Heartless Bitches International

» see heartless-bitches.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first time I heard of Heartless Bitches International was this month, in a message from a reader who used to read it and still had a few of its lines saved. So what follows comes from the Wayback Machine and from what people wrote about it at the time. It shows a site that went up in early 1996, run out of Ottawa by a software specialist and single mother who signed herself NatalieP. A Canadian trademark filing from November 1996 gives her full name, Natalie Prowse.

The tagline was "Deal With It!" and the first description called it an in-your-face site for women who are strong-minded and assertive and "in Total Control". If somebody had called you a heartless bitch for saying no, or for saying what you actually thought, the site was on your side and it was going to be funny about it. It repeated often that this was not about hating men. Their line was that they did not discriminate against stupidity on the basis of gender.

The early pages were frames and GIFs, an icicle-letter wordmark and a small axe stuck in a heart. By December 1996 it had been a "Fan Club Site of the Day" and had a review in The Net magazine, which is a lot for a one-woman site less than a year old.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the reasons page ~

The part our reader remembers is the part that made the site. A page called Real Life Heartless Bitches printed members' own one-line reasons for why they got the label, and every week one of them was picked as the Heartless Bitch of the Week. Among the lines the reader kept is a woman who loved swinging an axe with her own hands "and feeling as if I could kick the world's ass", and another who was sick of men telling her what she should be.

Around that the site grew rants and a manifesto, a Bitchitorial column, an advice column signed Auntie Dote, a file on manipulators and a long running section making fun of self-described nice guys. The members forum, the BitchBoard, let you in only after a written application.

~ the loud years ~

Yahoo Internet Life wrote it up in April 1997 and the Sydney Morning Herald a month later. The big wave was 2001, when Natalie did radio interviews across the US and Canada and the Canadian papers ran pieces in March and April. SFGate called it "an editorial firing range". In 2002 it was nominated for a Webby, and a single Fark link that July sent more than 30,000 visitors in one day. Wikipedia puts the membership around 6,500 in those years.

Our reader's opinion is that it was funniest at the start and got more serious as it went. The menu backs that up, by the 2000s it was more columns and advice than one-liners.

~ how it went quiet ~

New columns thin out after 2013. Sometime in the second half of 2015 a line appeared on the front page saying HBI was on hiatus and the old articles were still there to read, sitting above a footer that still said copyright 2004. It stayed like that for seven years, which is a kinder ending than most sites get.

The archive has a normal copy from 3 August 2022. The next one, on 3 October, is a parked page titled "domain for sale", and it was still for sale when the crawler came by this September. There was no goodbye post. The reader says it was simply gone one day, and the archive agrees.

credit to darkocean, who read it back then and sent us the lines they saved. thank you.

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