Raising Bitches

How does a serial doormat raise daughters who can stand up for themselves?

Adding this to the vision board for my daughters. (Broad City/ Paper Kite Productions/ Comedy Central)

Like any parent, I want my daughters to have happy and fulfilling lives. I would be proud of them for pursuing just about any passion– music, athletics, art, reading, math, building ships inside of glass bottles, righteous petty crime, travel, etc– but one thing that I absolutely need them to be able to do, no excuses, is how to be comfortable not being nice. Or, as some might put it: by being bitches.

By “bitches,” I mean bitches the way that misogynists use it– women who do not freely give their time and patience to anybody who demands it, for any reason. Girls and women who say no, and who stand up for themselves.

I’m already off to an inauspicious start in raising girls who aren’t afraid to not be nice to everybody at all times. The baby smiles at everybody. But my three-year-old can be a bit of a tough nut to crack. She’s a natural at being not nice, a trait I find myself trying to counterprogram.

Maybe I’m biased because she’s mine, but I think she’s pretty cute (she looks nothing like me). She’s got long blonde hair and striking green-blue eyes, and old people love that shit, and so they’re always trying to engage with her. Sometimes she’s game to share the gospel of Spider-man with them. But most times, she kind of stares at them blankly or ignores them. Which is fine! She doesn’t owe strangers conversation. But I’ve found myself, from force of habit, trying to coax her into talking to these random people who go up to strange children in public. I’m writing this paragraph as a way to hold myself accountable for next time it happens. Just let the random strangers be disappointed. Who cares?

I have a confession: I am a serial doormat. The idea of being unkind to another person’s face gives me hives. I’m getting better at it, but I’ve got a ways to go. I look back on my youth and realize with horror that I have wasted incalculable time and energy on not being a bitch to people who don’t have my best interests at heart while, at the same time, not being nice to people who I should probably make more of an effort for. On my first day working in TV, one of my producers jokingly told me that I shouldn’t be too trusting of people because “it’s showbusiness not showfriendship.” More than ten years later, I’m still waking up every morning and heading to my job in showfriendship.

I’ve put in so much effort trying to be nice to people who would probably run me over with their car if given the opportunity. Strange men who ooze lasciviousness and contempt. Older men who don’t think I have a brain. Younger men who think they know better than me because they’re male and I’m female. People of all genders who think it’s women’s job to maintain the pleasantness of every social situation. Bosses who are clearly pretending to be my friend so that they can pay me less. Slimeballs. Cornballs. Hornballs. People who act entitled to my time, my space, my peace. I’ve been servile to the expectations of people who offer me nothing. How do I raise girls who won’t do this?

I was raised to fear authority figures and obey without question. My parents wouldn’t let me watch network sitcoms because they were afraid it would make me sassy (did it work? We’ll find out!). Being called “disrespectful” was one of my dad’s sickest burns.

Eventually that attitude extended to treating all strangers as though they may be authority figures. Which turned into being so polite and deferential in professional interactions that I frequently got taken advantage of, or didn’t ask for what I actually wanted. Which turned into the unpleasant discovery in my late twenties that it’s difficult for me to initiate confrontations with friends or colleagues or even rude strangers face-to-face without crying. When I had a problem, rather than talking about it, I would avoid the other party in the dispute, ending a nonzero number of friendships and stalling out my career at multiple junctures. Sometimes I’d repress my initial feelings until they exploded in an outburst that didn’t make sense in context, which is embarrassing. This took literally years to begin to unlearn. (In the meantime, I was a giant bitch to every man I ever dated. Some of them absolutely deserved it. Others did not.)

This might be due in part to the fact that I was raised in the 1980’s and 90’s, a time when the phrase “gentle parenting” would have gotten you laughed out of a cigarette smoke-filled teacher’s lounge. My parents– authoritarian, like most parents during those years– would threaten to call Mr. Chitwood when we misbehaved, and that Mr. Chitwood would take us to reform school. Mr. Chitwood was a police officer who lived about a mile from our house. He was heavyset and had a black mustache. In my hazy memory of him, the stache was about midway in bushiness between the Adolph Hitler and the Kaiser Wilhelm. He was not a scary guy, but I was terrified that if I, say, didn’t eat all of my parsnips, he would roll down our driveway in his Crown Victoria and haul me away. He moved to another small town when I was small, and I don’t think I ever had a single encounter with him. As far as I know, my parents never told him that they had basically turned him into the Boogeyman in our house.

[I’m still way too polite to the police. A few years back, I got pulled over in Texas by a police officer whose name was literally “Bacon” and I found myself giggling and trying to make small talk as he was writing me a ticket. I’m sure he fucking hated me and my California plates. What the fuck. What a waste of energy.]

We went to Catholic mass every Sunday, where I learned that God loved us a lot, but also we better be good or else we were going to hell. I had to confess my “sins” to a middle aged priest with clammy hands when I was seven years old. Most of my sins had to do with disobedience. The priest told me to say a bunch of prayers, which I did, believing that I’d sufficiently plastered over the holes in my tiny soul by mumbling Hail Mary a lot. By the end of his tenure at our church, parishoners were pretty much over his shit. While preparing for the recessional one Sunday, he tripped and fell down the stairs between the altar and the aisle, and couldn’t get himself up. He lay there on his back, his arms and legs wriggling like a fumigated bug, yelling “Help! Help!” for what seemed like a suspiciously long time before a few of the women got up to help him back to his feet.

(Years later, word around St. Dominic’s Catholic Church was that the priest had been embezzling money from the collection and using it to buy things like big screen TV’s for himself, and that his “assistant” was actually maybe his girlfriend. Which is actually a lot less bad than what a lot of other priests were doing around that time, but it still wasn’t a great look for a guy who was supposed to be the righteousness expert.)

My college entrance essay— to a Catholic school, natch— was about how important it is to be nice to people. At the time, I truly believed that projecting sunshine and rainbows was a way to get kindness reflected back to you. While I was there, I was way too nice to boys and not nice enough to girls. It was a problem.

It’s also a problem at scale. The more I study billionaires and despots the more I realize that they rely on everybody but them being nice and doing what they’re supposed to. Watching Democrats in Washington twiddle their thumbs and Follow The Rules in response to the Trump administration’s blatant lawlessness is a pretty frustrating example of where being “nice” gets a person in an interaction with somebody who wants to take advantage of them. They get screwed over. If only fewer people were kind by default, the Elon Musks and Rupert Murdochs of the world would have to work harder to hoover up all the power and resources.

Me negotiating. (Heathers/ New World Pictures)

Some of the Nice By Default behavior girls are conditioned for is a safety thing. Most men will not react violently when girls and women don’t comply with their social demands. But some will. And so, just like it’s safer to not eat random mushrooms because some are poisonous, it is safer in most cases for women to just assume that a random man might respond to social noncompliance with violence, or at least by acting like a total asshole. Getting followed halfway home by a man muttering “fucking cunt” because I wouldn’t give him my phone number on the train doesn’t happen every day, but it only needed to happen once for me to feel afraid every time a random guy I wasn’t interested in flirted with me in public. (One of the best things about getting older: the men leave me alone now.)

The threat of “bad men” truly has led to a world where mediocre men enjoy unearned deference from women and girls. It’s a pretty good setup for them. We– and I’m not excluding myself from this, as I’ve been way too fucking nice to random dudes– further enshrine this expectation in them by being nice to them all the time, simply because they expect it. Which means that when a girl or woman comes along who is Not Nice to them specifically, it’s upsetting.

I don’t have high hopes for the future, but I do believe that my daughters’ generation could be the one to end this cycle. But also, they should probably carry and know how to use bear spray– which works both for men and bears.

I don’t want my kids to grow up being jerks to everybody, for no reason. Like kindness, bitchiness doesn’t mean anything if it’s just whipped out at every turn. A person who is bitchy in all situations gives off the impression that they have something going on that is outside of the bitchiness target’s control, and thus are not to be taken seriously. A person who is usually reasonable suddenly becoming assertive or rude can make a much greater impact. You can really hurt somebody’s feelings weilding bitchiness like a scalpel. And hurt feelings are often an important first step in changing behavior.

I reject the notion that we don’t owe anybody anything. ~We live in a society~; of course we owe each other and should look out for and help each other. Empathy is one of the most potent and valuable human traits. However, behaving prosocially does not necessarily mean being compliant on demand.

Another vision board entry for the kids. (Fried Green Tomatoes/ Universal Pictures)

I want to teach my daughters that, contrary to social messaging, there’s nothing wrong with being a bitch. There’s nothing wrong with not replying to a random demand for a smile, or refusing to make coffee in the break room when a male coworker could just as easily do it. I want my daughters to use as few conciliatory exclamation points and emojis in their written communication as possible. I want them to be able to endure marathons of uncomfortable silence without feeling compelled to fill the air with pleasantries.

I don’t want my daughters to waste their energy being little rays of sunshine around people who don’t respect them or see them as fully human. I want them to be completely fine being called “not nice” by people who feel entitled to a private extemp performance of pleasant femininity just because they’re girls.

I want my daughters to feel confident enough to confront somebody who is trying to take advantage of them or somebody weaker than them. I want my daughters to be comfortable saying “No” and then not elaborating further about why the answer is “no.” I want them to understand at a young age that most people who follow up a “no” with a “why” are not entitled to the “why.”

And then maybe they can teach me how.