"Fucking Bitch"

Treat male entitlement like the threat that it is.

Immediately after murdering U.S. citizen Renee Good in broad daylight this week, masked federal agents called her a “fucking bitch.”

Actually, it’s hard to know if they were referring to her or her wife Rebecca, since both of them were in the car.

This is newly reported. It comes from video posted to social media by the White House itself—in the shooter’s defense.

This, of course, is bullshit. And the bullshit is the point.

If you can keep everyone fixated on which direction her tires were pointed, or whether or not her bumper brushed a guy’s leg at 2 mph, or—if all else fails—her tone (gosh, where have I heard that one before?), you can make them forget that a man pointed a gun at a woman’s head, pulled the trigger, and called her a fucking bitch—with the United States government cheering him on.

The armchair forensics are a shell game. They’re intended to distract from just how wanton and destructive unhinged male entitlement—a quality many of my classical music colleagues have been opportunistically nursing for decades—has become, anywhere it appears.

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He Got A Slap on the Wrist. I Got Expelled.

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And the evidence of rancid male entitlement in this crime scene is overwhelming.

There’s the fact that the agent in question shot Good not once, not twice—but three times.

You do not shoot someone—in the head—three times in self-defense.

You do it because you can.

There’s the fact that a professional law enforcement agent ordered a civilian woman on a quiet residential street to “get out of the fucking car.”

I don’t clutch my pearls at profanity. But I give a hard fuck-no to angry men throwing their potty-mouth weight around to announce who’s in charge.

When a drunk guy cusses out a bar waitress, when an out-of-control maestro screams that a woman’s decisions are bullshit, when an armed federal agent throws around the f-bomb—that noxious smoke means a roaring fire of male entitlement is already burning, and there’s no telling how much it could destroy.

There’s also the fact that this country’s highest leadership—and their mobs—smeared and dehumanized a dead woman as if it were pure reflex. Fox News used the word “lesbian” like a punchline. A Grok user has already created a deepfake of Good in a bikini—using a photo of her slumped over her steering wheel and covered in blood.

This was never about neutralizing a threat. None of it—from the smallest acts of control to the most horrific acts of violence (and yes, I will say it for the thousandth time, they are all cut from the same cloth)—ever is.

It’s about protecting male authority at any cost—his right to obedience in the moment, his right to impunity after the fact.

Anything that serves those aims—eliminating a woman who holds him accountable, rewriting her as a terrorist, a bitch, a whore, a dyke, a lunatic—any of it is on the table when misogyny is the organizing principle.

Because misogyny is not just about how women are abused. It is about how men are protected.

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"We Trust His Judgment"

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If you want to know how much misogyny is in a system, look at how much license men are given. Notice how routinely their rage and lust is excused or deferred to. Check how much their pain is prioritized. Observe how often their futures and legacies are preserved at all costs.

Systemic misogyny is what tells a man that when he feels disrespected, frustrated, fearful, angry—or just giddily violent—he is entitled to take aim at whoever he thinks is expendable and pull the trigger—literal or metaphorical. It is what lets him know that he can casually walk away from the scene without consequence. It is what happens when we collectively and consistently teach him that no one will stop him.

If you’ve ever enabled a boys-will-be-boys culture—and since most of my readers work in, or hope to work in, classical music, most of you have—then you have trace amounts of blood on your hands here.

If you have ever dismissed a man’s dehumanizing, cruel, or hostile speech as a “poor choice of words,” or shrugged off his brags about getting away with murder or grabbing ‘em by the pussy or getting a slap on the wrist—then you are part of the problem.

If you have ever proposed a solution for male aggression—keep your head down, play your cards right, do what he tells you, wait it out, leave—that is anything other than unequivocally insisting that it stop, then you are participating in this.

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Maybe You Should Transfer

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If you have ever assigned responsibility for a man’s behavior to anything other than his own adult agency—to his stress, his genius, his temperament, his old age, his youth, his ambition—then you have helped build the moral vacuum that enables a kind of violence that is, apparently, no longer unthinkable.

I have no way of softening the indictment, and I wouldn’t offer it if I did. Women are being destroyed and demeaned and diminished—in our own profession and on our own streets—with an alarming level of numbness and normalization.

It is always men who pull the trigger. But they couldn’t do it without the cowards—men and women alike—who shield them.

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The murder of Renee Good was an act of authoritarian terrorism. It was also a public display of misogyny, homophobia, and violence against women. I hope you’ll find a way to oppose it—out loud, in public. If you’re in my neck of the woods, I’m attending a vigil this evening, 1/10. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to join.

Also—take a minute to ask yourself why you’re willing to casually use the b-word—in any context—if you’re not willing to use the n-word. It’s past time to take misogyny seriously.

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