Renee Good Was A Fucking Bitch
How misogyny turns defiance into a death sentence.
Renee Nicole Good was a fucking bitch according to her killer. Unless we understand what makes so many women fucking bitches in the minds of the men who kill them, we will never really understand what happened to Good — or why violence against women is so often excused, minimized, or explained away.
What happened to Good was so needless and so devastating that we can only make sense of it by naming the system behind it: patriarchy. This is the system that still determines who is seen as threatening, who is dismissed as irrational, and whose life is considered expendable. It remains a powerful driving force for shaping the decisions and outcomes that harm women and anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow expectations of white male power. It also explains the growing fascism we are seeing in this country.
As I wrote another piece,
…you can’t separate fascist politics from patriarchal gender ideology—they are mutually reinforcing systems. Fascism gains strength when traditional masculine authority feels threatened by economic change, women’s rights, or social progress—it promises men they can reclaim dominance and restore their “rightful” place above women, minorities, and others deemed inferior. Both celebrate violence as a masculine virtue. Both seek to control women’s sexuality and reproduction to consolidate power.
Good stirred so much anger and hatred in this man that she was reduced to a fucking bitch who deserved to be shot. Why? Because she thwarted the rules of patriarchy. While seeing angry masked men coming at her and swearing must have been frightening, Good remained outwardly calm, refusing to be cowed by their attempts at dominance. She didn’t cry or get “irrationally” angry. She was perhaps, from her eventual murderer's point of view, maddeningly composed—saying to him "That's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you," as you might to a child who is getting agitated when being told he’s doing something wrong.
Meanwhile, her wife Becca, a woman who doesn’t present as traditionally feminine and refused to be submissive, openly filmed the scene and mildly mocked murderer Jonathan Ross— “Hey, show your face, big boy,” she said. Ross likely knew they were together because Becca said to him as he took down their license plate “That’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know. It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”
The law of patriarchy—which this administration is hell-bent on strengthening— demands women’s obedience and fear. It demands women’s servitude to and admiration of men. Together these two women violated that law. With toys and a dog in the car, they clearly had no need for men. This is likely what incensed Jonathan Ross when he shot Good four times—once in the head, once in the arm, twice in the chest—then called her a fucking bitch as her car went careening into other cars.
Her final crime before the shots? An attempt to drive away. Turning her wheels far to the right to avoid Ross who’d positioned himself in front of her car, she “slightly brushed” him. As The Guardian reported, the car was “moving so slowly that the officer is able to easily retain his balance.”
He could have shot her tires. He chose her head.
Since Good’s death, many people have been invoking Margaret Atwood’s famous line, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.” It’s an apt description of what happened. To defend against the small humiliations from two women and shore up his ego, Ross felt the need to, quite literally, eliminate the threat.
While we can’t know whether he would have responded the same way to a cisgender, heterosexual white man, the phrase “fucking bitch” is not incidental. It reflects a familiar, gendered pattern: women who resist male authority often trigger a particular kind of fury—one that recasts them as deserving targets. Research on intimate partner femicide shows that male perpetrators routinely frame their violence as a response to women’s “disrespect,” resistance to control, or challenges to his authority— effectively shifting blame onto her.
This is how Kristi Noem can call Good a dangerous domestic terrorist and rally the Right to say “she got what she deserved” (including right here on Substack in response to a Note I wrote about Good leaving behind children including a six-year- old that also lost his father two years ago).
While a woman who refuses to make herself small is deemed a "fucking bitch," a domestic terrorist, by the Right’s definition, seems to be someone horrified that neighbors are being targeted for the color of their skin and dragged away by anonymous masked men—and who protests it. It's someone on a school board that values social justice (oh, the horror), or as Fox News host Jesse Watters felt compelled to point out about Good, "a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio" and who “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” The implication is clear: any woman who speaks too loudly, any queer person who refuses erasure, any activist who disrupts comfort—is fair game.
Are you also starting to feel like a fucking bitch and a domestic terrorist? I know I am. I’d feel pretty good about it except for the risk of being shot in the face part.
The truth is, that risk is nothing new. At least not for people of color. I doubt any Black or brown person is surprised by what happened to Good. For white people, it’s a complete shock. We rarely see police violence against white women displayed so openly. But the dynamic is identical to what killed Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and so many other people of color—nonviolent encounters with law enforcement that end in death because the person is deemed disposable.
I live in Chicago where Silverio Villegas Gonzalez was killed by ICE and I didn’t hear about it for weeks.
To the collective trauma of marginalized people, we/the mainstream media have given a collective shrug. If anything good can come from the state-supported execution of Renee Good, it’s that people—specifically white people—are waking up to the horrific abuses of power that have always been there.
My hope—my fierce, urgent hope—is that this moment cracks something open. That those feeling gutted by Good’s cold-blooded murder allow it to radicalize them, not numb them. That we refuse to be gaslit into believing abuse of power is anything other than what we see with our own eyes. That we recognize misogyny, racism, and homophobia not as fringe ideologies but as the foundational tools of patriarchy, the system that has always decided whose lives matter and whose don't.
Rest in Power Renee Nicole Good.
