This week, a reporter on Capitol Hill overheard Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) confront Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and then witnessed Yoho utter as he walked away that the New York congresswoman was a “fucking bitch.” Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor Thursday for a remarkable speech calling out Yoho’s subsequent half-apology, and HuffPost senior reporter Emma Gray wrote a powerful piece about why Yoho’s insult and AOC’s response hit a nerve for millions of women.
OK, so why did Rep. Yoho’s apology upset AOC, and so many others?
Rep. Yoho's apology fell short because, first and foremost, it wasn't an apology. He refused to admit to the language he used — which was said in public and witnessed by a reporter — instead apologizing if his words had been “misconstrued.” He also emphatically stated that he would not be apologizing for his “passion,” by which I assume he was referring to his aggressive accosting of his colleague on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It was basically like a paint-by-numbers of faux-pologies issued by powerful male public figures who are called out on their inappropriate, misogynist behavior. Deny the charge? Check. Invoke your wife and daughters as proof of your decency? Check. Imply that you're sorry ... if she was offended? Check. If he was not going to own and reckon with his poor behavior, then he would have been better off saying nothing.
Your piece makes an interesting point about the weight of the word “bitch,” and how its meaning has evolved — tell us about that.
“Bitch” has been sort of a catchall term for a woman who steps out of her appointed social, cultural, economic or political role for at least several hundred years. In researching the term for the piece, I found that “bitch” started out as a pejorative term that specifically connoted lewdness or sexual immorality, like a dog in heat. But by the 1700s it had expanded to include any woman seen as “strong-headed” or difficult to control, and its usage in literature really took off around the time of the suffrage movement and ratification of the 19th Amendment, which feels pretty telling.
It also feels significant that the term has not really gone out of vogue since the 1700s. As I wrote in the piece, lots of anti-Hillary Clinton swag in 2016 used the term, and clearly that was the default insult that came to Rep. Yoho when he was confronted by a young woman who dared to disagree with him and take up space and assert herself as his equal. Women of course also use the term — some in derogatory ways, others in more endearing or arguably “empowering” ways — but it means something pretty specific when said by a man to or about a woman.
Based on the reaction to AOC’s speech, it’s very clear that what happened to her is a universal experience for women. What parts of her remarks on the House floor do you think really resonated for people?
Oh, gosh, I mean the entire nine-plus-minute speech is really a masterpiece and should be studied, but a few things really stuck out to me.
One thing was her ability to outline how commonplace this sort of language is for most women, and how it is simply a linguistic indicator of the (subordinate) place that many men would prefer women stay. She said, “This is not new, and that is the problem. Mr. Yoho was not alone.”
Also, her dismantling of the trope that simply having a wife or daughters inoculates a man from engaging in harmful, sexist behavior, or automatically qualifies him as a decent person, when she said, “I am someone’s daughter too … and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”
Also, her complete and utterly delicious evisceration of Rep. Yoho’s self-importance. She thanked him for “showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women.”
Not only was AOC’s speech satisfying in the ways that she just simply wiped the floor with Yoho, but even more so because she used the personal attack as a way to make a much larger and much more resonant point about the systems that are still entrenched in this nation, and that work to systematically keep women in their appointed places. As those boundaries continue to be pushed, it will also continue to evoke and expose the fears of weak men eager to hold onto their power at all costs.
You’re a woman in a very public profession, and you often write about controversial topics, so unfortunately you’re not a stranger to what AOC was describing. How did you feel watching this story play out?
I think many women — especially women who do their work in public — are unfortunately used to experiencing slurs like “fucking bitch” in their professional lives. It’s certainly very easy to throw meaningless barbs out on Twitter when someone is affronted by something a woman has done or said. (Men absolutely get harassed online as well, but it tends to take a different tenor.) When I was thinking about this piece, I actually did a search on Twitter with my handle and the word “bitch,” and a critical mass of tweets came up. Seems like men on the internet tend to get angry and lash out when a woman does things like post a news article about another man. I was talking to a friend last night and she said that AOC’s speech had made her think about how many times she had been called a “fucking bitch” to her face, and made her wonder how many times she had been called that behind her back by men.
Watching AOC both make clear that the slur didn't wound her in any real way — truthfully, I think most women are so used to hearing things like that that they stop making a lasting impression at a certain point — while also driving home why the normalization of that degrading language still matters and still sends a clear message to women as a whole, was profoundly moving.
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