What’s up with this? “son of a bitch” is common as hell but there’s no female equivalency? This is madness! I refuse to believe women are immune from having bitch mothers.
same goes for the “son of a whore” equivalent and “son of a gun”. I’ve heard women say “well, she’s a son of a bitch”. Not good enough IMHO.
At least motherfucker is ambiguous and it can be used liberally for both sexes.
Doesn’t flow well. Daughter of a bitch is too long and ungainly to roll out of a mouth easily.
I think since the insult is not really directed towards the mother we should start using:
bitch of a bitch.
That rolls off the tongue a bit better.
Who do I petition for this?
The female equivalent of “son of a bitch” is “bitch”.
The female equivalent of “son of a whore” is “whore”.
Although their context has become milder over time, these are all specifically misogynistic insults, reflecting attitudes toward women that are hopefully fading, at least in the U.S. and Europe. You would use “whore” or “bitch” to a woman directly, but since they couldn’t be used directly to a man, instead you’d use them toward his mother.
You can use “son of a bitch” for a female to add extra insult, just like calling a guy a bitch.
Since the main point has been covered (you don’t need “daughter of a bitch” when you can s8imply say “bitch” and insult a female. Parsimony in insults!), I;'ll just note that these formulations aren’t unique to English. Sir Richard Burton noted an example in the 19th century in Arabic of a woman calling her own son a “son of a bitch”.
The fact that she was reflexively insulting herself even more severely by saying this doesn’t stand in the way of a good and satisfying insult. Profanity doesn’t have to be logical.
What about “daughter of a motherless goat”?
nm
There’s no reason to call a woman a daughter of a bitch, when you can just call her a bitch. The whole idea is that you’re going for the misogyny angle so that either way, it was a woman’s fault.
Because daughters are inconsequential, obviously!
I actually say that ‘motherless goat’ thing. I wonder where it came from.
It’s the patriarchy! No, really…bear with me.
In patriarchal cultures, women are considered property of men. A man is expected to protect their honor, and the purity of the women in their family is a direct reflection on their value as men. So to insult someone’s mother is a grave insult to their manhood.
It doesn’t work for women. We have no special expectations that we will protect the purity of our family members.
And this raises the aggression level by including the target’s mother as well as the target.
I am clearly not very informed; I always assumed “son of a gun” was a more recent term that referred to a “shotgun wedding” resulting in male offspring.
In Spanish, “hijo/hija de puta” (“son/daughter of a whore”) are the closest equivalent to “son of a bitch,” and they are used equally across genders to describe an assholish person.