To help celebrate our twenty-fifth year of being on the information superhighway, we have reached out to some of our former columnists for check-ins and updates. Today’s featured columnist, Susan Schorn, is a former Column Contest winner. She wrote sixty-one essays of Bitchslap, her column about women’s rights and self-defense, from 2009 to 2015. We’re pleased to have her back on our pages with her sixty-second installment.
Bitchslap debuted in 2009 as “a column about women and fighting,” because they say write what you know, and what I knew was that I always seemed to be fighting—for safety, or autonomy, or simply to not be pushed around—and most of those fights were related to my identity as a woman. The column’s premise was apparently novel enough to sustain an audience: that fighting is not without its costs, but it works surprisingly well against bullies, and even when it doesn’t work, it’s preferable to helplessness. Sometimes it’s even fun.