority are called "bitches" by those who harm them, it's not just name-calling. It's the verbal architecture of violence, the linguistic permission structure that allows someone to pull a trigger and then, in the same breath, explain why the target wasn't really human enough to matter. It's the same structure that allowed communities to watch women burn and call it godly work.

We know where this leads. We've seen the pyres. We've read the trial records where "witch," "scold," and "whore" transformed women into killable beings. We cannot pretend that "bitch" functions differently just because we've moved from stakes to bullets, from public squares to isolated confrontations.

Rejecting this rhetoric isn't about policing language in the abstract. It's about recognizing that words matter, especially in the mouths of those with power over life and death. When an armed agent calls a woman he's just shot a "fucking bitch," he's not just being crude—he's telling us exactly how he justified killing her, even to himself. He's using a word that, like "witch" before it, transforms murder into something society might accept.

We must refuse to accept that justification. We must insist on women's full humanity, whether they comply or not. Because the alternative—a world where disobedient women are just bitches to be put down, witches to be burned, scolds to be silenced—is not a hypothetical dystopia. It's the world we've lived in before, and it's the world that language like this is trying to bring back.

History teaches us that the words come first. The violence follows.