bitching

Catherine Jones gets her claws outa BITCHING - the subject of a new book - is the single most important skill if you are a woman.

You're either in - in which case you lead a charmed existence buoyed by bitching emails, texts and phone calls - or you're out, which means anything you do will be held against you.

The wisest women don't lead the pack, instead treading a fine line between bitching - always better if it's even slightly amusing as opposed to pure venom-based - and being fair-minded.

IRISH women are big into bitching, according to a survey conducted by Archers Aqua.

For proper bitching, nobody but nobody can beat the characters on the TV show Gimme Gimme Gimme, the rest of us are in the halfpenny place.

BITCHING is part of a good night out on the town for Irish women, a survey revealed yesterday.

And not surprisingly 48 per cent love a good old bitching session about former boyfriends.

This invitation made me appreciate a number of things: the importance of communicative connections in working women's lives; the pleasure of getting together to talk about each other's troubles; the ways bitching can give emotional expression to and some sense of relief from the troubles that preoccupy women's hearts at work.

I want to sort through some of these delineations by revisiting Jones's (1980/1990) classic observation about bitching as a sub-category of gossip that performs on two levels: on the interpersonal level as "complaining" and on the political level as "consciousness-raising." When Jones made her bi-level observation in 1980, the second-wave Women's Liberation Movement was still vibrant and consciousness-raising groups were still active enclaves full of "bitching" women learning together and from each other that "the personal is political" (cf.