Could not locate my copy of Thinking about Women (1968) this morning, so have been unable to determine whether Ellmann includes 'bitch/bitching' along with 'shrill' etc in her analysis of female-unfriendly gendered language. Can't remember if she does.
It's not as though men don't bitch, any more than they don't gossip (I once sat in front of 2 clergymen on a bus who were saying things about various other gentlemen of the cloth like 'He'd sell his mother to be made a bishop'), and gossip doesn't have to be malicious, but both words have connotations of the feminine and the malicious.
But while I think that bitching at people is usually a wrongness (though I can surely think of instances where I have been tempted and might even consider it justifiable), bitching about is another kettle of codfish.
It's not necessarily always a good thing, and people who do nothing but bitch may have their problems, but in a lot of cases it works as a letting off of steam about matters over which one has little or no control (e.g. as, with colleagues over tiresome readers/donors or Problem Colleagues).
I can see in the brave new social networking world this may turn problematic, as there seems to have been significant erosion of
Goffman's useful distinction of
'on-stage/off-stage'. A tweet or a FaceBook posting is going to accrue a very different audience from the 3 people within earshot of one's desk as one puts down the phone on a particularly annoying enquirer.
But it's also possible - I hazard - to see bitching as one stage in a productive process of getting validation that something is Not OK, and possibly enabling moving on to a further stage of doing something more constructive.
Is this not how 'the [so-called] Second Wave of Feminism' aka 'Women's Liberation' got going? One could, I think, perceive a phase of undirected bitching about the gendered status quo in the early to mid-60s. Though possibly with some ambivalence - I recall in The Golden Notebook that Anna develops a sense of her sessions with Molly complaining about men (and do admit, the men in The Golden Notebook are seriously complainable about) as problematic and somehow 'essentially lesbian': which may be fascinating period detail or revealing something about Lessing. Or both.
But anyway: sometimes it's the letting off of steam that lets one go on not going bang in public, and sometimes it's clarifying that something somewhere is not right. And, okay, sometimes it is just plain spite.
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