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How Not to Be a Whiny Little Bitch

And what to do when you have to deal with one

Shoshana Kaufman
11 min readMay 12, 2022
Photo by Gursimrat Ganda on Unsplash

Bitch used to be an innocent word that distinguished a female canine from a male canine, or dog. It became, however, a loaded term that denoted ill temper or nastiness in women.

Bitch is a word often used to put women in their place. It’s used to insult someone, usually a woman, for being too assertive or for refusing to accept someone’s (usually a man’s) bad treatment.

But I’m using it in its more midcentury sense of a whiny, complaining person who makes other people responsible for his or her life’s problems, or someone who is bitchy, or easily inspired to begin complaining.

We’ve all dealt with this person. Nowadays, if the person is female, she might be referred to as a Karen. A man might be called a bitch in an ironic way, which is really, when you think about it, a form of reverse sexism.

But I digress.

At any rate, here are some rules for avoiding bitchiness in all of its unpleasant forms. To dramatize my rules, I will use a fictional character named Marvin who is based on a real person. He is the whiniest, bitchiest, most annoying person I have ever dealt with whom I didn’t also hate. I actually liked many things about him, but the effort to be his friend turned out to be too…

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Shoshana Kaufman
Shoshana Kaufman

Written by Shoshana Kaufman

Mother, grandmother, teacher, wife, food lover, spiritual searcher.

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