Repeat readers of my contributions will know that when we’re dealing with things that could potentially be spoilered, I tend to engage vagaries and nonspecifics to try and save people the pain.  This won’t be any different, but just in case, here it is:

THE SPOILER WARNING.

There.

Boobs

Overall, Nolan hasn’t done too badly.  Anne Hathaway seems a good choice, and there isn’t any in-yer-face cleavage or suspicious anti-gravity trickery.

Unlike in Arkham City.

+1 to Dark Knight Rises

Though she did have some cool moves, those boobs never seemed affected by the basic laws of physics.

Bums

Catwoman does have a black, skintight suit, but so does Batman – some compensation, I guess? – and there are only a couple of unfortunate shots of her bum as she rides the bat-bike.  This is however; a) a big improvement on Arkham City‘s near constant sexy-butt-wiggling right in centre-camera, and b) offset by her being awesome on that bike.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Backstory

It’s important to remember that the game and the film encounter Selina/Catwoman at different points in her story and her relationship with Bruce/the Bat.  Despite this, both mediums do quite well in demonstrating her motivations and character.  The film, however, does marginally better as it manages to do this while advancing, generally, a bit more respectful portrayal of her as a woman.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Bitch

The most disappointing Catwoman scene of the whole thing. “You dumb bitch!” snarls the guy she’s fighting.“No-one’s ever accused me of being dumb before,” says she. Now, Selina ignoring the b-word could either be a) because she’s showing that its intended purpose (as an insult) doesn’t affect her, therefore suck it, or b) it’s such a commonplace piece of vocabulary she doesn’t see why it’s so excruciatingly wrong. I hope, and like to believe (based on Hathaway’s facial expression on-screen), that it’s the former.  I was midway through writing this at the time, so I’m extremely disappointed it was there at all.  Seeing as we’re comparing the movie to the game, however, having one instance of “bitch” in the whole film is 1000x better than hearing it every other second, like you do in Arkham City.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Boots

YES THEY’RE TOTALLY PRACTICAL.

Also in that “bitch” scene is the sudden appearance of Selina’s massive metal stilettos. Why?! No one can be that gymnastic in 5″ fucking heels. As you may note, this hacked me off considerably. The film tries to justify these ridiculous boots by having the inside of the heel sharpened like a serrated blade (check out the poster image, right) – but that seems to me like a poor token to try and throw off the fact they’re pure decoration and only there for prettifying Catwoman. She doesn’t need them! They aren’t practical, even if there’s a Swiss Army Knife in those heels, it’s just… no.

The second attempt to validate them comes as a baddie asks her if they hurt (implied: to walk in) to which she responds, “I don’t know, do they?” and kicks him with one. Fun retort, maybe, but they’re still unnecessary, and all the credibility the film gained by not focussing on her boobs is lost as they just use those heels to return her to unrealistic pin-up status. Game-Catwoman has similarly stupid shoes so there’s no betterment to be found here.

+0 to Dark Knight Rises

To sum up…

Nolan & Hathaway’s Catwoman does better than Arkham City‘s, but there remains a lot of space to improve.  The age-old issue of practical footwear is the big one for me –  after making such an effort to cover up cleavage, making the top half of her outfit much more practical, what exactly was the point in contradicting that by forcing her to don stilettos?

The ‘bitch’ thing also irked me quite a lot, but it was much better than in Arkham City, which was almost unplayable in places for the amount of churning rage brought about by being called a Catbitch so often (I mean, aside from the fact a female cat can be called a ‘molly’, ‘queen’ or ‘dam’ where a bitch is a female canine, of course).

Film Catwoman has the common sense to tuck the boobs away so they don’t lollop around as she beats up baddies

As I said, film-Catwoman’s body isn’t made nearly as much of a focal point as it is in the game.  There’s no cleavage to ogle, lots of close-ups on her face, and when her body is in view, it’s often as hidden as Batman’s is by varying descriptions of black attire.  Downfall is a bit a of bum-shot while she’s on the batbike, but this is nowhere near as big a negative point as Catwoman’s near-constant sexy wiggling in Arkham City.¹

On the whole, film-Catwoman does much better than game-Catwoman for all the above reasons and many more I daren’t go into here for fear of lolspoilers.  The film on the whole is pretty awesome, and the female characters are integral to the story: despite what the trailers may suggest, it is not simply Bat vs. Bane with a bit of eye candy on the side.  I won’t say more because that’ll give too much away, but go see it and decide for yourselves.  I enjoyed it immensely and will probably be seeing it again in the not-too-distant future.

1. NB: Yes, I know about the portrayal of Catwoman in many of the comics and blah blah fidelity, but this is the 21st century, not 1940… so, surely, we can update her just a little to move with the times after 70+ years?  And I don’t mean revealing more skin.

BITCH

(n. and v. )

Four Legs Good

The four-letter word that isn’t a four letter word, at least properly a bitch has four legs. As anyone who’s ever tittered at Cruft’s will be only too aware, the glory of bitch is that, like gay, it has a meaning unrelated to human sexuality in many circles. Hence its first meaning, ‘the female of the dog’, originating in Middle English and Old Norse. The dictionary extends its potential out a bit: you can, it insists, have other types of bitch creature (e.g., ‘bitch fox’) as long as you specify. Bitch aardvark; bitch turtle (I hope).

You say 'bitch' like it's a bad thing.

But, with typical ingratitude to Man’s Best Friend, the human race quickly (well, by the fourteenth century) started using dog to mean all the juicy olde worlde insults – ‘worthless fellow’, ‘traitor’, ‘low cur’, ‘coward’, etc. – with the implication being that a four-legged dog only thinks of its survival and has no interest in Elevated Human Ideals like honour, dignity, nobility, etc. Bitch is the female of the species in every sense, so, while dog is connected with male inadequacy and primitivism, bitch attacks women on that most unoriginal of plains, sexuality.

Enter the second, and probably most commonly understood use of the term: its opprobrious application to women. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED to you and me) initially sticks to the rather conservative definition ‘a lewd or sensual woman’, adding sternly ‘Not now in decent use’, although it then extends the term to mean ‘a malicious or treacherous woman’ or, more generally, an ‘outstandingly difficult or unpleasant’ thing, this last surely an allusion to the proverbial aggression of mothering animals. But why do these sexual meanings keep cropping up? The answer lies in the Dim And Distant Past.

A Diversion Back In Time

When these terms begin to be bandied about in the 1300s, the crucial point is that that much-touted Man On The Street would probably have said that men were spiritual, closer-to-God beings, while their wives were, well, Closer To God in the Trent Reznorian sense. There was a very simple reason for this: physically speaking, women can, er, last longer than men. ‘What is this?’ their husbands cry, ‘I’ve had enough – That’s all anyone should need! Womankind is dangerously lecherous!’ Moreover, since Man had been created first (and in God’s image) he was some way towards divinity already, but the daughters of Eve were far from such exalted regions. They were really just a higher kind of animal: Adam had, after all, been given dominion over his wife along with the birds and beasts.

So female lechery could quickly become perceived as a primitive, animalistic trait that the forces of humanity – and the superior self-restraint of men – were always trying to overcome. And bitch emerges as evidence of such a view, since just as dog suggests that primitive man is, in essence, cowardly, bitch implies that all women (as the female of the species) are basically dogs in heat, driven by their genitals, and consequently liable to stray towards adultery and sexual deception just as, today, men supposedly ‘think with their pricks’ (more on how this shift occurred to come!).

BITCH. A she dog, or doggess; the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of ‘whore’.
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811

Wait, What About Me?

The sub-definition of bitch‘s opprobrious sense relates to its application to a man. Here, the dictionary argues, it ‘has the modern sense of “dog”‘, although its use is, bizarrely, ‘less opprobrious, and somewhat whimsical’. So a male bitch is essentially a dog, a coward, a whiner, a weakling: all terms which, handily, reflect back on the gender the man in question is borrowing. But, you know, whimsically.

The plot thickens! If, linguistically, (lewd) women are essentially the same as dogs in heat, the verbal senses of bitch (I bitch, you bitch, she/he/it bitches) take on a whole new inevitability. Denigrating people behind their backs becomes behaviour to be expected from any female animal, and, consequently, natural and normal. Moreover, it becomes an explicitly feminine activity: men do not ‘bitch’ about each other, or rather, if they do, they are upsetting a perceived gender role in the process. Son of a Bitch (supposedly Old Norse in origin) is a useful comparison here: men who are treacherous, it implies, are their mothers’ sons.

Bitcho Ergo Sum, or whatever.

So then, interactivity time: is there an equivalent word for men, that, if appropriated by women, has a censorious reflection on ‘natural’ male behaviour? The only ones I can think of generally reflect badly on the woman, and have little impact on the man – ‘sharking’, ‘pimping’ – or hardly change at all, as with the pleasingly unisex ‘fucking’.

‘You Say “Bitch” Like It’s A Bad Thing!’

Finally, a word on bitch in the twenty-first century. Since the purpose of this Alphabet is to work through linguistic history via the Oxford English Dictionary (which is in so many ways the pater familias of conventional English), I find myself ill-equipped to discuss the many nuances the word has acquired in modern day slang (‘a crocodile will stone cold eat a bitch’, etc.), which, however, is an area I hope readers will be able to bring something to themselves in the comments.

However, what is really confusing me is the question what to make of the increasing tendency nowadays for certain women (or, at least, greetings card companies aimed at women) to reclaim bitch as a Fun Ironic Term: hence all those novelty cards about how one would be ill-advised to disturb ‘the bitch’ when she’s sleeping / shopping / eating chocolate / gossiping / menstruating, for LO, SHE IS A BITCH. This seems to translate as something along the lines of ‘Hey, I’m the female of the species! I have, like, moodswings and stuff! I’m deeply unreasonable!’ These women do not, however, seem to be particularly concerned with sexual activity, which, the dictionary insists, is bitch‘s primary definition in its application to women. Ironically, they are in fact using the term in something much closer to its secondary meaning, ‘an outstandingly difficult or unpleasant thing‘.

Further reading

• Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (ho ho)
• http://bitchmagazine.org/ – Something I’ve not really gone into detail about, but this is a good example of reclaiming the word from a more acceptable point of view than GIVE THE BITCH HER CHOCOLATE.

NEXT WEEK: C is for … Crinoline. No, really, it’s an awesome word! And we thought we’d dodge the obvious.