'I Want Mine!' - The Bitches Of Identity And The Gimme Culture Of Entitlement

Betty Lou Phipps was a difficult, demanding, obstreperous child - a penance for her two temperate, considerate, and sharing parents.  Betty Lou squalled in her crib, banged the tray of her high chair, threw temper tantrums on the stairs, ripped up A Child's Garden of Verses, and spit on the linoleum floor. 

'That's mine!', she howled at her little brother tearing the toy from his hand.  'That's mine' she shouted when a friend was about to sit in her chair.  'That's mine', she snapped at her mother at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime. 

Her mother and father tried to teach her about sharing and consideration, but it never took.  There was a selfish, ornery, nasty streak in the little girl that no amount of instruction, cajoling, or tempting could change. 

The nuns at St. Maurice were a tough lot - as hard-bitten, old maidish, and bitter as they come - and they brooked no insolence or disobedience; but Betty Lou Phipps was an exception.  Not that they gave her special treatment, but because was simply uncontrollable.  She acted as though everything was rightfully hers - the chairs, the tables, the Cross, and the right to speak whenever she wanted, and her demands were loud and insistent.  All that Sister Mary Joseph could do was to raise her arms in prayer and beg the Lord's help.  

One would think that the girl would get her comeuppance in adolescence.  Girls are a bitchy and catty lot at that age, and they, as a collective would beat every last bit of contumely out of her and turn her into an obedient groupie. This was not to be, for the ferociousness of her claims, the thinly-veiled violence behind them, and the pure, ugly nastiness that oozed out of her every pore kept them away. 

It was when she got to college that she found her emotional/intellectual home. 'Entitlement' was the word of the day, the meme, the zeitgeist of the university.  You were black, Latino, gay, transgender, bi-sexual, bi-racial, non-binary...the endless list of oppressed groups which demanded singularity, respect, identity, and the dues owed them for past insults. 

Being a white, straight girl was initially a problem.  She didn't fit into any of the entitlement groups, but when her fellow students heard her vile, aggressive, blatantly cruel and untoward remarks in favor of each and every one of the progressive causes on campus, they knew they had an ally.  They made her an honorary lesbian, bitch, and feminist cunt and unleashed her on the complacent ignoramuses of the university.  

She was welcomed at the Harvard Lesbian Caucus, the Black Women's Street Cooperative, the Hispanic Solidarity Movement and asked to speak.  None of their number had the eloquence, the passion, and the bullying fire of Betty Lou.  When she spoke, she was a woman possessed.  Adolph Hitler himself never roused the rabble in his torchlight parades like Betty Lou could have. 

The political cause was irrelevant, and she spoke as convincingly and as passionately whether it was about abortion, gender reassignment, the predatory barons of Wall Street, or the withering climate.  She was a vixenish harridan - a fearsome, horrible, hateful cyclone. 

She was never happier.  She had found her place, her niche, her promise.  She was a dervish, a colossus, Genghis Khan incarnate, a willful being created to do damage, loving every minute, conquering as she went, and leaving severed heads on spikes along the roadside as she left the rubble of towns and villages she had vanquished. 

Harvard in the time of Betty Lou Phipps was the worst of the college campuses across the US.  It was balkanized in more ways, more divisions and subdivisions, more clusters of identity, entitlement, and bald demands than any other.  The cult of identity-entitlement-restitution (IER) was nowhere stronger. Dining room tables, bleacher seats, assembly chairs were all arranged by identity group. There was no such thing as the Harvard campus, but the Harvard campuses. 

It was a progressive cabal of administrators, professors, and students all marching to the same drummer, all espousing the same beliefs, all working to re-engineer the university to be the home, the focus, the omphalos of progressive thought and action. 

Sex was a problem of course.  Few men wanted anything to do with her, but as defiantly as she had spoken out for lesbianism and the gender spectrum, she still wanted men.   Nothing or no one else was worth the bother.  She was accosted by every sexually permutated woman, hounded, pursued, and entreated; but like everything else in her life, she wanted what was hers, and that was not hot pussy.   

The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare's story of a Betty Lou Phipps type woman - a shrewish succubus who wanted everything her way. She was demanding, insolent, aggressive, and brutal.  Only Petruchio who looked beyond the Sturm und Drang saw a normal woman, a giving, respectful, and loving soul. Once she came under the beneficent, respectful watch of Petruchio, she lost her ferocity and untoward demands.  She was tamed.  Whether she knew it or not, he was Betty Lou's Mr. Right. 

All the rest was irrelevant, easily put aside, tools used for former construction, bits and drills, augurs and  presses needed as she was being formed, but no longer.  Channeling was what it was called - repurposing all her frenetic gimme energy into something more....appealing?

'Who am I?' she asked, a question more a tribute to her maturity than to any new existential philosophy.  Philosophical was one thing she wasn't.  Life was to be taken, not considered, and while this new sexual dimension unfortunately involved two people instead of one, it was nothing more than a cost-benefit transaction, a nice compromise between indomitable will and libido. 

So she held her tongue, swallowed her bile, smiled, and complimented - God! What an awful slog this mating was.  She went through a bevy of men who met some but by no means all of her daunting criteria, dallied with some, rejected others, but then finally in an epiphanic moment, said, 'Fuck it'.  What was she doing capitulating, compromising, diddling with a raft of undesirables.  If this is what it took - denying her very soul - then it was a complete waste of time. 

Women included.  Those Bernal Heights bitches who took her obstinacy and bad humor as signs of male-hating behavior and put on the rush were sorely mistaken.  She might give up on men for the sake of identity and being, but she was in no mood for butch. 

Betty Lou never fit on the gender spectrum.  Straight women were given few algorithmic pauses on it, so being defiantly anti-sexual won her no points with the progressive crowd.  She was off spectrum, off program, off policy and happy for it. 

Identity, entitlement, the gimme, I want mine culture was no longer her thing.  Someone else put her into those categories where she did not belong.  'I am me' was the only meme on her street - a strong, defiant, independent woman whom no dinner bell called.  

A political metaphor, if you want to think of her example that way - lockboxes with names inscribed but nothing within.  Who cares at all what race, ethnicity, or gender you are?  What fabulist nonsense! What childish fantasy.  What pure, unalloyed, ridiculous cant. 

'No boyfriend?', asked her mother on a trip back home to Chillicothe; but by now she was used to parental importuning, returned to trimming the primroses, and looked forward to mommy's homecooked meal.