I think I had an epiphany while watching an action movie over the weekend.

My sister and I were walking down memory lane at my parents’ house, and by walking down memory lane, I mean we were sitting on our arses watching video cassette tapes. We decided to watch both feature-length reboots of Charlie’s Angels, mostly because they order burgers in the first movie , with which we had expertly-paired with our room temperature Whopper burgers like that guy with no authority other than his curly hair and authentic dress sense who used to appear in the free Coles magazines and badger you with wine suggestions for recipes.

As we were watching an incognito Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu detonate a bomb while falling from an aeroplane before landing on a speedboat driven by a bikini-clad Cameron Diaz, I was shocked to find I was more struck Barrymore’s choice of words than the several gaping plot holes I’d just witnessed in the space of about 42 seconds. The guy an incognito Barrymore drags from the plane calls her a “crazy bastard” because she is dressed as a man before she reveals herself as a woman by pulling off her mask and shaking out her unrestrained hair (because why have a practical mess bun holding your hair back during an extremely dangerous assignment when you can shake your hair like you’re on a goddamned Pantine commercial if you manage to pull the highly-unpredictable stunt off?). Before releasing her wild hair that somehow manages not to get stuck in her lipgloss, she says, “I think you mean crazy bitch”.

Now, I’m going to get up on my feminism horse (its name is Uterussa de Fallopian and she is obviously coloured bright crimson because all women who like being treated equally are OBSESSED with making men aware that their vagina is an exit passage for magical menstrual blood and not a mere pleasure sheath for their penis daggers – right?) and raise myself a quizzical brow.

I obviously know why “bitch” is usually associated with women because that’s the name of female dog, but why in the heck is “bastard” limited to male the men in the illegitimate house?

I have always felt I had quite a bit of knowledge about the word. As the daughter of a bastard and a technical one myself, I like ot think I am know. As the resident Queenslander in my office, I have a tendency to follow up/add an air of bogan legitimacy to multiple statements a day by tacking a “ya bastards” on the end. When I’m not referring to someone whose name I don’t know/can’t remember/can’t pronounce as “old mate”, it’s usually replaced with a “this bastard”. But even I have to admit that bastard has its male connotations. And I’d like to know why.

As a well-educated, resourceful young adult, I decided to turn my interests to thoroughly researching the topic: I typed “bastard male term” into Google and clicked the first few links that popped up.

The first link I clicked on was a web forum that looks like it would still be able to “glammed up” by a MySpace profile code.

A couple of cluey people cited conditions, which I can only assume date back to feudal society, when it was all about your inheritance. To me, the term “inheritance” makes me think of the ultimate heiress Paris Hilton and my brain fills with the associated imagery of Von Dutch trucker caps, stringy hair extensions and that weird gargle-scream she would let out when forced to do something gross on The Simple Life. But back then your inheritance was less about whether you’d be able to dress a shaking chihuahua in diamonds and more about whether you’d spend your days literally in the gutter or sitting in a castle as decadent overlord. And you couldn’t inherit the family jewels if you’re the spawn of unwed parents.

Back then women were only valued for their looks (not at all like today) and so while a daughter born to un-wed parents wouldn’t inherit anything, if she had, and I’m paraphrasing here, a knock-out bod and fuckable face she’d be able to marry out of complete poverty. Because women rarely inherited family wealth even if her father put a ring on the woman he planted his seed in, being a bastard didn’t “sting as much”.

But sons of unholy unions had no land, or money, and no future. Apparently marrying rich wasn’t something the fellas cold fall back on in those days.

Then I saw this answer:

“Bullshit, a bastard child has always been a boy child. At least here in the American South. Here we recognise that the female is the benevolent progenitor of all life that folows. They are sacred. Here, only boys are allowed to be bastards.”

which was kind of like biting into a sausage and finding out it’s the penis of Theon Greyjoy: you kind of enjoyed it, but you don’t like knowing where it came from can’t bring yourself to swallow it.

What I could gather from this information is that females are worthless but are also sacred but can destroy a child’s life because of the relationship status of the porksword she falls on. It didn’t really answer my question. I had delve deeper.

I investigated a straight up definition like I was a French exchange student trying to figure out if the new word I’d just been taught by a smart arse kid on my bus route was an appropriate term to slip into conversations with my Australian host parents. But poor Fleur is still just as confused. An online slang dictionary had four definitions for the term:

a derogatory term, usually for an unkind male.

a person born to unmarried parents.

a general insult

a male. Used in e.g. “poor bastard”, “lucky bastard”, etc.

My third link was from a Yahoo answers page, which had generated a bit of discussion from the original question (which isn’t really a question but this is a pressing issue, so who has time to phrase correctly?!):

I heard that Bastard was the term for a “male dog”. I thought it was for a person without a father?

In the answers to follow, each person said a bastard was a child born out of wedlock, or some variant. But each time they said “child” and not “person born with a penis”.

This brings us back to the whole bastard vs bitch debate. The whole notion that as there was a derogatory term from a woman, namely bitch, there had to be an equal term for men. Bastard does kind of make sense. I mean, they both start with “b” so it all fits together very nicely. But then, you can’t really ignore that while a bastard was considered some kind of white trash baby, at least it still belongs to the human race. A bitch is more than a whole other species, it’s a whole other genus, family AND order. So they sort of are COMPLETELY, ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.

Not that I’m advocating for use against either word. Colloquially, each have transcended their original meaning to become something completely new. And they each have their place in our vernacular. Exclaiming, “that was an absolute female dog of an exam” just doesn’t have the same ring to it without “bitch”. And shouting “which one of you children born to parents outside of wedlock changed the order of my highlighters?!” just doesn’t strike the same tone as a cheeky “bastards” would. We use these words because their meaning has evolved to a point where no other term will describe what we’re trying to convey as accurately. Sometimes all you need is a bitch.

I’m sorry, Drew Barrymore’s character who doesn’t have a last name until we find out her true identity is Helen Zaas, but I don’t think the words need to refer specially and exclusively to a particular gender. And this isn’t just because I’m a raging feminist who is burning down the joint using bras and hairspray as starter fuel; it’s because “bastard” is such a fantastic word that its use shouldn’t be limited to referring to just half the population of this magnificent planet. And the same goes for “bitch”.

It’s because while Lisa Wilkinson has been called a saucy bitch, she is also one glorious bastard.

And even though Karl Stefonovic has been called a glorious bastard, he is also one saucy bitch.

And I think we can all agree on that.