When #MeToo started, I wrote down all the times I had actually been sexually harassed. Every day on the subway, I smashed down between two men whose thighs were taking up three seats, terrified of being yelled at, doing it anyway. No one ever mansplained to me-did they? Manspreading, on the other hand, I understood. When the term mansplaining was invented, I was confused.
But none of it mattered because the world changed, we grew up, and we turned out to agree, or disagree, or laugh about them in therapy, or never think of them at all.
They said things like, “Don’t argue with Liz!” or “She’s pretty, but…” or “You’re really intimidating.” They said, “It’s okay that my top is bigger, because your bottom is bigger,” or “I never think of you as black,” or “You have a Jewish nose,” or “Flab!” Teachers told me, “Let someone else answer,” and friends assured me, “You’ll get into Yale because you’re black.” People said, “I wish I were as thin as you,” or “You’re twice as big as she is.” They said, “Liz will be so pretty when she grows up, with her looks and her figure,” and “Liz is ugly.”Īll of which is to say, they said-as we all did-numerous contradictory things, some compliments, some torments, many subject to opinion, many sheer sexism or racism. Though I never got to use it, because no one called me a bitch. That was the response you gave to “bitch” in my middle school. Spanning the street, the bedroom, the voting booth, and the workplace, these simple words have huge stories behind them - stories it’s time to examine, re-imagine, and change. And in Pretty Bitches, Skurnick has rounded up a group of powerhouse women writers to take on the hidden meanings of these words, and how they can limit our worlds - or liberate them.įrom Laura Lipmann and Meg Wolizer to Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Traister, each writer uses her word as a vehicle for memoir, cultural commentary, critique, or all three. No one knows this better than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times’ column “That Should be A Word” and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. “Effortless,” “Sassy,” “Ambitious,” “Aggressive”: What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise, and blame, bearing an outsized influence on women’s lives - to say nothing of our moods. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean.
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