The bitch switch

To continue in celebrating this section’s one-year anniversary, I’ve decided to bestow upon our readers the very heartfelt gift of not talking about my personal life for an entire article. So drink it in, guys. Today’s piece is all for my bitches. It’s business as usual next week.

If you’re rockin’ girlie bits, then you know about the “bitch switch.” If you’ve got boy parts, then you’ve probably watched this monstrous phenomenon rear its lipstick-smeared, mascara-streaked head at you, chalked it up to gender discrimination and told yourself, “Damn. Bitches be crazy.”

We are. Well, we can be.

For some reason, there seems to be a set of synapses in every woman’s brain that short circuit when their emotions get itchy trigger fingers. These turn perfectly sane, rational women into vengeful, shrieking harpies. It only takes a second or two, which is why the bitch switch is so freaking scary.

I’ve seen the switch flip most often as the result of f**ked up relationships. Ugly break ups and raging altercations can turn ladies into lunatics faster than you can Tweet, “#bipolargirlproblems.” Seriously, what is it about love?

I saw the bitch switch flip on Valentine’s Day while looking at my bro Annie’s Facebook profile. She had been going out with Evan, a handsome young formula racer who would be more successful at his chosen profession if he didn’t have to support a tremendous cocaine addiction.

“Pain is temporary, trophies are forever,” Evan would say. He was a real winner of Charlie Sheen epicness, that one.

I wrinkled my nose and sneered when I first learned of their unlikely coupling but decided to bite my tongue, knowing that criticizing your BFF for slumming it with a shady guy only adds to his “bad boy appeal” that makes the panties go “Ping!”

“Annie’s a smart girl,” I told our friends. “She’ll wise up soon.”

She did.

(Don’t pull the trigger: The Ex isn’t worth losing your self-respect over.

Annie, are you okay?

Evan never had money, so he started taking money from Annie’s purse. When she’d had her fill of unwillingly sponsoring his shady-ass dealings, she announced that they were over and demanded he pay his five-figure tab. Evan started ignoring Annie’s calls. That’s when he flipped her bitch switch.

A few days shy of Valentine’s Day, Annie drove over to his apartment building hungry for a confrontation and ready to lay some serious smackdown. Much to her disappointment, he wasn’t home. Then she remembered that Evan didn’t lock the front door to his apartment because he would often lose his keys and just couldn’t afford a locksmith every time. Annie snuck upstairs, past the building’s security guard — who was privy to Evan’s shady dealings and really couldn’t give a rat’s ass if his angry ex-girlfriend was raging to draw some druggie blood — and let herself into his apartment. Frantic, she tried to look for money. He didn’t have any. Annie then decided to take away the one thing he would never be able to replace again in his life.

“I stole his racing trophies,” she told me.

My best friend’s break up B&E culminated in a Valentine’s Day beatdown, when she took the business end of a baseball bat to Evan’s trophies on the street outside her house. I saw pictures of the aftermath, which she took with her BlackBerry and posted on Facebook. I was totally speechless.

“I feel kind of bad somewhere deep down in the abscesses of my rotten heart, but then again I just remind myself that nothing is sacred these days,” she said.

I told her she was acting like a crazy bitch and that Evan wasn’t worth losing her shit over. I mean, please. What guy is? Apparently though, a little mental batting practice was all Annie needed to get over Evan the Terrible. She moved out of her mother’s house, now works as a broker and is seeing a sexy expat. I can’t really say that I like him for her (but no one really matches up to Annie), but an upgrade from a guy with sleeve tattoos to one who actually wears sleeved button downs habitually deserves mad points (even if they’re pink shirts) in my book.

“That was an ugly breakup, huh?” Annie said, in retrospect. “I needed that though… To whoop my ass into shape.”

Locked out of love

The first apartment I lived in over here was a serviced flat in Causeway Bay. They are popular with expats because they are already furnished, located in good neighborhoods and the astronomical rent covers utilities, WiFi and maid service, making it possible to move in with just a suitcase and a dream.

One night, my dreams of getting paid to write were interrupted when I heard the door to the main hallway open with a slam. It was three o’clock in the morning. I was about to roll over and fall back asleep when I heard these thundering footsteps charging towards what I thought was my door. The footsteps soon turned into banging noises against the door of the apartment across mine, punctuated with squeals from a slurring pipsqueak. “Open the door, Cedric!” The girl yelled as she pounded her fists against his door.

Cedric was my tall, doe-eyed French neighbor who moved in at the beginning of the month. Our encounters were brief; instead of knocking on doors to borrow cups of sugar, we’d knock and ask to borrow lighters.

I later found out the reason he moved next door was to escape the death rattle of a five-year relationship with his druggie girlfriend, the same crazy bitch whose switch flipped in our hallway while I was trying to sleep.

The amphetamine-induced door pounding eventually stopped when I heard a crash. At that point, I was a little scared to take a peek at what on earth was going on outside, but the yelling had stopped so I decided to sleep and investigate the next day.

From what I heard, she sounded like a tiny little thing but it turns out that chick’s bitch switch made her strong enough to rip Cedric’s lock right off his door. I left him an angry note that read “CONTROL YOUR WOMAN” and took a picture of the damage with my BlackBerry, determined to chastise someone for this insane behavior.

So, Dear Cedric’s Girlfriend: Keep your bitch switch in check. It is probably the reason he’s just not that into you.

Public display of aversion

Two weeks ago, I had a night out with my guy friends. What originally began as a Friday night food date with Ben and Alex — bros of mine since my days as a news wire intern — and my attached-at-the-hip friend Steve turned into a massive shit show.

Steve and I ended up meeting more of our guy friends at a wine bar in SoHo. We were out on the patio having a laugh when Steve and I got texts from our mutual friend, Danielle, who was out on a date but wanted to meet up with us.

I met Danielle through Steve, who introduced us after I bitched and moaned about having only one really close girl friend here in Hong Kong. She was a local Hongkonger around our age, totally gorgeous and thus, always out on dates. She knew all the places to be and I was excited to make friends with her. Steve, however, gave me a disclaimer when he first introduced us. “Drama tends to follow Danielle,” he told me.

Drama sure as hell did follow her into the bar when she met us that night.

Girl, Interrupted: when good girls go bad

Danielle came in with her date, Paolo, an older, douchey-looking finance guy in a suit. He bought us a round (I’m assuming to feel better about the fact that we were all judging him) and Danielle snuck away with me to have a smoke. She told me that they had just met two days ago and that she really liked him. I said I was happy for her, wished her luck and told her to see where it goes.

Somewhere in between all the whiskey cokes and smokes, Danielle and Paolo snuck off for what I assumed was going to be a cheeky makeout session. It wasn’t. They walked back inside, separately. He sat at the bar and ordered a beer, while she walked over to our table tearing up.

“He’s engaged.” She said.

What a doucher.

What happened next is sort of a blur because Steve and I have tried so desperately to wipe it from our memories. The night had been going so well.

Danielle’s switch flipped. Hard. It was as if her insane alien clone had snatched her when she went outside and walked back in pretending to be her. A happy, semi-sober girl walked out that door. A wasted basketcase walked back in. Steve and I tried to calm her down, but to no avail.

“You’re being a crazy bitch,” I told her. “Stop it. He shouldn’t see you like this and you’re better than this.”

It didn’t work. Her bitch switch was on and it wasn’t turning off till she dished out some punches. Reason wasn’t working, so Steve and I resorted to restraining her physically. We managed to hold her back from punching Paolo in the face, drag her out of the bar (not before I gave that jerk Paolo a piece of my mind) and shove her into a taxi.

Once we got her home, Steve and I were desperate to turn the night around. We couldn’t go back to the bar (we can never go back), which sucked, because we liked it there. I then remembered that I had a mickey of cheap 7-Eleven whiskey at my apartment. We shared it with Cedric and talked about crazy bitches till the wee hours of the morning.

So here’s what I’ve taken away from an entire month of dealing with all this crazy sauce:

Every chick has moments where they lose their shit. I’ve been there and I get it. We’re human, we have feelings and there are times (of the month) we just don’t know how to control or deal with them. It starts to be a problem, though, if your bitch switch is turned on more than it’s turned off. I understand that love makes you do messed-up things, but you shouldn’t let yourself get to the point where you’re so screwed up that it becomes hard to love you. Have some self-respect, bitch. Your crazy isn’t doing our gender any favors.

And if self-respect is a little hard for you to come by these days, I would recommend getting on meds.

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E-mail the author at Francesca.ayala@gmail.com. She can bitch slap the bipolar out of you if need be.