I’m thinking that “fucking bitch” needs to become the “nasty woman” of the second Drumpf administration. Let’s put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs and get it tattooed on our forearms. Let’s just decide that Fucking Bitch is the status to which we now aspire, and the energy we bring to our collective efforts.

I’ve watched a lot of the videos from Renee Good’s murder, and I struggled, with each new clip, to understand what happened to make that man—fully armed, swaddled in Kevlar and camo, anonymized by his mask and glasses—feel so threatened that he had to fire three bullets at close range into a fucking car. Because let’s face it—and I mean no disrespect when I say this—Renee looked kind of absurd in that moment. She had the look of a mom who was still in her PJs, still with bedhead and morning eyes, who put on boots and a coat to drop her kid off with the accompanying childlike trust that she would not have to see anyone or interact with the public in that state. Like we all have, some uncountable number of times ourselves. She looked like a woman who left the house fully expecting that twenty minutes later she would be back in her kitchen with a second cup of coffee. 

Let’s just pause there for a second. 

Fuck.

So why? What got Jonathan Ross so incensed that he put that bullet in her? I watched all these videos and I couldn’t really make sense of it: yes there was a lot of noise (noise would definitely make me shoot someone), there were cars and it was kind of chaotic, but seriously? That’s why he had to kill someone’s mom? Has this guy had no training for the job he currently holds?

And then I saw the video of her wife.

I watched Becca Good walk around the car with her phone, mocking all the ICE agents. Cracking jokes about switching license plates, asking Ross if he wants to go toe to toe, telling him to go get some lunch. Calling him Big Boy. I watched it and I felt my body tense, my heartrate rise, because now I knew what was going to happen—not from watching the other videos, but from half a century living life as a woman. I knew, without having to see him, what effect her mockery was having on him. That might have been the moment, honestly. When she talked to him like he was a child who needed a sandwich and a nap, I honestly think that was the moment he locked in. She condescended to him. She made him feel small. All the weapons and Kevlar in the universe can’t compensate for the feeling of smallness, not when it’s coming from a woman, not when it’s coming from some fucking bitch. I don’t even think Renee is who he was talking about when he said that; I think he was talking about Becca. I think that bullet was meant for Becca.

Was it Margaret Atwood who said it best? Men fear that women will laugh at them. Women fear that men will kill them. Because they do. Over and over and over again, they fucking do.

For making a small man acknowledge his smallness, Becca Good ended up pacing the sidewalk with her wife’s blood all over her, trying to make sense of what just happened. But we have all been fucking bitches at some point in our lives, probably for making other small men acknowledge their smallness, and now we are a nation ruled by small men whose smallness is rolling over the landscape to crush us all. Maybe it’s because I’ve reached the stage of life where women are assumed to have run out of fucks to give and begin embracing their witchiness (though witchiness has always been a component of my vibe), but from this point forward I think I want fucking bitch to be the energy I bring to every gathering, and to the world at large. At this point, fucking bitches are probably who we need the most.