Not anymore, if Kate Figes's recently published Big Fat Bitch Book (Virago, £9.99) is anything to go by. In this, bitching is celebrated as the highly amusing art it can be. We all know it's good to talk – well, you'll be mighty glad to know it can be good to bitch too. According to the author, bitching, like gossip, is a way of assessing yourself and your surroundings. We learn the rules in the playground as part of a complex hierarchical game that employs bitching among peers as a way to check out both the competition and our place within it.
Grown-up bitches
As we get older, so our bitching develops. We use it to bond with our friends (nothing like a good old moan over a few glasses of wine at the end of another endlessly rubbish week at work) and keep our enemies in check (Figes notes that women, while brought up to be Good Girls who do right by those around them still need a way to let off steam – bitching behind someone's back avoids insulting someone to their face while still getting your message across).
[quote]Even that classic move of agreeing with someone to their face only to slag them off for that very same thing as soon as their back's turned is, according to linguist Jennifer Coates, simply a way of “maximising the common ground” with that person, while still affording us the opportunity to express our own feelings as well.
Which all sounds rather marvellous and provides an instant conscience salve to anyone whose ever directly praised a friend's cooking/parenting/bungee jumping skills in the full knowledge that you'll be mocking them a nanosecond later. But this only really works if everyone's playing by the same rules. At its best, bitching is hilarious (a GSOH, after all, is what separates a good bitch from a bad one) and a great way to let off steam.
Degrees of bitching
But it's a fine line between a sharing a good, honest gossipy moan and being cruel. Bitching can serve a useful function in cutting down oversized egos or keeping bores in check, but if it's sustained over a period of time or continually directed at one person it turns swiftly into bullying (the last Celebrity Big Brother is a case in point).
Bitching might be a useful way to level the playing field when you're feeling threatened (sexual competition among women is a classic bitch-trigger), undermined (if your boss passes you over for promotion – again!) or just plain old bored (nothing like a good old slag-fest to lift the colour of the day), but it's a far from one-size-fits-all activity.
Family members, for example, get away with much crueller and more barbed comments than many others because the strength of the familial bond – the knowledge that you'll really be there for one another when the chips are down – balances it out. The same principal works with really close friends, the best of whom you'll be able to volley gently bitchy comments with like star players on Wimbledon's centre court.
However, when it comes to slagging off strangers, ganging up on one person, or pointedly attacking those you know are weaker than yourself, you're no longer bitching. You're simply being a bitch.
