One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: “And then you got a shot?”

“That’s right,” she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. “That way my body wouldn’t make milk, and I could go back to work.” I couldn’t help myself; I cheered.

I loved that shot because of what it meant to my mom, something I understood even at a young age. She had tried being a housewife after my sister was born the year before, but the drudgery of washing and folding diapers, the inanity of popular soap operas, the lack of tangible accomplishments at the end of each day, had her clawing her way back to a steadily rising corporate career when I was only 6 weeks old.

Contrast this with my own children’s more feral birth stories, which involve some or all of the following: midwives, birthing tubs, hospital-grade pads lining my sofa and living room floor. And breastfeeding. Lots and lots of breastfeeding. I squeezed what maternity leave I could from federal laws. In the end, though, I quit my job so I could figure out this life-shifting role without the hassle of long commutes, expensive child care, and pumping breast milk while perched over a toilet.

The way I looked at it, I was taking the maternity leave my society didn’t want me to have and that women like my own mother never wanted. But the French feminist and philosopher Elisabeth Badinter argues in her 2010 book, which was finally released in English this week, I was yet another newbie mom screwing things up.

In “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women,” Badinter explains that, 30 years ago, things were looking good for a generation of moms in Western Europe – women had total control over reproduction, they had achieved financial independence, wage gaps were shrinking. Then a global economic crisis kicked women off the job, pushing them back in the home and searching for meaning. At the same time, a renewed interest in the environment persuaded grown-ups to look to the earth and tradition for answers. Marry the two, Badinter argues, and a new type of mom was born — one who knew what she wanted for her babies and believed she possessed some innate wisdom to make it happen. Problem is, these moms, the daughters of Badinter’s and my mother’s generation, set women back decades with things like drug-free births, generous, state-sanctioned maternity and paternity leaves, and, of all tools of the Man, cloth diapers.

There’s a new tyrant oppressing women’s lives, Badinter claims. And it’s a nipple-sucking, nap-fighting, incontinent little baby.

Sure, children have been ruining their mothers’ lives since we evolved from chimps. But what makes this snapshot in time so different, according to Badinter, is the fact that modern, emancipated mothers are so complicit in their own destruction. Lactating, co-sleeping, time off from work – that’s a bunch of “naturalist” mumbo-jumbo and a distraction from a woman’s duty to herself and a society that wants to see her as equal but can’t quite get past the milk stains on her blouse. These days, though, not only do women welcome the career interruption, according to Badinter, but they also buy into the idea that mothering is an instinct. So women adopt a “naturalist” lifestyle, carrying their babies, spending time with them, actually purchasing, on purpose, diapers that have to be scraped and washed rather than tossed in the trash.

For Badinter, this naturalist parenting has taken over, triggered mom guilt, convinced us that we should refuse epidurals, breastfeed off-schedule, and, of all things, take advantage of long, paid maternity leaves. Who cares that these things might actually be the woman’s choice, make sense for her family, satiate her curiosity about the thresholds of human pain? By participating, women are ceding power back to men. The men? They don’t have to lift a finger – thanks to moms, they’ve regained control over everything.

I’ve been a modern mom long enough to look at mommy-wars rhetoric like Badinter’s with the skeptical eye of a wounded veteran. I mean, she makes a great case that mothering trends come and go and are rarely based on irrefutable science. Epidurals? Safe. Breast milk? Not all that. Skin-to-skin bonding with babies? Fun but hardly crucial. I think we all know we’re not going to be snacking on placenta forever. Then again, does a home birth really have a negative impact on the stubborn wage gap?

Badinter particularly has it in for breastfeeding, something she thinks too many women have been tricked into and something French women aren’t all that interested in trying. Why bother, she wants to know. It ties moms down, adds a layer of guilt, isn’t any better than bottles and formula. Anyway, it’s taxing – on the woman and her “conjugal partner.” When it comes time to bed down, rather than offering up bountiful breasts for her mate to fondle, moms are pushing fathers to the couch to make room for her new lover – a co-sleeping baby. It’s an arrangement, she recounts with seeming horror, that can last for years.

Badinter’s critique is not surprising, given how zealous the “breast is best” messengers can be. (She dedicates a delightful number of pages to taking down La Leche League.) But as a mom who breastfed her kids for years, I can assure you that nurslings are a ball-and-chain only as much as the outside world won’t welcome them in. In which case, it’s not breastfeeding moms who are undermining women’s status, it’s the same old mother- and child-averse institutions – work, school, swimming pools swarming with conservatives. Modern engineering has made babies a kind of go-anywhere accessory. Problem is, too much of society prefers they’re not anywhere, no matter what they eat.

Badinter isn’t the first aging feminist to accuse younger women of trying to settle the score with their feminist foremothers. Was my decision to take a career break, suckling my babies for years and even, occasionally, wrapping them in cloth diapers a rebellion against my mother’s hard-driving, job-focused ways? The artificial milk and endless hours at a babysitter’s? That’s not how I see it. My mother and I both reacted to the demands of our time. In this book-length attempt to scold the young’uns for screwing up progress, Badinter, like others before her, fails to see that what her generation gave us were real choices.

After I was born, the corporate career window was closing on my mom with every day that I got older. She crawled back through just in time and made a decent life for herself and her family. I, on the other hand, felt like I had time. Sticking with one company for life was as outdated as a postpartum estrogen shot. I didn’t have to rely on the one job that I left. I could start a new career when I was ready. My mother’s urgent return to work had paved a slow and meandering path for women (and men!) of my generation. I wasn’t expected to leave my job to be with my kids, which is exactly why I could consider it.

Generation gaps aside, Badinter’s book ultimately feels outdated. Most of her data comes from the 1980s and ’90s, and family life has evolved dramatically since then. I’m in Year 11 of motherhood, and I feel I’ve witnessed modern parenting change right before my eyes. Where Badinter reports regression for women, I see signs of progress.

Instead of the old-guard patriarchy taking over the wheel, more and more partners share the load – either through necessity or a sincere desire to be with their kids. I have as many stay-at-home-dad friends as I do similarly barely employed mom friends. These dads can work the cloth diapers as well as any oppressed French eco-femme. They heat formula, thaw frozen breast milk and pack healthy lunches. They attend playgroups and work the co-op preschools during the day and send out resumes and story pitches and teach classes at night. Want to piss them off? Just call them “Mr. Mom.” Or tell them they’re doing a great job babysitting their kids.

I’m not saying Badinter is completely out of touch with Western mothers’ lives. It’s true that motherhood lowers women’s status. But that’s not a modern phenomenon – and it has little, if anything, to do with cloth diapers. Has she even seen modern cloth diapers and accompanying accessories? If it weren’t for the fun colors and ridiculous brand names (Fuzzi Bunz?), you could easily mistake them for Pampers.

Where modern women do undermine themselves is the constant questioning of their choices and allowing for an onslaught of guilt. No matter what we do, it’s wrong in someone’s eyes – so why do we take any of this criticism seriously? Instead of doing as we please and moving on, as Badinter praises French women for doing, we do as we please and then punish ourselves with guilt. I should know: Though I stand by the choices I’ve made as a mom, this book made me feel like shit. Then again, so did the Tiger Mom treatise and, more recently, the book about how superior French parents are to me. Why so little faith in my own decisions?

My mom, on the other hand, never regretted her estrogen shots or worried that baby formula had made me fat. Yet she absolutely loved the idea that I nursed her grandkids. For a baby shower, she gave me cloth diapers. My mom even managed after a while to stop making negative comments about mothers who didn’t go to work every day. These weren’t slights against me — just an old habit from when she had to defend mothers who did.

The topic of that 1994 event, headlined by Ann Romney and the Children’s Defense Fund’s Marian Wright Edelman and held during Romney’s Senate race against Ted Kennedy, was women and children’s safety and rights, according to Dushku. The audience, she recalls, was predominately African-American and Latina women with young children in tow. They asked about welfare benefits, as reform and “welfare-to-work” were hot topics at the time. Ann Romney’s position, according to Dushku, was to be a stay-at-home mom at all costs — consistent with Mormon doctrine, if off-message for the campaign. When one audience member asked about community service, Ann Romney said, “I would just say no…You have no business going around in your community when your children are young,” Dushku remembers. She says now, “People almost booed and hissed.”

Dushku is a professor at Suffolk University who for many years was a member of the suburban Boston congregation where Mitt Romney became bishop, occasionally butting heads with him over issues of women in the church. Though in previous campaigns she has voiced her concerns to the press, in an interview with Salon Wednesday, Dushku said she has been ambivalent about granting more interviews about Romney. Mormons are “harmony-seeking,” she said. But she described herself as “irritated” by last week’s “war on moms” rhetoric, and in the conversation, Dushku expressed stinging criticism of Mitt Romney’s attitudes toward women.

But she also zeroed in on Ann Romney’s position from her husband’s first Massachusetts campaign. It was Romney’s attitude that really struck Dushku: “She acted like it was such an easy question to answer. She didn’t understand [staying at home] was a luxury that only a few people can afford.” Dushku says she and a friend who attended actually felt sorry for Romney, coming away thinking, “Ann just does not understand these issues.”

Of course, Ann Romney was essentially repeating what the Mormon church still proscribes for women, though that script has been challenged by Dushku and others. As the women’s movement blossomed throughout the 1970s, Dushku and fellow Massachusetts Mormons began questioning gender roles within the church. They even founded a Mormon feminist journal, Exponent II, that is still published. Ann Romney stayed on the sidelines during those debates, though Dushku couldn’t recall her explicitly commenting on their aims.

Mitt Romney was clearer in his reactions. “Mitt had an attitude of, ‘Why do you have to stir things up? It has nothing to do with the church and women should be satisfied with what they have,’” Duskhu says. When Dushku was a divorced mother of four, she says Romney “just thought that anybody that wasn’t married to someone who can support them was just almost too unusual to consider in any collegial way.”

Other Mormon feminists who knew Romney during that era also have less-than-rosy memories of his attitudes toward women. Helen Claire Sievers, who also worked on the early days of Exponent II, told the National Journal that she once told Romney that spousal abuse was more widespread than she would have guessed. Romney replied that “he was pretty sure it wasn’t happening. … There was a man who told Mitt that he was abusive to his wife, and Mitt said, ‘No, you’re not.’ It was so hard for him to understand what was thought of as spousal abuse.” He did, however, agree to meet with women involved in the Mormon feminist community and to try to work with them.

At least two Mormon women who had been involved in feminist causes, Elisabeth Calvert-Smith and Barbara Taylor, went on to work for Romney’s campaign or join his administration. Calvert-Smith declined to be interviewed, and Taylor did not respond to a request. But Taylor, who later worked as an executive assistant to Romney, told the Washington Post in November that though Romney initially “thought we were just a bunch of bored, unhappy housewives trying to stir up trouble,” he had “evolved.” Romney, she said, is “an entirely different person now.”

Dushku seems unconvinced. When Romney said on the campaign trail that he knew about women’s concerns because his wife had told him, several Mormon feminists told me it echoed the way things are done within the LDS church, where women and men move in separate spheres. “I would agree,” said Dushku when I ran this by her. “I think Mitt has never learned how to talk to women.” What about the women who worked for him in the statehouse – where, his campaign has pointed out, he employed women in record numbers – or at Bain? “I think he did that under pressure, to keep that issue at bay, because he knew he was vulnerable in that area,” Dushku said.

“He’s not a man who has a moral core,” she said. “He’s very loyal to the Mormon church, pays his tithing, is faithful to his wife, but he doesn’t have a set of core values you can count on.”

Dushku says she saw that firsthand in what is probably her most high-profile clash with Romney – when she went to the Boston Globe during that 1994 Senate race with the story of her friend, later identified as fellow Exponent II member Carrel Hilton Sheldon. Late in her pregnancy, Sheldon’s doctors discovered that Sheldon had a dangerous, potentially life-threatening blood clot. Sheldon’s Mormon stake president, a doctor, counseled her to have an abortion, which was also her preference, and to care for her four existing children. Romney, however, “regaled me with stories of his sister and her retarded child and what a blessing that child had been to the family. He told me that ‘as your bishop, my concern is with the child,’” according to Sheldon. Dushku said in a 2007 interview that Romney said “something to the effect of – Well, why do you get off easy when other women have their babies?’” So when Romney began claiming that he was pro-choice in his 1994 election, Dushku told the Globe, “I went to his office and I congratulated him on taking a pro-choice position. And his response was – Well, they told me in Salt Lake City I could take this position, and in fact I probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.”

Today, she says, the encounter with Sheldon is “a sign that Mitt thinks once he’s made a decision, it’s the right decision. His style has always been one of telling people exactly what is right or wrong. He’s not someone to engage people in conversation. He’s a person who comes to a conclusion, is emphatic about it, and he’s not interested in dialogue and exchange.” Dushku, a political scientist, said Romney was bewildered in that race when reporters called her for insights on him, because he had never taken any interest in her work. “He would say, ‘Why would anybody call you?’” And when the Boston Globe ran the Sheldon story, Dushku told Salon, “He said, ‘Well, how did you come out from under a rug just to attack me?’”

“We’d never had a real confrontation until after the campaign, when he blamed me for helping him lose,” Dushku says now. “Mostly he was just a dismissive person who felt like he had the right to decide for everyone what was the right way to be a Mormon.”

Indeed, one biography of Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s “The Real Romney,” has Romney telling Dushku, even before the split over abortion and the election, “I can tell you one thing: You’re not my kind of Mormon.” After Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, according to Ron Scott’s Romney biography, Mormon leaders essentially redistricted the wards so Romney and Dushku would never cross paths. “To some, this dextrous and nearly transparent maneuver became known as the Dushku gerrymander, an unrequested courtesy extended to their former stake president Mitt Romney and his wife, who would never again have to be face to face with Judy Dushku while they worshiped.”

These details, along with the image of two friends snoozing happily entwined, make the moment emblematic of a dynamic central to “Girls’” appeal and its importance. Despite Dunham’s protestations about not wanting to be some symbolic emissary from the land of young ladies (Sorry, kid, you’re it!), this is what she’s telling us about Women Right Now: that the lives of contemporary Mary Richardses and Rhoda Morgensterns are not based on pursuit or enjoyment of hetero congress; rather, they are often most firmly and warmly wrapped around each other.

You have likely already read something about the sex on “Girls,” which in early episodes, at least, all takes place between straight, sort-of-realistically-bodied young people. What you’ve read is true: the show’s abundant sex – as experienced by its four female leads – is either boring and unsatisfying, porn-fantasy-driven and unsatisfying, nonexistent and unsatisfying, or performed as conquest (Jessa says after bagging an ex, “That was me showing that I cannot be smoted. I am unsmoteable”) and yet … unsatisfying. Sex for these young women is an awkward element in their lives, and whether you think that this characterization is hilariously awful, worryingly awful, or whether it prompts you to reflect, once again, on how everyone else but you is a prude, there is no question that “Girls” features some awful, awful sex.

But part of the point of “Girls” is that the sex, and the guys with whom the sex happens, are not the point. Instead, as titularly advertised, “Girls” is about girls, and the fact that they do make connections – emotional, intimate, irritating, satisfying, pleasurable, lasting. Just not, so far anyway, with men. The show, among many other things, is crucial and corrective testament to the ways in which women’s friendships with each other have flourished and changed during the same period in which their liberties and status have increased.

Minutes into the first episode, Hannah sits naked in a bathtub eating a cupcake, laughing pityingly with a betoweled Marnie about Marnie’s emasculated boyfriend. When the boyfriend accidentally comes into the room, it’s clear he has no place in this room of unclothed communion. A similarly awkward entrance occurs later, during one of several scenes in which one of the four lead characters sits on the toilet, making serious confessions (of pregnancy, for instance) to a girlfriend while peeing. The bodily closeness depicted on “Girls” makes flesh the role these women play in each other’s lives: They are the non-sexual lovers of each other.

It’s the girlfriends who provide the physical affirmations usually associated with boyfriends. “You are beautiful, shut up,” Marnie tells self-deprecating Hannah. “Your skin is, like, hauntingly beautiful,” Long Island girl Shoshanna says to her worldly cousin Jessa. “When I look at both of you, a Coldplay song plays in my heart,” Hannah tells Marnie and Jessa, kidding but serious. In one scene, having been meanly rejected by a boy because of her virginity, Shoshanna desperately asks her friends if they would have sex with a virgin, meaning her. “Oh Shosh,” Jessa says kindly, “if I had a cock, it’s all I’d do.” You get the feeling that she means it; if they could provide that kind of fulfillment for each other, they would.

This same-sex affinity feels extremely contemporary, part of what has prompted critics to write about the show as revolutionary. But noting female friendship as a (or the) primary source of emotional sustenance only feels strange in the context of relatively recent history; in fact it’s a dynamic that is very old.

For the many centuries during which marriage was regarded as an economic and a socially ratifying necessity, rather than as an institution from which women could reasonably hope to derive emotional or sexual pleasure, intense social and physical bonds between women were an accepted part of life. From Celia and Rosalind in “As You Like It” to Hermia and Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” whom we’re told were as close as “two lovely berries, moulded on one stem,” Shakespeare regularly used the assumed closeness (and sometimes the bed-fellowship) of women as a plot device. Much of what we learn of the fate of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe is from letters to her best friend, Anna Howe. Then there’s Lucy Montgomery’s Anne Shirley, who meets her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit” in Diana Barry.

The term “Boston marriage” was used during the late 19thcentury to describe unmarried women who lived together in long-term partnerships. In “Bachelor Girl,” a history of single female life in the United States, Betsy Israel writes that around the same period, near-romantic female bonds were encouraged by parents. Two girls, meeting perhaps in school, would be “‘smashed’ – think of best friends going steady – and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience.” Of course, all that social growth was supposed to be in service of marriage. “Once they’d mastered these skills,” Israel writes, “they would be able … to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.”  For a long time, there was no questioning the sexuality of women who held hands, slept side-by-side, confided in each other or wrote long love letters to one another.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century, as marriage came to be treated as a union based on love and sex, that same-sex friendships began to be seen as competitive to the closeness a woman was supposed to feel to her husband, and thus as sexually suspect. Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has described how, by the end of the 1920s, American psychoanalyists “were warning that one of the most common ‘perversions of the libido’ was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their ‘affections on members of the same sex.’ Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.” The fix, Coontz writes, was to discourage social unions between women and encourage more early sexual experimentation between the sexes. Networks based on female camaraderie, trust and dependence began to break down.

These mid-20th-century decades are the ones on which most of us have drawn, until recently, our understanding of how a woman’s life is supposed to proceed. They were years in which women made stupendous social, economic and professional strides, yet during which they were still told to pursue, and mark their graduation to adulthood with a “traditional” marriage, in which a man is lover, confidant, provider, partner and companion. These were also years in which messages about women’s behavior toward women were nasty; girls were hair-pullers, back-stabbers and bitches, always after each other’s jobs, wardrobes and men.

These are Dunham’s “Girls,” and while the privileged Oberlin grads depicted on the show are members of the demographic statistically most likely to eventually marry – and to enjoy successful companionate marriages – their walks down aisles might well not take place for a decade or more. During that period, the people with whom they are likely to form their most intense emotional partnerships are, like the smashes of old, other young women. Except now, the smashes are happening not in anticipation of unfulfilling marital futures, but in advance of potentially happy marriages; they’re not a reflection of the powerless quandary of women compelled to marry practical strangers for money and social acceptance, but rather of a generation of women who, even if they don’t yet have real power, experience historically unprecedented autonomy and freedom.

Yes, we’ve seen friends on television before.  From Mary and Rhoda to Laverne and Shirley to, yes, the show that must not be named but to which “Girls” is always compared. But Carrie and her brightly colored cadre made history in almost cartoonish fashion, in which material consumption was supposed to be symbolic of social liberty (until it just became material consumption), in which friendship was a public performance enacted in expansive shiny clubs over jewel-colored cocktails. Those flamboyantly drawn expressions have given way to Hannah and Marnie, who breakfast in their grim apartment kitchen, Marnie listening with irritation as Hannah slurps her cereal milk and talks with her mouth full, like regular best friends, not fabulously implausible best friends.

Their life is not one of aspirational adornment, but of the quotidian realities of (even privileged) young adult life, in which the people you trust and argue with and talk to at the end of the day about your job, whom you share beers and breakfasts with, are your girlfriends.

It’s hard to talk about the role of female friendships without making them sound like placeholders for marriage. But it sells female friendship very short to regard it as some kind of training ground for later, committed heterosexual (or homosexual) partnership. These relationships take place not in some liminal state, as women are waiting for “real” life to begin; marital partnership no longer defines “real” life. Young women, older women, unmarried women – they are simply living their actual lives, not dress rehearsals for them, and the bonds they form with each other are as real, as varied, as complex and often as long-lasting as the ones they may or may not form with romantic and sexual partners, and as fraught and as true as the love they may or may not feel for their kids.

These women are, make no mistake, partners, spouses, family to each other. They get mad at each other for being late for dinner, for sleeping with the wrong people. They are jealous, possessive, dismissive of and bored by each other, sometimes in the emotionally manipulative style associated with lovers. Fighting over that too-adoring boyfriend, Marnie tells Hannah that she can’t understand because “you’ve never been loved this much.” She pauses. “Except by me. I love you that much.” While Jessa at one point turns to Hannah and issues a line that could have been taken from either romantic comedy or drama: “I am not a character for one of your novels. Stop staring at my face so hard.”

At the end of an early episode, Hannah, recovering from a series of life’s traumas, dances by herself in her bedroom to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” Marnie arrives home; they laugh at the day’s indignities, and then, before you know it, they’re dancing – happily, freely, satisfyingly – together.

My discomfort will come to an end soon. “The B—- in Apt. 23” debuts tonight. The billboard will be replaced, but what it tells us about how we talk about women isn’t going anywhere.

According to Google Books, the word “bitch” appeared 170,710 times in the decade beginning in 2000, almost always in an up-with-women way. (Compare that to the 1930s, when the 11,369 entries ran more to issues of animal anatomy and veterinary medicine.)

Over the past year, in both politics and the entertainment world, talking about women has become an opportunity to fling around insulting language. A lot has been said about “slut,” but it’s that other word — “bitch” — that really gets at the heart of the issue. “Bitch” occupies a strange and conflicted place in our lexicon and our culture. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate put-down — just ask any woman who’s rejected a sexual advance how it feels to be called a bitch, usually in public. On the other, it’s become a term of affection among, for lack of a better word, the sisterhood.

Which is not to say that we’re entirely comfortable with the word. It still doesn’t pass the polite society test. You still don’t want to say it in front of your grandma. Celebrating — or denigrating — a woman as a bitch still carries a hint of the subversive.

It’s been said that TV is the most democratic of media. If that’s true, then “Don’t Trust the B—-” and its big sister, “GCB,” already airing on ABC, have a lot to teach us. Pitched as “Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apt. 23” and “Good Christian Bitches,” respectively, the shows were picked up in part, I suspect, because of the supposed cheekiness of their titles. They communicate an adult sensibility, one that won’t be afraid to ruffle a few feathers.

Except that the titles were changed immediately. “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt 23,” a half-hour sitcom, tells a classic odd-couple story about two roommates, one a savvy, possibly psychotic con artist, the other a seeming naif who quickly catches on and earns her harder-edged peer’s respect. Inevitably, they become friends, etc., etc. Scared of actually using the word “bitch” in the title, the network suits originally shortened it to the terminally dull “Apt. 23.” When that didn’t catch on, they reverted to the original, adding a pleasing new rhyme along the way.

The same thing happened to “GCB.” Fearing that Christian audiences would be offended, ABC changed “Good Christian Bitches,” an hour-long comedy-drama about a former “Queen Bitch” who returns to her childhood home in the Dallas suburbs, to “Good Christian Belles.” It was then shortened to its current title, a meaningless acronym that no longer seems to refer to anything.

The new shows’ coy evasion is part of a trend. We saw it in the short-lived sitcom “$#*! My Dad Says.” Based on a popular Twitter feed, the network advertised the show as “Bleep My Dad Says.” “Bleep” is a clever ruse, a censoring of the censoring, but anyone familiar with the show’s history, or cartoon graphics, for that matter, knows what “$#*!” stands for.

“$#*!” can’t actually be spoken on TV, but “bitch” can. Not too long ago, hearing the word come out of a character’s mouth raised an alarm. Hell, Lucy couldn’t even use the word “pregnant,” much less anything really salty. Now, “bitch” has become so commonplace it isn’t even edgy anymore, at least after 8 p.m.

There’s a disjunction here, and it points to the fact that, despite its gains, the word still makes us squeamish. After all, ABC wanted the word to titillate and communicate its own hipness, and yet wouldn’t commit to it for fear of offending anyone.

The word itself holds an interesting, perhaps unique, place among our current crop of go-to slurs. These days, we like to insult people based on sexual characteristics. What better way for Americans still squeamish about sexuality to put someone down than by labeling him with a coarse term for actual genitalia? A man can be a “prick,” “dick” or “asshole,” none of which is considered unspeakably bad. Not so for a woman. We reserve our worst for other words, those that begin with “c” and “t” and conflate an ugly image of female genitalia with the behavior and/or attitudes of women. That’s why they are so offensive. They reduce women to the purely bodily and declare that a woman’s body is inherently offensive at the same time.

“Bitch” comes from a different tradition of insult, in which a person is compared to an animal — in this case, a highly sexualized one — and so stripped of some of his or her humanity. Think “cur,” which has an air of old-fashioned quaintness about it. “Bitch” doesn’t have any overtones of a lost, imperial past.

Outside of dog-breeding circles, the meaning of the word has evolved. Tell a man that he is “someone’s bitch,” and you’ve emasculated him. You’ve reduced him to the level of a woman, which, if the slur is used effectively, is the core of the insult. Any woman who is labeled a bitch is, on the other hand, someone who won’t give what’s asked of her. She has broken the social contract that demands women be pliable and accommodating. Which is precisely the opposite of its meaning when used as a compliment. A woman who admiringly calls another woman a bitch is declaring her admiration for someone who won’t conform to those expectations.

What I can’t figure out is what ABC means by it. Are they trying to offend, or are they attempting, in a ham-handed way, to appeal to young women who want to see themselves as rule-breakers? Because I’m not sure that retaining the initial letter and only gesturing to the rest of the word is any less offensive than just saying it. If network standards-and-practices departments allow dialogue to contain the word, then just go ahead and use it in the title. On the other hand, if “bitch” is too incendiary to appear in a show’s title, it shouldn’t be allowed so liberally once the action starts.

We are already familiar with the double use of words once reserved for bigots and misogynists. Marginalized subcultures often reclaim words that have been used to hurt them. But the process is awkward. They speak to a history of relations — whether they be racial, sexual or gender — that have been complicated, at best, and brutally unjust, at worst. Examples aren’t hard to find. While some people are seen as allowed to use the “n-word,” our general discomfort with it isn’t surprising in a country where young black men are in danger just walking down the street. The same process has been seen in the gay community, which has embraced “queer.” (Remember “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which didn’t have to tiptoe around a formerly offensive word, because it had been so widely accepted.) “Fag,” on the other hand, inhabits that stranger space, in which context is everything: Spat out by a homophobe, it’s hate speech. Used by one gay man to refer to another, it can be an affectionate form of in-speak.

And it’s what’s happening with “bitch.” Despite the gains women have made, gender relations in America remain troubled: Widespread wage gaps still exist, as does a paucity of women at the highest levels of power. We’re still arguing about why women get blamed for their own rapes. The list goes on and on. The words we use to refer to women show us how far that process is from being complete. Every once in a while — as with TV-show titles — our ambivalence about them comes into sharper focus.

Rush Limbaugh learned the limits of our tolerance, at least when it come to a public figure attacking a private citizen using a gendered insult. But the powers-that-be at ABC want to play it both ways. They want to wink at an audience that appreciates the audacity and irony of using the word “bitch,” but are still afraid enough that they will censor it, at least partway.

Television is ubiquitous in America. We invite it into our homes and it reflects us back at ourselves. “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23” and “GCB” tell us something about how we think about ourselves. If TV executives, their nervous eyes trained on Nielsen ratings and the bottom line, can’t figure out our attitudes about how we think and talk about women, then neither can we. I’m just not ready to tell that to my daughters.

That’s also around the time the gynecologist says, in a scene clipped for the trailer, “You could not pay me enough to be 24 again,” and Hannah says, “Well, they’re not paying me at all.”

If the teenager was an invention of the second half of the 20th century, more recent decades have brought another period of suspension between childhood and adulthood, the post-college era of confused self-creation. As Dunham herself recently said of the show’s title, “I think that these are girls who will feel like girls until they’re 35 maybe.” For a certain kind of lucky person, freed of the most immediate financial burdens and rich in a family’s emotional investment, college might have felt like independence or responsibility. But it turns out to be so cosseted and circumscribed that graduating feels a little like leaving the womb.

Even so, the ways “Girls” and the new film “Damsels in Distress” treat the problems of young womanhood can tell us a little bit about the realities of class and generational change in America. Since Dunham’s characters aren’t visibly encumbered by one of the most serious matters actually facing her generation – crippling student debt – and they can control their fertility to delay childbearing, they’re both grasping and adrift, left feeling both entitled to more and vaguely guilty about their right to be upset about not getting it. No wonder Hannah, in a moment of weakness, seems to wish for a “real” problem.

The interim solution, it seems, is to talk through it as articulately and self-deprecatingly as possible, and the long-term solution is to wait it out. The former tactic has always been preferred for characters in Whit Stillman movies, who try to cope with the emotions of early adulthood by offering as much cerebral distance as they can muster. Stillman’s first film in over a decade, “Damsels in Distress,” offers yet another self-possessed hero pronouncing to an outsider how to rationalize and handle one’s feelings in a world of elaborate social customs – in this case, college. As in earlier Stillman movies, there are more dewy, lovely girls, often surrounded by inadequate and self-obsessed men. In Dunham’s work, the two meet to have mostly unsatisfying sex, but Stillman’s more genteel, ahistorical types favor dance crazes.

Sex for the characters on “Girls” is plainly influenced by porn, but the characters’ congress as we see it is deliberately the anti-porn: at best, demystified, often disappointing, intermittently funny, and never quite leaving the realm of self-consciousness. This is how group socializing – parties in particular — functions in Stillman movies. It’s never quite as fun as it’s supposed to be, and the best lines come on the sidelines. But people still valiantly try to lose themselves in dance, a more raw form of interaction even as it has its own rules. It is almost always a nostalgic exercise – his first three movies, “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco,” each take place at the lingering close of an era, and the “Damsels’” device-free world is steeped in tap and line-dancing. Moving your body unself-consciously is a goal in itself — in “Damsels in Distress,” the highest ambition of Violet (Greta Gerwig) is to start a new dance craze, the Sambola. It’s one of the funniest jokes of the movie that this is actually just a pastiche of several existing dances, remixed.

What does it mean to be ambitious when so much has been made easy and so much came before you? When your parents seem to have done all the heavy lifting and the significant cultural work? Sometimes, it means lowering your sights so low you can’t fail – per Hannah, just staying alive is an accomplishment. In the beginning of “Barcelona,” one character vows to only date women who aren’t beautiful, and now in “Damsels,” Violet proclaims that one should only date “morons,” ostensibly because one has an opportunity to improve the world that way. Of course, it’s also a way to preempt rejection when there is very little concretely at stake.

Preempting rejection is something Dunham knows well: She’s often admitted to doing it by putting forward her un-Hollywood body as mortifyingly as possible. The same goes for what she called in the same interview with critic Alan Sepinwall “self-exposure and the age of the over share.” It functions, she said, as “another kind of self-defense in a certain way. It’s like, I’m going to tell you everything about me so you can’t tell me anything about me that I don’t already know.” That includes the semi-shamefaced revelation that one wants to be famous or important: While Dunham’s characters crave sexual validation, career validation is at least as meaningful. In a moment of honesty, Dunham’s Aura in her movie “Tiny Furniture” admits that she wants to be as successful as her mother. In “Girls,” Hannah is more open about her desire to be something – “a voice, of a generation,” as she eventually amends.

Dunham picked Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” for her recent week of programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she cast Stillman mainstay Chris Eigeman as the boss at her internship in “Girls.” In that movie, two recent college graduates who like each other less than Dunham’s girlfriends toil in publishing and cycle through sexual and romantic partners. As they embark on an apartment hunt, a male colleague sneers, “That’s comical, that girls like you really worry about paying the rent. Aren’t your fathers heavily subsidizing your living expenses with big allowances?” The character played by Kate Beckinsale replies indignantly, “They’re not big at all.”

There are other, more acute humiliations, but in the arc of the movie, they pass. Chloe Sevigny’s Alice gets slut-shamed by the first man she has sex with, and dates yet another arrogant jerk, until she doesn’t. By the end, disco is dead, but Alice has moved on, having gone with her instinct and landed a career coup. She finds a better guy, at least for now, to bust a move with on the subway. Meanwhile, in “Girls,” Hannah momentarily frees herself from anxiety in a dance – first solo in her bedroom, then with her roommate. Forged in the absence of responsibility for a nuclear family, friendships of particular vitality and import are a signal achievement of this stage of life – and a way to survive it.

In the end, for the women and men of Stillman and Dunham’s world, these elite woes are emotionally destabilizing but ultimately transient. That’s partly why the pity and dismay that’s been bestowed upon Dunham’s characters by some of her elders seems so misplaced. Even as she takes her characters – and her peers’ – pain seriously, she’s affectionately skewering them for our benefit, partly because she knows they’ll come out of it mostly fine. As the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum has pointed out on Twitter, in “Tiny Furniture,” Dunham’s character, Aura, finds her mother’s diary from her early 20s “and finds out that things weren’t different for her. Same struggles with sex, body and artistic ambition, same unformed identity. But now, that mother “RARELY thinks about those experiences. They’re valuable, they shaped her, but [they’re] just history now.”

These are bumps along the learning curve that have long been part of the male coming-of-age narrative – “sowing wild oats” and so on – that still prompt a sort of paternalistic panic when practiced by “girls.” Sure, not everyone will emerge as quickly and as brilliantly as Dunham, but for those temporarily freed from the most pressing burdens of life, left only to figure out what the hell they actually want from theirs, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel.