"I am woman, hear me bitch"
About this Quote
A profane remix of a revered feminist line, it dares you to flinch. Craig Bruce riffs on Helen Reddy's "I am woman, hear me roar", swapping empowerment anthem for a word designed to stick in the throat. The intent isn't subtle: reclaim the slur by detonating it in public, forcing the listener to confront how quickly society polices female anger, volume, and refusal. "Hear me" is still the spine of the sentence; what's changed is the price of audibility. The speaker isn't just demanding attention, she's naming the punishment typically assigned to women who take up space.
The subtext is about the double bind: be assertive and you're labeled; be quiet and you're erased. By choosing "bitch", the line compresses decades of gendered contempt into a single syllable, then turns it into a badge. It's also a trap for the audience. If you recoil, you reveal how comfortable you were with "roar" as metaphor but not with the crude social reality underneath. If you cheer, you're endorsing a kind of militant self-branding that can slide into caricature.
Context matters because Bruce is a male writer best known for pop-culture crime storytelling. That makes the line read less like lived testimony and more like ventriloquism: a punchy, culture-jamming slogan written from outside the identity it performs. That tension is the point and the problem. It works because it's abrasive, instantly quotable, and hard to domesticate. It also risks flattening feminism into attitude, trading structural critique for a shock line that sounds like liberation and insult at the same time.
The subtext is about the double bind: be assertive and you're labeled; be quiet and you're erased. By choosing "bitch", the line compresses decades of gendered contempt into a single syllable, then turns it into a badge. It's also a trap for the audience. If you recoil, you reveal how comfortable you were with "roar" as metaphor but not with the crude social reality underneath. If you cheer, you're endorsing a kind of militant self-branding that can slide into caricature.
Context matters because Bruce is a male writer best known for pop-culture crime storytelling. That makes the line read less like lived testimony and more like ventriloquism: a punchy, culture-jamming slogan written from outside the identity it performs. That tension is the point and the problem. It works because it's abrasive, instantly quotable, and hard to domesticate. It also risks flattening feminism into attitude, trading structural critique for a shock line that sounds like liberation and insult at the same time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Confidence |
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