User:NotAHedgehog121/sandbox

Reclaiming derogatory terms[edit] English-speakers continue to use words such as spinster, bitch, whore, and cunt to refer to women in derogatory ways. Author Inga Muscio writes, "I posit that we're free to seize a word that was kidnapped and co-opted in a pain-filled, distant, past, with a ransom that cost our grandmothers' freedom, children, traditions, pride, and land."

Part of taking back the word bitch was fueled by the 1994 single, "All Women Are Bitches" by the all-woman band Fifth Column and later, by the 1999 book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel. In her declaration of the word bitch, Wurtzel introduces her philosophy: "I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, call when I feel like it, throw tantrums in Bloomingdale's if I feel like it and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself: that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy."[38]

Feminist author Jessica Valenti encourages readers to pay attention to their terminology rather than requiring them to reclaim derogatory terms: "The most thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl"