Content Warning and Big Question

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Quick warning before we start. This episode talks about slurs, sexual shaming, racism, and harassment. So take care of yourself while you listen. Are women human? That's the question Dorothy L. Sayers puts to a women's society in 1938. And to answer it, she borrowed a line from of all people, D H Lawrence, the man who wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. Quote, Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a babyface, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal or an obscenity. The one thing he won't accept her as is a human being. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. I'm your host, Christina Rose. So obviously, that was a rhetorical question. Of course, women are human. But look at the words we use when referring to women, especially women who are visible, ambitious, sexual, angry, aging, unmarried, child-free, powerful, or just inconvenient. Once you start actively noticing those words, you'll start to see a pattern. I'm sure you've heard them before. The good girl, the bad mother, the bitch, the slut, the witch, the gold digger, the spinster, the crazy ex, the angry black woman, the dragon lady, the welfare queen, the Karen. They all have different origins, they're used on different women, and they each have very different consequences. But they all do the same thing. Take a complicated human being and shrink her down to one warning label. Neither Dorothy Sayers nor I am asking if women are biologically human. Instead, I'm asking who gets treated as a full, messy, complex human and who gets turned into a label as soon as she steps out of line. And if you're a guy listening, welcome. This isn't about blaming you. It's about noticing something we all do.

Dorothy Sayers on Women as People

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Let's start with Dorothy L. Sayers. She was a crime novelist, best known for her detective, Lord Peter Whimsey. By 1938, she was tired of being asked to explain what women are like, as if one half of the human race shared one temperament, one destiny, and one favorite brand of tea. Her answer was pretty simple. Women are people. We're all different from one another. A woman shouldn't have to represent her entire gender every time she succeeds, fails, speaks up, goes to work, gets married, doesn't get married, has kids, doesn't have kids, wears lipsticks, hates lipsticks, or changes her mind. That's why the Lawrence line hits so hard. Angel, devil, a servant, a pair of legs, every one of those is a label. A human being is allowed to be complicated. A label is expected to follow a specific script. For example, when a man is assertive, we might call him admirable, annoying, affective, rude, insecure, or just having a bad Tuesday. When a woman is assertive, we default to one of the pre-made labels society has already established for this type of woman. She's difficult, bossy, a diva, a bitch. What she did doesn't matter. All we need to know is that she stepped out of line from what a woman is expected to be. And that's why name-calling is so significant. An insult is almost never just a description of what happened, it's a claim about what kind of woman she is, how she deserves to be treated, and what every other woman should learn from watching her get punished.

How Labels Rewrite Reality

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And there's actually a name for this. Sociologists call it labeling theory. The idea is that the behavior becomes deviant only partly because of what someone did, but also because people with more power in society gave it a name and created the consequences for it. And when researchers looked at how these were applied to women, they found that any ordinary departure from societal expectations for women gets treated the same way. In other words, a label doesn't just describe what's going on, it rewrites it. Once a label sticks to you, it changes which facts people remember, what motives you had, and which punishments would be suitable for you. I personally noticed this when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt got divorced. At first, a lot of people assumed she must have done something because he seemed like such a nice guy. People had already labeled her a home wrecker and weird before this, so obviously it was her fault. And then the FBI documents went public and a lot of people started seeing it differently. It took paperwork for some people to even consider that she might not be the villain. And this whole thing stood out to me because a similar thing happened to me when I got divorced. I found that if he didn't physically beat me or cheat on me, people assumed I did something. And once you realize you were labeled, you start to notice it more with other people. Once people decide you're the villain, everything you do that fits the narrative gets remembered, and anything outside of the narrative gets forgotten. It works the same at work. A woman may start out being called ambitious, she's got goals, not a bad thing. But if her boss starts piling extra work on her and she sets a boundary, now she's difficult. A man doing the same thing, he's considered management material. And if she speaks up about it, she's graduated to bitch, a judgment of her entire character. Honestly, it's an incredibly efficient system. One label, and everyone already knows her personality, and nobody has to ask what she actually did. I'm not saying we don't have labels for men, players, losers, etc., but there are a lot fewer of them, and they rarely follow a man around the way they follow a woman. And they're everywhere, from school hallways to the office, from tabloid headlines to your social media feed, from political campaigns to the family dinner table. The exact meaning might change a little each time, but the intention stays the same. Establish the line, note the woman who crossed it, and warn everyone else not to do the same.

Language That Degrades Women Over Time

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Feminist linguists notice this back in the 1970s. The way we talk doesn't just reflect women's place in society, it helps keep them there. Words connected to women tend to pick up sexual or insulting meanings over time, in a way the matching words for men usually don't. They call it the semantic derogation of women. Listen to the difference. Master suggests expertise or authority. Mistress, which is what the Mrs. MRS period abbreviation stands for, could mean a woman in a secret affair. Bachelor sounds independent. Spinster sounds like a failure. Language is messy and not every word follows this pattern, but once you notice it, it's hard to stop noticing. Words for women are especially likely to get sexualized, shrunk down, or turned into moral judgments. Philosophers have pointed out something else about slurs like bitch and slut. Most insults have a neutral version. For example, pig and police officer point to the same people. The insult just adds contempt. But what's the neutral version of slut? You might think it's a woman who has sex, but it's not. Because if slut meant a woman who has sex, it would land on the women who actually have sex. It doesn't. Meanwhile, a married mom of three is obviously having sex, and we generally wouldn't call her that. And a guy doing the exact same thing, he's a player, a stud. So the word was never about what a woman actually did. It describes what someone has decided about her character. In fact, I was called a slut before I'd ever even kissed anyone. It was a judgment from the start. It tells everyone that this is a woman who can be dismissed or humiliated. And trust me, it did its job. So

Warmth Versus Competence and Likeability

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why do labels like these stick so fast? Psychologists have an idea called the stereotype content model. It says we tend to size people up on two basic questions. How warm are they and how competent are they? Warmth asks, are you friendly? Can I trust you? Are you on my side? Competence asks, are you capable, effective, powerful? And the combination of these two changes how people feel about you. Think of the sweet grandma nobody takes seriously. She appears warm but not competent, so she gets pity. Now think of the brilliant boss nobody likes. She seems competent but not warm, so she gets envy. Someone who seems both warm and competent gets admired, and someone who seems neither gets contempt. I'll post a graph of this on Instagram so you can get an actual visual of this. It's not a perfect map. Race, class, age, disability, sexuality, and culture may all contribute to where one might land on the graph. But it does help explain why women so often have to choose between being liked and being respected. Warmth gets treated as proof that you're feminine. Competence gets treated as proof that you're fit to be in charge. But when a woman shows competence and drive, people may decide she's lost her warmth. Now she's cold, abrasive, unlikable, or the label we already have for that, a bitch. Now remember warmth and competence because this next idea shows how sexism uses both. It was real eye-opening when I first read about it, and it's going to come up a lot this season. It

Hostile and Benevolent Sexism

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explains why sexism doesn't always sound mean. It's called ambivalent sexism theory, and it was developed by two psychologists in the 1990s. Ambivalent means having mixed feelings, and that's the basis of it. Men have historically held more power than women, but they also depend on women for love, for sex, for raising kids, for making a home. So instead of simple hatred, you get a mix. Resentment toward women who seem to threaten that power and affection for women who fit into their ideal role. Researchers have tested this with thousands of people in more than a dozen countries, and the same two-part pattern shows up almost everywhere. It always comes down to two kinds of sexism that work as a team: hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is the one we all recognize right away. It paints women as manipulative, overemotional, sexually promiscuous, or having malicious intentions. And it appears when women seem to be competing with men or challenging male authority. Benevolent sexism sounds a lot nicer, which is why we often miss it. It puts women on a pedestal, pure, warm, morally better, delicate, and deserving of a man's protection. But here's the catch: it's a trade-off. The admiration comes with conditions. It's only offered to women who stay in traditionally defined roles and accept dependence, deference, or protection as the price of being called good. And that's the trade. You get the pedestal, but you give up your independence. If he's protecting you, you're not making your own decisions. If he's providing for you, you're not financially independent. And a pedestal is a pretty small place to stand. One study showed that women who agreed with benevolent sexism were more likely to accept a partner restricting what they could do as long as he presented it as for your own good. And here's the most important part: women endorse benevolent sexism too, sometimes as much as men do. Because it feels like a compliment, so we don't question it. And sometimes we even judge the women who do question it. And I recognize this from being Asian American. People often tell me, your people are so smart. They think it's a compliment, and so do a lot of Asians, but it's the same move. A nice sounding box you're expected to stay in. Benevolent sexism is still sexism, and benevolent racism is still racism. And since I started dating again after my divorce, I can't tell you how many men on these apps have told me they love Asian women or have always wanted to date an Asian woman. He thinks he's complimenting me, but what he's telling me is that he wants a type, not a person. And FYI I unmatch immediately. When researchers pulled together hundreds of studies on workplaces, relationships, violence, stereotypes, and social ideology, they found that the two kinds of sexism work together. Benevolent sexism guards traditional gender roles, and hostile sexism protects power when someone challenges those roles. Researchers have also tested how this connects to warmth and competence. In one project, they looked at what hostile and benevolent sexist messages say about women's warmth and competence. Across three studies, both kinds of sexism sent the message that women are and should be less competent than men. The benevolent version just made women sound warmer. So even the flattering version has a ceiling built in. It's basically saying, you're wonderful, but you belong over there. And that explains the good woman versus bad woman split. The good woman is warm, loyal, modest, nurturing, attractive in the approved way, sexual in the approved relationship, and powerful only when she uses that power for other people. This made me wonder if that's part of why so many women in traditional roles pour all their energy into charity work. It's one kind of power they're allowed to have. The bad woman, on the other hand, is cold, selfish, loud, promiscuous, manipulative, unfeminine, or dangerous, whether or not she's actually doing any of those things. And you already know nobody can actually live in the good woman box forever. Be attractive, but not vain. Be sexual, but not slutty. Be competent, but not intimidating. Be successful, but don't make anyone feel unsuccessful. Be nurturing, but don't be a martyr. Be direct, but smile while you do it. Age naturally, but don't look old. Fight aging, but don't look like you tried. I mean, just look at the cover of any woman's magazine. Lose 20 pounds in a month right next to a recipe for triple chocolate gooey brownies. Or how to finally get that promotion in the same issue as how to keep your house spotless. Find your work-life balance and also do a load of laundry every night, then wake up at 5 a.m. for some me time, which is usually a workout to stay thin. It's no wonder women are burnt out. And it's part of why the song Labor by Paris Paloma went viral. It's about all the unpaid, invisible work women are expected to do and how exhausting it is. Almost every woman I know relates to it. And if you haven't heard it, go listen after this episode. I'll link it in the show notes. Honestly, there's no way to win. As soon as someone doesn't like you or is jealous of you or is offended by you, there's a pre-made label ready to go. And after this break, we're gonna talk about why they all have the same goal.

Backlash When Women Break Rules

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And now let's talk about backlash. Psychologists have found that gender stereotypes actually come in three kinds. Descriptive stereotypes say what women supposedly are, women are nurturing. Prescriptive stereotypes say what women should be, a woman should be nurturing. And proscriptive stereotypes with an O say what a woman must never be cold. The first kind just makes people surprised when you don't fit. The last two are where the punishment comes from. In one set of studies, people evaluated job candidates who came across as confident, ambitious, and self-promoting. The women were rated just as competent as the men, but they were also rated as less likable, and that made them less likely to get hired. The men who acted exactly the same way, no penalty. Because here's the catch. To prove you're competent, you have to talk up your wins, sound sure of yourself, and ask for what you want. And for a woman, that's exactly what breaks the rule about never acting pushy or cold. So the very thing that proves she can do the job is what gets her punished. You can hear that penalty in everyday words: bossy, difficult, shrill, intimidating, emotional, even when she's the calmest person in the room. Words like these take a problem built into the system and make it sound like a flaw in her personality. So I notice a consequence of this every single time I ask for something at work. I feel like I have to add a smiley face. Like, hi, I need you to fix an error in this document. It would be great if I could get it by Friday morning. Smiley face. Nobody told me to do that. I just learned that I needed to soften my request so I did not appear cold. But then I risk the chance of being seen as incompetent. Because if a woman is warm but not recognized as competent, she's lovable but not promotable. If she's competent but not read as warm, she's qualified but unlikable. And if she performs both perfectly, somebody may still decide she's calculating. So if you're wondering what the right thing to do is, congratulations, you figured out the trick. There was never a right thing. The goal is about compliance. So let's look at these words a little more closely because they're not interchangeable. Each

Witches Bitches and Sluts Categories

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one guards a different border. The way I see it, there are three big categories of insults for women. You might recognize Them from the name of this show. The witch is the smart one, the weird one, the goth girl who doesn't need anybody. The bitch is the assertive, confident one, and the slut is the pretty one or promiscuous one. Pick any woman, and one of these is waiting for her. It can be set off by anger, authority, saying no, or just not softening the truth. Words like slut and whore police sex and morality. Their meanings stretch far enough to punish a woman for having sex, seeming to want sex, dressing in a way someone connects with sex, turning down someone's sexual attention, or just being disliked. Notice that two of those things are contradictory. She can be called a slut for having sex, and she can be called a slut for turning down sex. That contradiction isn't a flaw in the word, it's what makes it so effective. Normally, a rule tells you ahead of time what not to do so you can follow it. But with labels like slut, the rule gets decided after the fact by whoever wants to use it. There's no behavior that keeps you safe. So women end up policing themselves all the time. What they wear, who they talk to, how friendly they are, just in case, and are quick to spot others doing something they work so hard to avoid. Oh my gosh, look at what she's wearing. I would never be caught dead in that, can actually mean, oh my gosh, I can't believe she is wearing that. Doesn't she know that's against the unspoken rules about feminine sexuality? I have worked so hard to follow those rules. So how dare you just ignore them? And I know this label personally. Like I talked about in the trailer, all through middle school, high school, and college, I was called a slut. And it started before I'd ever even kissed anyone. I didn't understand why it was happening to me, and I felt really alone. But looking back, I keep remembering my sister's words. It always started when someone felt threatened. And surprisingly, it was usually another girl. Then there are the words that fill in the gaps. Dumb blonde goes after competence and blames it on her looks. Gold digger turns a woman's relationships into a money scheme, even in societies that have historically kept women from having money of their own. Crazy and hysterical throw out a woman's perceptions and feelings. Of course, they don't fit into neat dictionary definitions. They sometimes overlap and adapt. The same word can be affectionate between two friends, yet violent coming from someone else.

Online Harassment and Its Purpose

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Women use them against other women, and women reclaim them. But changing your tone doesn't erase a word's history. When researchers looked at how this plays out online, they studied gendered insults on Twitter. In just one week, they found more than 2.9 million tweets using a set of sexist slurs. The attacks went after women's looks, intelligence, sex lives, mental stability, and age, and the comments policing beauty were especially nasty. Their conclusion was that this aggression has a purpose. It reinforces old-fashioned ideas about femininity and shames women for supposedly falling short. Every one of these labels says, here's the line you crossed, here's who you are now, here's how people are allowed to treat you, and here's the warning to every woman watching.

Intersectionality and Racialized Stereotypes

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Now, woman isn't one single category with no race, no class, and no sexuality attached. There's a word for this, intersectionality. It describes how different systems of power like race, gender, and class overlap. And black feminist scholars have a name for certain stereotypes. They call them controlling images. Stereotypes that make the way black women are treated look natural, deserved, or self-inflicted. So when someone calls a woman an angry black woman, it goes further than saying she isn't warm enough. It pulls in a whole racial history that can make completely justified anger look irrational, threatening, or unprofessional. Jezebel sexualizes black women, and it comes out of a history of exploitation and violence. Mammy praises endless caretaking while denying her independence, her desires, and her vulnerability. And we'll talk about all three labels in episodes six and seven when we examine the story of Hattie McDaniel and how she fit into them. The Dragon Lady stereotype paints Asian women as sneaky, domineering, or sexually dangerous, while the Lotus Blossom stereotype rewards being quiet and submissive. And those two are also getting two whole episodes of their own when I tell the story of Anime Wong and how she was placed in both simultaneously. And there are versions of this for poor mothers, like the welfare queen, and for trans women, disabled women, and fat women, each with its own history. And we'll get to all of these in future episodes too. The stereotype content model can explain part of this, but it can't stand in for history. Two women can be called aggressive for doing the exact same thing and still face completely different stakes because the word lands differently in different racial or institutional backdrops. So when you hear a label, it's worth asking who's saying it, who's it about, what history comes packed inside that word, who gets believed, who gets protected, and what actual consequence could follow.

The Hidden Cost of Defending Yourself

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And as I asked in the trailer, who benefits? But here's the sneaky part: a label doesn't need everyone to agree with it to work. It just needs to plant some doubt, make it socially costly to be seen with her, or force her to spend time trying to prove it wrong. Think about how this works for women in politics. If they're spending all their time defending against arbitrary labels, they don't have time to campaign for the actual policies they want to change. That's another reason name-calling is so powerful. It hands the work to her. Someone makes a one-word accusation and she has to write the defense. She ends up explaining her tone, her clothes, her relationships, her ambition, her parenting, her credentials, her face, her body, her age, and her sense of humor. Labeling her takes four seconds. Her rebuttal may take the rest of her life. And everyone watching learns something too. If you've ever seen a woman get punished for being loud, you might have decided to keep your own voice a little softer. It's the same reason I put the smiley faces on my work emails. And a politician who watches sexualized abuse spread across every platform may start speaking less freely or leave public life altogether. So the harm goes beyond hurt feelings, even though hurt feelings matter too. Gendered name-calling can shut down speech, wreck reputations, pile on harassment, and shrink the range of ways women feel safe acting. It controls the women being targeted and everyone who's watching.

Reclaiming Words Without Erasing Harm

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And right now you might be thinking, but wait, your show is literally called Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. Aren't you using the exact words you just spent a whole episode picking apart? Yes, and very much so on purpose. When I say these words, I'm taking them back. I'm reclaiming them. Reclaiming is when the people a word was used against pick it up and use it themselves to take the sting out of it, to find each other, to make art, or to name themselves on their own terms. It can be joyful and powerful. It can also be messy and it depends a lot on who's saying the word, to whom, and where. Reclaiming a label doesn't mean pretending it never hurt anyone. The power actually comes from knowing that history and refusing the shame that came with it. But reclaiming a word doesn't magically erase it. If I call my best friend a bitch with love, that doesn't give everybody permission to call her that. A word one community has reclaimed can still hurt people in another. And some women just don't want to reclaim the words that were used against them. That choice deserves just as much respect. I'm not trying to swap one required identity for another. You don't have to become a witch, a bitch, or a slut to prove you're liberated. What I care about is choice. Your right to define yourself without a hostile audience doing it for you. After my divorce and a lot of therapy, I've had time to think about why I was treated the way I was, and truthfully, why I treated other women the way I did. What I've realized is that we were taught to compete with each other for men's approval. My generation fell for it, and a lot of the time we didn't even know we were doing it. I started this podcast because I don't want that to keep happening.

Put the Human Back

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So are women human? Yes, obviously, but we can't just say women are human. We need to treat them as human, which means letting women be as complicated as anyone else, kind and selfish, brilliant and sometimes totally mediocre. Or as sayers put it, what we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It means judging what someone did without turning one moment into a judgment on her whole character or all of womanhood. It means noticing when a compliment is actually a cage and when an insult comes with instructions. But once you can see how labels work, you can interrupt them. So the next time you hear a woman called difficult, crazy, bossy, slutty, intimidating, or unlikable, I want you to pause before you accept that diagnosis. Ask yourself, what did she actually do? Would you describe a man the same way for doing the same thing? Or someone of a different race or sexuality? Which expectation did she break? And who benefits by discrediting her? The most radical response to a label is actually the simplest one. Put the human being back into the picture. Back in 1938, right after she quoted that D. H. Lawrence line from the top of the episode, Dorothy Sayers answered it. Accepted as a human being, yes, not as an inferior class, and not as a superior class, not in fact as a class at all. So remember, a woman isn't a category, a warning story, or a public referendum. She's a human being, and so are you. This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sleds. I'm Christina Rose, and thank you for spending this time with me. If

Share Your Story and Sources

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this episode made you think of a label someone's given you, or what you've used without really thinking about it, I want to hear about it. Send me your story in a DM on Instagram at vth.wps.podp. Once again at the th.wps.podp on Instagram. Or email me at the WPSpod at gmail.com. And if you want to dig deeper, the full research list and sources are in the show notes. And join me next time when we discuss the legend of Marilyn Monero and why you have to be smart to play.