Fucking Bitch
Two words. We all heard them.
“Fucking bitch.”
They were the first words spoken after ICE agent Jonathon Ross shot Renee Nicole Good. After seeing the video, after hearing those words, with everything happening in this country and this world, I found myself asking a question that felt almost obscene: how could I possibly spend my time writing about something as “trivial” as romance novels?
And yet—how could I not?
To emotionally process this nightmare, to answer my own internal howl of pain (How could this happen?), I have to dig back, and back, and back again into what I believe are the origins of the sexual revolution and the aptly named war between the sexes. Because I believe that the MAGA phenomenon that led to Trump’s ascendancy—and to the current brutal incarnation of ICE—is patriarchy’s final, desperate pushback against a world shaped in large part by feminism. A feminism that began, quietly and radically, with the first romance novels written by women, for women.
Let me explain.
England. Europe. America. The 1700s.
The introduction of cheap paper journals and printing presses in the 1600s had already started a quiet revolution. Women who had not previously been educated began to be taught to read and write—at first just well enough to keep household records and accounts. Soon, they began keeping private journals of their own dreams, thoughts, and feelings. And then they began not only to read books, but to write them.
By the 1750s, women were publishing novels under their own names, with women as the main characters and women’s lives as the subject matter. Unsurprisingly, these novels focused heavily on a woman’s choice of a mate, because a woman’s husband was often the single most important factor determining her happiness and standard of living.
And surprise, surprise: women wanted to choose for themselves.
They wanted to select partners based not only on money or connections, but on kindness, intelligence, attraction, and character. They believed—radically—that they had a fundamental right to seek happiness, or at least contentment, in marriage.
Romance novels set a new standard for men who wanted wives. Wealth and status were no longer sufficient. A man had to be physically pleasing, intelligent, refined. He could not be brutish or violent. He could not be a drunkard, a gambler, or a wastrel.
Men were not thrilled with this development.
As the romance novel evolved, so did the amount of control heroines—and by extension, women—exercised over their lives. Between 1750 and 1800, heroines were still expected to be obedient daughters, virtuous (meaning virginal), and careful not to reveal passion or desire before marriage. But by the time Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, it was possible for Marianne to completely “ruin” her reputation by openly loving a man to whom she was not engaged—and still be rewarded at the novel’s end with a rich, handsome husband who loved her deeply in return.
These books and their authors were met with fierce moral condemnation from male critics, writers, and religious leaders. Around 1750, the term Blue Stocking emerged to describe women deemed unmarriageable because their education and intellect supposedly made them unattractive to men. It was meant as an insult, a warning, a way to herd women back from the dangerous practices of reading, writing, and thinking too much.
Instead, women writers leaned into it.
They did not stop writing because famous men like Alexander Pope publicly excoriated them. They laughed all the way to the bank as denunciations drew attention and fueled public curiosity. They took the insult and incorporated it into their books, making intelligent, literate women admirable heroines. The characters who parroted society’s criticisms were portrayed as buffoons, villains, or both.
In Fanny Burney’s 1796 novel Camilla, Eugenia Tyrold—scarred by childhood smallpox—is educated in the classics to prepare her for spinsterhood. Instead, it is that very education, and the character it forms, that wins her love and marriage. Burney also introduces Mrs. Arlbery, a wealthy widow who chooses not to remarry and to maintain her independence. Both women are scorned and shunned by characters who turn out to be nothing more than greedy social climbers. Both women ultimately triumph, while their adversaries fail or perish.
With a single novel, Burney introduced two radical ideas into Western women’s consciousness:
Exercising one’s intellect would not preclude love.
Choosing not to marry—or remarry—would not preclude happiness.
We can’t know whether Jane Austen’s refusal to marry a wealthy family friend was directly influenced by Burney’s work, but we do know that Jane read Burney and admired her deeply. Pride and Prejudice takes its title from a phrase in Burney’s novel Cecilia. Austen’s characters are famously intelligent, opinionated, and voracious readers.
Romance novels and feminism fed each other.
Fast forward to the 1900s. With the introduction of the birth control pill, marriage was no longer a prerequisite for sexual passion. In 1972, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss published The Flame and the Flower, launching the era of the “bodice ripper.” For the first time, romance novels depicted women engaging in passionate premarital sex.
There were, however, two deeply unfortunate conditions. First, to preserve the heroine’s “virtue,” the initial sexual encounter was often non-consensual. Second, the rapist had to be redeemed—lust transformed into love—so that the story could end in marriage.
The one redeeming feature, and the reason these books were so wildly popular, was that they depicted women as experiencing and enjoying sexual desire. By the 1980s, authors like Jude Deveraux and Lisa Kleypas popularized romances in which heroines had premarital sex based solely on mutual attraction and consent.
Other boundaries fell more slowly. The first romance novel with a divorced heroine, The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, appeared in 1929. The first lesbian romance, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, was published—and promptly banned—in 1928. These subgenres did not truly flourish until the 1970s, alongside Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and the passage of no-fault divorce laws and legislation ending gender-based discrimination in employment and finance.
With financial independence came real choice. Women could leave husbands. Marry better men. Marry women.
And yet there is one option that modern romance still rarely allows its heroines to choose: not marrying at all.
Instead, contemporary heroines are often introduced as professionally successful, socially fulfilled women who insist they don’t want marriage—only for the plot to reveal that this desire stems from trauma, fear, or emotional damage. The arrival of the hero “corrects” her thinking. Marriage is restored as the inevitable, healing end point.
And therein lies my heartburn with the modern romance novel.
Up until the 1970s, the genre expanded women’s sense of what was possible. It demanded more respect, more autonomy, more control. Then it stopped short. It ceased selling women freedom and began selling them heterosexual marriage as the highest form of fulfillment. In doing so, it became—wittingly or not—an arm of the backlash against feminism.
And backlash there was.
Men suddenly found themselves in a world where being wealthy, hardworking, sober, and conventionally attractive was no longer enough. A wife no longer needed to be beaten or cheated on to justify leaving. Sexual or emotional unhappiness was sufficient. A man had to win a woman’s affection—and keep it.
More unsettling still, men were no longer competing only against other men. They were competing against women’s ability to build satisfying lives without them at all. The question shifted from whether a woman made a man’s life easier to whether a man made a woman’s life harder.
Increasingly, women answered honestly.
The backlash was swift and organized. Christian fundamentalism surged in the 1970s alongside Roe v. Wade, easy access to birth control, and no-fault divorce. For every Gloria Steinem, there was an Anita Bryant or a Phyllis Schlafly. The Equal Rights Amendment was successfully scuttled in 1982. The 1990s brought purity rings, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and a renewed obsession with “traditional family values.”
By 2000, Karl Rove had harnessed the Christian right into a reliable Republican voting bloc. By 2010, the internet gave birth to incel culture and the manosphere.
Incels—primarily heterosexual men aged 18–29—blame their inability to find partners on feminism rather than on their own unwillingness to adapt. Their online discourse is saturated with misogyny, sexual entitlement, and rape culture. Women are reduced to “femoids,” “holes,” “roasties,” “Stacys,” “Beckies,” and “feminazis.” The slogan “Your body, my choice,” popularized by Nick Fuentes after Trump’s 2024 election, distills the conflict perfectly. This is not about sex. It is about control.
Which brings us back to January 7, 2026, and the killing of Renee Nicole Good.
That killing could not have occurred in the same way without Donald Trump’s elections in 2016 and 2024. It could not have occurred without the weaponization of ICE and the normalization of state violence against perceived enemies. Trump’s victories depended heavily on young male voters and self-identified Christians—people who supported him not despite his misogyny, but because of it.
This was never a campaign for Christian values. It was a campaign against female power, minority power, and any power that did not belong to rich, white, heterosexual men.
Renee Nicole Good was a citizen. She was partially blocking a road—a nonviolent act not punishable by death. Her real crimes were observing men who did not want to be observed, being married to a woman who spoke back, failing to obey quickly enough, and refusing to remain passive and compliant.
For that, she was shot three times at close range. In front of her wife.
And the words chosen to define her, in her final moments, were “fucking bitch.”
In the days following her death, reports surfaced of ICE agents telling civilians who resisted or filmed them, “Haven’t you learned anything from what happened?” They didn’t need to explain. Everyone understood the threat.
And yes—I am scared.
I live in a small rural town, but I know myself. If I witnessed an ICE action, I would take out my phone and start filming. I would not roll down my window on command. I would not unlock my door. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be beaten or jailed.
And yet—I want to lean into this.
I want to take the words Fucking Bitch and claim them the way women once claimed Blue Stocking. I want to print them on pins and hand them out in honor of Renee Nicole Good. It won’t bring her back. But it will refuse the silence they rely on.
They may break our windows. They may drag us from our cars. They may call us fucking bitches.
But we will wear the name proudly.
Because they will never own us.
