One Word Was All It Took To End My Marriage — 'He Didn't Just Say It, He Snarled It'
It's a word that, for some reason, many cis-het men still feel entitled to use.
U.Ozel.Images | Canva He didn’t just say the world, he snarled it.
His contempt was as hot as his breath on my face. This was the third time my husband had called me that horrible word, and I swore it would be the last.
The first time, I was shaken. I eventually reasoned my way out of the initial shock, passing it off as a one-time thing. After all, over fifteen years of marriage and five years of dating, my husband had never previously called me this word.
It was everything that had been going on, I rationalized — the trauma therapy that was dredging up long-buried pain, layered on top of an emotionally demanding job, layered on top of the emerging complexities of parenting preteens.
The rage was nothing new. True, it was becoming hotter and more frequent, but I’d been introduced to his rage early on. Even in our first few months of dating, I’d felt the cold pinpricks of fear on the back of my neck, looking at this man I thought I knew and suddenly did not know.
Even though his rage and I had gotten better acquainted over the last 20 years, I still felt the same sense of disorientation when he unleashed it, the same fear of this stranger who was abruptly and unaccountably standing before me. This stranger could be capable of anything.
This stranger had often puffed up his chest and gotten in my face, made a point of reminding me that he was taller, with broader shoulders and thicker arms. But this stranger had never called me that horrible word before.
He is lost in his past, I told myself. His rage is not really for me. He is working through complex trauma. Things will get worse before they get better.
Things didn’t get better. The second time he called me the word, I told him that it couldn’t happen again. He knew full well how much I hated the word. He knew full well that our children had heard him say it, knew full well there was nothing okay about modeling this behavior, and knew full well he was capable of not saying it.
The third time he called me the word, I asked for a separation. It was the final straw.
There is one word I knew from the beginning I could never say to my husband, would never say to my husband. It’s a word I never, not once, felt remotely tempted to say to my husband, no matter how angry or bitter I felt. Other white people had said this word to him, and he had rightfully drawn the line.
We talked about how badly some white people wanted to use the N-word, how they were incensed that he could say it, but they couldn’t. Eventually, my soon-to-be ex-husband stopped using the word himself.
It had been liberally sprinkled throughout his first and second hip-hop albums, but in his third album, it was nowhere to be found. Neither did he employ the word in friendly conversation with his Black friends. He understood the desire to claim the word as a source of empowerment and endearment, but for him, the word carried too much history, too much weight.
I’m not going to claim that the N-word and the B-word are the “same” thing. The words speak to different, though related, systems of oppression. But one notable historical parallel is an attempt on the part of the oppressed to claim a pejorative word that has been weaponized against them and use it as a term of endearment or a source of empowerment instead.
For women and the LGBTQ+ community to effectively claim the B-word, one crucial thing had to happen: Cis-het men had to stop using it.
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And there are many out there, including our current president, who never got the memo.
For years, society has decided that the B-word is a-ok for anyone to use, not even worthy of a bleep on primetime TV or flagged as an explicit lyric. Male hip-hop artists and stand-up comedians frequently use it simply as a synonym for “woman” or “girlfriend.” It’s not overtly mean, it’s nothing worth getting upset about, they say. And after all, everyone uses the B-word.
Even my daughter tells me this. “Relax, Mom,” she says, “It’s not a big deal.” But I would argue that it’s a very big deal indeed.
As most of us know, this word originally referenced a female dog. Its derogatory usage against women didn’t emerge until the 1400s, 400 years after the word was initially coined. An 18th-century slang dictionary proclaimed the word “the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman."
By the early 1900s, the use of the word was soaring, largely in response to the women’s suffrage movement. The term was employed to describe “difficult” women, like the suffragists, who didn’t know their place — which of course was at home and not in the public sphere.
One hundred years later, not much has changed. Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and many other female politicians have all been called this by their male colleagues, and by the public at large. As Vox writer Li Zhou points out, the term has long been about “the containment of women’s power.”
Whether it’s used to describe a woman as an object, a woman as a male possession, or a woman who is too outspoken, the B-word when employed by a cishet male is neither empowering nor endearing.
Sometimes cishet men believe that it’s funny to use the word, as stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell did when he referred to a girl in a joke as a “little B” In his book, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell, he talks about a female friend who asked him why he made this reference, pointing out that “every time you say ‘B,’ you are linked to every other man and specifically every other Black man who uses that word as a way to refer to all women, no matter who they are and what they do.”
And though Bell was still convinced that his use of the word is funny, he decided to do something radical — to listen to his female friend and take another approach. And guess what? He ended up getting the same laugh. Maybe even a bigger laugh, he says.
Bell doesn’t use the B-word anymore, but unfortunately, that’s not the case for many cishet standup comedians and entertainers. Maybe Bell could give the memo to this guy?
It’s an ongoing struggle for me, as someone who loves both stand-up comedy and hip-hop, to appreciate genres that don’t hold their entertainers accountable for derogatory slurs against women. Instead, women who feel offended are told to “lighten up.” It’s just a song. It’s just an act. Relax.
If you look at the comments on the comedian Corey Holbomb’s TikTok video embedded above, they don’t question a cishet man’s right to say the B-word; rather, they mock a woman in the audience who didn’t find the bit funny.
The continued use of the B-word by cishet men speaks to a broader social narrative that women should shut their mouths, stay in their lanes, and exist not as autonomous human beings, but as human beings defined by their relationship to men. It’s a social narrative that seemed to be on the decline not all that long ago, and yet in recent years has regained alarming momentum.
When, as a society, we decide that it’s just not a big deal when cishet men use the B-word to refer to wives, girlfriends, female colleagues, and other women in comedy routines, in songs, and on the campaign trail, we’re sending the message, particularly to our younger generations, that disrespecting women is just par for the course. It’s nothing to get worked up about, and sometimes it’s kind of funny besides.
There was absolutely nothing funny about a man spitting that word in my face, least of all the man I called my husband.
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It was a power play, a show of force, an act of flagrant disrespect, and an abrupt dismissal of any attempts I had made to voice my frustrations and concerns.
Would I have reacted so strongly if he had said I was “acting b****y” or I was “always b****ing about something?” Probably not, but I still would have winced. While not all variations of the B-word are created equal, when cishet men use any of them, they are carrying on a legacy of gendered domination and denigration. The B-word was created by men, eventually weaponized by men, and, despite our attempts to claim it, continues to be used by cishet men to insult and control women.
I hold no grudges against women or those from the LGBTQ+ community who make gleeful references to bad Bs or boss Bs — it should be our word to use how we please. But I don’t use the B-word much, if at all. Like my soon-to-be ex-husband who ultimately felt that the N-word’s negative history outweighed its positive uses, I find it difficult to recast the B-word in a positive or empowering light.
Society’s insistence on deeming the word acceptable for broader usage is just one more example of the myriad ways that women’s concerns are trivialized, ridiculed, and dismissed. It’s just a joke, it’s just a word.
My marriage likely would have ended one way or another, but the B-word propelled me to take the most difficult first step.
Maybe, just maybe, my soon-to-be ex-husband finally got the memo.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.
