The vignette in writer, actress, and comedian Robin Thede’s hilarious series is a switchblade-sharp commentary on impossible beauty standards. But its punch line is also transferable to any one of the many irritating expectations that can thwart us.
As women, we’re often the recipients of instruction that was not asked for and policing that is not required. This is even more so for Black women, who have been subjected to a long history of systemic policing—of our bodies, our behaviors, and our beings. Profitable careers have been built doing exactly this.
To tell a woman how to live is big business. The self-help industry generates revenue that rivals professional sports. The phenomenon of the bad bitch was commercial enough to land Amber Rose a book deal writing a manual that would teach women how to become exactly that. In a statement, Rose defined bad bitch as a “self-respecting, strong female who has everything together. This consists of body, mind, finances, and swagger; a woman who gets hers by any means necessary.”
To be sold unsolicited advice and be gifted with unasked-for expectations is not just a Black woman thing. It’s a woman thing. But I can only speak to the particularity of my experience, which is tied inextricably not only to gender but also to race, education, and class.
The idea of the bad bitch is not new.
For many of us, the notion that we had to be firing on all cylinders, at all times, was baked into our upbringing, with parents in all corners of the diaspora instilling in their children the idea of having to be twice as good as their White peers in order to earn just as much. A self-fulfilling maxim born out of the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement that followed, it permeated not just the parenting style of generations but also our entertainment, social groups, and literature. It also birthed the bad bitch.
I can’t remember when or where I first heard the mantra; I don’t recall my parents ever uttering the words twice as good or just as much. But I remember the sentiment being all around me—at family gatherings, in Sunday Bible school, during playdates with friends, and in the episodes of The Cosby Show I watched as a kid—coloring my childhood with a particularly bright shade of strive.
Any child or grandchild of the civil rights generation understood the lesson: because of an uneven playing field, it would require exceptional effort to achieve what the average White person might view as ordinary. And the effort was mandatory. The message from my elders always seemed to be that our ancestors didn’t come this far for folks to lighten the grip on their bootstraps—even as time and world events made it increasingly plain to all of us that respectability doesn’t really matter. That no postgraduate degree, high-powered job, or rock-solid credit score can protect you from the indignity of being followed by a security guard in a shop or mistaken for being the nanny of your light-skinned baby in the park.
The “twice as good” idea played out for many of us in generational terms as well, the idea that we needed to accomplish twice as much as our forebears to keep up the momentum of progress. My parents, grandparents, aunt, and uncles didn’t have to spell out to my sister and me that we were expected to achieve more than the generations that came before us. It was obvious. And for whatever reason, I never questioned it. Maybe I never questioned it because this thinking was all I knew. The idea of excellence was tied to purpose, community growth, and uplift.
This feeling carried over into my university life, where I was surrounded by a small but robust network of students who lived Black excellence on various levels. I acquired girlfriends in bulk—a high-achieving mix of former valedictorians and class presidents, all unapologetically outspoken, all stylish, all swaggerific and beautiful. It was invigorating, if a little sickening. These were bad bitches in training. They watched Daughters of the Dust and could offer a critical analysis of the repertoire of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. They looked camera ready without makeup and had regular hair appointments, while I mostly did my own clumsy wash and wraps in my dorm room and struggled to find the right MAC concealer to match my skin tone. I was awkward in comparison and much more of a work in progress than they looked to my eyes. Nevertheless, I found their friendship exciting and energizing.
We formed a network that became a safe space as we went on to push into largely White work settings after college as young attorneys, medical trainees, writers, editors, doctors, and investment bankers, traversing all the pressures these environments come with as well as the expectations of our families and ourselves.
But the tone and tenor of the expectations I encountered changed as I progressed in the world of media and found myself swinging up the rungs in tandem with the internet boom, which provided exponentially more space for critique and discussion about everything. Alongside this, a new wave of feminism emerged in the 2010s together with the first-person essay economy, and the two combined to create an environment rife with opinionators, deep dives, and hot takes, all traveling at the speed of 4G and intensifying our ambitions.
And throughout, Black women were magic and slayed all day. On the tennis court. On the stage. On the big screen. And at the polls. And moves that would not make headlines had the executor been White (being elected to office in certain cities, for example) became the subjects of rounds of analysis and discourse.
Bad bitches were everywhere. As the Only. The First. The All-Too-Sporadic Moment in some incredibly long time. We reveled in being #CarefreeBlackGirls. And living our best #BlackGirlJoy. We got in formation and documented the glory of our visibility in beautifully arranged tableau, clothes coordinated in monochromatic dégradé, faces bright with accomplishment. All united under the wonder of #BlackGirlMagic. Our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
But gradually the idea that we are magic and the notion of slaying became talking points that applied only to women of a certain type: marketable, camera ready, and relatively affluent with quotable sound bites at the ready, sexy backstories, and a large following tuned in to their every move.
And the magic in the ordinary? It began to get left out, lost.
Around this time, I was overachieving with the best of them. Off the back of my graduate studies at Oxford University, which I had completed during the two-year stretch when I was pregnant and on mat leave, I joined the editorial staff at ELLE, eventually climbing the ranks to become deputy editor, the most senior role ever held by a Black woman at the British luxury fashion magazine. While there, I established a mentoring program to help fix the criminal scarcity of people of color working behind the scenes in the country’s £26 million clothing industry. While doing all of this, I juggled television appearances, talks, columns, and television and radio broadcasts. I said yes to the opportunities that intrigued me, no to the projects that didn’t. And throughout everything, I was a mother and a wife. Here is where I should add that, with the exception of my mentoring, this mix of work is not particular to race but instead was the very unique experience of working in media in the 2010s.
Nonetheless, my work was often ascribed to race.
“Black girl magic goals!” captions would sometimes read underneath my Instagrams broadcasting my latest article, project, or musing. I’d post a waving Black girl emoji in response to the rallying cry.
“I don’t know how you do it. Aren’t you tired?” colleagues and peers on the fashion circuit would ask.
The question would routinely annoy me. These were all things I liked—no, loved—doing. A happy wife makes a happy life, and all that. A fulfilled mom means happy kids, and so forth.