Life would be extremely dull without these women or the characters they created, Davis as veteran movie bitch Margo Channing in All About Eve, or Crawford as Crystal in The Women. In literature, there are Emma, the Bingley Sisters and Becky Sharp, female characters who thrill us because they dare to present women as they really are: clever, calculating and verbally dexterous. A healthy malevolence lurks beneath the good girl facade. Take Mae West, for instance, who wrote most of her own material, as well as being a sex symbol. In her list of 15 “Things I'll Never Do” (which includes cook, bake, sew or take another woman's man), number seven says it all — “Play mother parts, sad parts, dumb parts or a virtuous wife, betrayed or otherwise. I pity weak women, good or bad, but I can't like them. A woman should be strong either in her goodness or badness.”
In an ideal, ungendered world, everybody would be nicer to each other. All women are human, with a wide range of strengths and weaknesses, just like men. We are just as competitive and ambitious, we get just as angry but we are not supposed to show it. Girls still grow up squeezing themselves into stereotypical “good” girl notions of femininity (and their feet into uncomfortably high-heeled shoes) and when we are not aware of how fettered we are by these stereotypes we veer towards being the kind of weak bitches who put other women down simply to make ourselves feel better. But there is a much stronger bitch inside each one of us just bursting to get out. As Madonna once said, “I'm tough, ambitious and I know what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.” Real women are loud, brave, outspoken, astute and funny, as well as kind, loving and supportive. So let her out girls, for “life's a bitch and then you die.” You might as well get what you want from it while you can.
Kate Figes is the author of The Big Fat Bitch Book, published by Virago.
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