Almost thirty years later, Due was on an airplane and heard a grown man call a young girl a bitch as the plane touched down. "He called a little crying girl that, and his wife was sitting with him and she didn't say anything," Due says. "So when the plane landed, I made eye contact with him and said, 'It's very inappropriate to call a little girl a bitch.'"
"Hey, I call 'em like I see 'em," the man replied.
"I think you'd better look in the mirror. You'd better check yourself," Due countered.
She was so mad about the incident that she went home and looked up "bitch" in the dictionary to see how Webster's defined it. "There are so many dictionaries that have derogatory words against women -- slut, bitch, cunt, tit, whore -- I just couldn't believe it," says Due, who lives in Loveland. "And I started looking up derogatory words against men, and I couldn't find any. 'Son of a bitch' refers to a woman, and then 'bastard' was a baby born to an unmarried woman. And when it came to derogatory words against men that you would think would be associated with a man, it didn't say man, it said 'person.' But when it was derogatory against a woman, it would always say 'bad woman.'"
To Due, the only purpose the B-word serves is in describing a female dog.
No bitching allowed.
Nothing's bitchin.
No one is a son of a bitch.
Nobody's riding bitch.
No bitch-slapping.
Life is not a bitch.
And no self-proclaimed bitch is righteous.
"I think that's ridiculous. It just seems to me like they feel that they're not strong enough to say, 'That's a terrible word against women, and I don't want to deal with it anymore.' It's almost like they decide, 'well, if I can't beat 'em, I'll join 'em.' And I think that we can beat it. Almost like the N-word. Everybody knows you can't say the N-word."
A generation of young black men who've embraced the term would disagree. So would the women over at Bitch magazine, who've embraced the B-word. "Basically, we have pretty much the opposite hope for the word, which is that it can be reclaimed the way once-derogatory words like 'queer' have been reclaimed by using the word," says Andi Zeisler, Bitch's editorial/creative director. "And we've always been for using the word as both a noun and a verb, because while 'bitch' is certainly still considered a derogatory term, in many ways the act of bitching as a whole can lead to really positive change."
Due doesn't buy into Bitch's philosophy.
"I think it's too bad; I really do. I think that the thing, too, is that a black person would not start a magazine and call it the N-word. And white people cannot use that word against black people. But among themselves they can do it. And I know that there are girlfriends laughing, and jokingly they'll call each other a B-word, and I don't think that that's that much of a problem. But when a woman calls another woman that word in a derogatory way, or a man calls a woman that word in a derogatory way, it's crazy."
So Due has made it her mission to stamp out the term by starting the Stop the B-Word Campaign. "My whole point of starting this campaign is to bring awareness that this word is derogatory and demeaning against women," she says. "I'm not saying I'm going to go and change a law that anybody who uses this word will be arrested; it's not like that. I'm trying to encourage women to take a look at that word. It's just unbelievable that women call another woman a bitch; we're really calling ourselves that, women as a whole."
Due offers five suggestions on her website, http://beckydue.typepad.com: One, stop using the B-word; two, invite your daughter to stop using the word; three, make your home a bitch-free environment; four, tell the men in your life to stop using the word around you; and five, encourage friends to stop using the expression and sign the commitment form, which Due says has scored support from more than 500 people, half of which are men.
Leon is one.
"I am a man," Leon wrote to Due's site. "I give you my word that from my lips I will never use the B-word and other degrading words that hurt another human. I am sorry if I caused you or any other woman pain because of my choices of word. Please forgive me. I really didn't know I was hurting anyone. Thank you."
"That's pretty cool that Leon actually decided to take a look at that," Due says. "One of my goals it to try and encourage men and women just to be mindful of the word. Just to think about it."
Due looks to her own life as an example. While her mother was the first person she called a bitch, her ex-husband was the first person to call her a bitch. She met him at the gym just after graduating from high school in 1987. They were married in 1988, and things went south fast. "He'd push me and choke me and throw things at me and hit me and lock me out of the house in my underwear -- just humiliating stuff -- and it got to a point where he was very suicidal. He would have a gun out and have it to his head and tell me it was my fault," Due says.
So when he went to work one day in 1991, she split to Minnesota, where she had been born in 1969. Due never went back to him, but in her new life she still gravitated toward drinking and abusive men. "I was just running around and being careless and not taking very good care of myself," she says.
In 1995, unable to pay her rent and overwhelmed by $3,000 in credit-card debt, Due started living out of her car. She eventually got kicked out of a parking lot she was staying in and went to a shelter. During this time, she says, she considered both stripping and escorting, but in the end, couldn't sell herself. Instead, she worked for a dry cleaner during the day and cleaned the city hall three nights a week. She went back to school, starting with an English literature class, and though she's never gone full-time and hasn't pursued a degree, she's taken classes in journalism, women's studies and media, as well as various writing courses. She returned to Loveland several years ago to care for her ailing mother; once there, she reconnected with friends and decided to stay. She also took her experiences and what she had learned in school and turned them into self-published books, one based on her life and the other a children's story.
Due's appreciation for language is what helped translate her frustration with the use of the B-word into action. "One of the things I'm thinking about, if I do get enough signatures -- I think it'd be a great idea to get some of those words taken out of the dictionary: bitch, slut, cunt, whore, tit."
Removing words or word definitions from the dictionary with a petition isn't likely to happen, according to Arthur Bicknell, senior publicist for Merriam-Webster. "The editors here, their job is to record language as it is really used, so there's no editorializing. We're certainly not a political organization," Bicknell says, noting that vulgar words only appear in dictionaries intended for adults. "We have no control over how people are going to be using language. Do we have a precedent where a word has been omitted or where a word has been added because of petition? The answer would be no."
Still, some of the definitions disgust Due.
"It varies on what dictionary you look in. 'Pussy' is in there. Some of the dictionaries have it and some don't. One of them said a man having sex with a woman is getting pussy. In so many ways, I think so many women are jumping on the bandwagon of being derogatory against themselves. When they refer to their breast as a tit, I mean, it's sad. It's just so sad."
