For some people, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck, cunt, and shit, bitch has at times been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a taboo word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch has been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was sometimes considered to be defamatory; it implied promiscuity and so it was a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies. Some radio stations and television networks have even been fined for using it, the equivalent of having to pay money to a swear jar. Others have found creative ways to get around the censors. Bitch is switched with “witch” or euphemized as “the b-word,” somewhat comparing it to “the n-word.” It might be substituted with polite alternatives like bench or biscuit. But no matter how cleverly or cutely the word is camouflaged, people always know what is really meant.

Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the use of the word, bitch has undergone a dramatic unbleeping over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. It appears boldly in books, movies, and television, both subscription and network. It’s sung in songs, especially in rap and hip hop music, where its use has a long and unexpected tradition. And it’s omnipresent online. After centuries of censorship and lurking, bitch has emerged as an everyday word. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous nowadays that some say they’re numb to it. But that doesn’t mean that bitch doesn’t pack a punch anymore. Even today it’s often censored. And it’s still seen as derogatory, pejorative, and offensive, even if the dictionaries don’t always label it as such. Let’s take a look at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

B—

One Sunday morning in Clerkenwell, London, during the spring of 1590, Joanna Gage paused her housework to eavesdrop on a noisy dispute between two neighbors. She went out into the yard, where she saw Edith Parsons leaning out of her cellar window to yell at Sicilia Thornton: “Thou art an whore, an arrant whore, a bitche. Yea, worse than a bitche. Thou goest sawghting up and downe the towne after knaves and art such a whott tayled whore that neither one nor two nor ten nor twenty knaves will scarce serve thee!”¹ This tirade was the Renaissance equivalent of calling a woman a slut. A few months later, three women who had witnessed the incident, including Joanna Gage, repeated these words to the Consistory Court in London, because Sicilia had sued Edith for “uttering the lewdest of slanders” and defaming her good name. The court found in Edith’s favor, effectively deciding that Sicilia was indeed a bitch and a whore, although no penalty against her was recorded. This was a church court that dealt with hundreds of similar slander suits every year. It was known colloquially as the Bawdy Courts. As we’ve seen, society at this time was concerned with reputation and honor, so slurs like bitch and whore were smears against a woman’s sexual and moral character. Men might sue for defamation too, rather than engage in a duel to the death. The insults that men reported, however, centered around words like “cuckold” and “whoremaster,” which concerned not their own sexual behavior but that of the women over whom they were supposed to be in control. Men also reported non-specific invectives like “blackguard” and “knave,” or accusations of fornication, rather than the sexual insults leveled at women. There is, after all, no way to truly call a man the female equivalent of a whore or a bitch.

These examples of the word appeared in court records of testimony, which were faithfully recorded verbatim. Although around this time bitch was probably said more often than it was written, so early books aren’t a reflection of the true use and popularity of the word. As we know, Francis Grose, the collector of bawdy words, declared in the eighteenth century that bitch was “the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore.” In his own personal copy of the first edition of the book, Grose made thousands of handwritten annotations, and next to “bitch” he noted that it was a synonym of “carrion,” a word for a corpse or the decaying flesh of dead animals. He wrote, “… instead of the appellation of ‘bitch’ the blackguards sometimes say, ‘your arse is a carrion gallows, because ’tis hung round with Dog’s meat.’’”² This goes to show just how offensive bitch was, and that these kinds of crude words were favored by “low class” types. While Grose dared to spell out the word in full, many others didn’t. Bitch was often censored in early books. In the 1759 farce Low Life above Stairs, Lord Lawless has a torrid fling with the Duchess of Lovesport, from whom he contracted syphilis, or the pox. When asked how his new relationship was faring he replied, “Damn the B-t-ch to Hell and the Devil, she has poxed me.”³ While it was acceptable to publish blasphemous words like damn, hell, and devil, bitch was considered to be too offensive to spell out in full, even in a comedy full of buffoonery and horseplay. This view of bitch as an obscene and indecent word that must be censored or even expurgated lasted for hundreds of years and well into modern times.

Bitch was censored in newspapers too, although the mainstream press tended to be the most squeamish of all media. An article in an 1851 issue of the Hampshire Chronicle describes an altercation but only hints at the word, “He heard the voice of a man calling out, ‘Lay hold of the old b—, ’ directly after which he heard two women screaming.”⁴ Even during the days of the gutter press and yellow journalism, newspapers shielded readers from bitch with dashes, dots, and asterisks; they replaced it with rhymes like hitch and witch, or they substituted the word with “blank” and “expletive.” When Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times in 1896 he declared that his family newspaper would not “soil the breakfast cloth” with indecency and salaciousness.⁵ This saying soon morphed into the paper’s famous slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The insulting sense of bitch wasn’t fit to print at the time. On the other hand, the literal sense of bitch was acceptable. A 1907 advertisement in the classifieds of Dogdom magazine tells the sad story of someone who had to rehome their beloved pet: “For sale – Boston bitch, good all over, fine pet, street and house broken. Reason for selling – can’t keep her.”⁶ In 1944, the New York Daily News paved the way for the unbleeping of bitch when publisher Joseph Medill Patterson instructed his two managing editors by memo: “Please print the following words in full: Bastard, Son of a Bitch (no hyphens), God damn or Damn.”

Nowadays, publishers have fewer inhibitions and bitch is usually printed without a second thought, but only thanks to the efforts of early authors who blazed the trail. When publisher Charles Scribner acquired the rights to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, its publication was nearly halted due to its use of the word. The character Lady Brett Ashley is strong and independent and often accused of being a bitch. She even calls herself a bitch. Offended by this vulgar language, Scribner announced that he’d no sooner allow profanity in one of his books than he would invite friends to use his parlor as a toilet room. Hemingway replied that he “never used a word without first considering whether or not it was replaceable.”⁷ Hemingway’s editor, Max Perkins, warned him that the book might be suppressed if the word was kept in it, but he also supported his author by threatening to resign if Scribner declined to publish the book. In the end, “bitch” remained in the novel, but it was indeed banned in several cities, which just added to its notoriety. Even still, some critics believe it’s Hemingway’s most important work. His mother Grace, however, did not agree. The book’s coarseness and vulgarity had embarrassed her at a ladies’ book group meeting. She pronounced it “one of the filthiest books of the year.” She added, “Surely you have other words in your vocabulary than ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’—Every page fills me with a sick loathing. If I should pick up a book by any other writer with such words in it, I should read no more—but pitch it in the fire.”⁸ That he’d ticked off his mother only confirmed to Hemingway that he’d made the right choice to keep the word in the book.

Bitch noun

1. a woman

Even in modern times, bitch is occasionally censored in newspapers and magazines as b---h or “the b-word,” if it’s not removed entirely. Newspaper editors are often inclined to publish an offensive word verbatim in order to faithfully quote a song, movie, or book, but they don’t always choose to do so. In 2005, the New York Times omitted the title Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport in a review of the book; as a result, the editors were criticized for their “astonishing squeamishness and misplaced political correctness.”⁹ Ironically, an op-ed about the book’s notoriety appeared in that same issue, written by the author Jennifer Shahade, and commissioned by the newspaper. But neither piece mentioned the word at all. One of the paper’s top editors admitted later that it was “an act of overly zealous concern for readers’ sensitivities,” but they didn’t set the record straight. The process of censorship is often inconsistent and confusing. The diet book Skinny Bitch emerged around the same time and was reviewed in the Times with the word intact. The newspaper has an even longer history of printing the word in its pages, because it reviewed Super Bitch in 1975, a movie about a drug dealer who gets men to do her dirty work before having them killed. But then, at other times, editors choose to censor the word arbitrarily.

Some individuals and groups have gone on crusades to censor bitch from public conversations. In 2007, the New York City Council passed a symbolic ban on the word “nigger.” In that same year, Brooklyn councillor Darlene Mealy tried to introduce a citywide ban of the “hateful and deeply sexist” bitch too, which was referred to as “the b-word” in the legislation. Citing its use in rap music, she said the word created “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women, describing it as “a vile attack on our womanhood.”¹⁰ Mealy acknowledged that the measure was unenforceable, but she argued that it would carry symbolic power against the pejorative uses of the word. Only eighteen of her fifty-one fellow-councillors voted with her, however, and so the measure failed. Had it passed, it would have likely failed in practice; such bans almost never work and only serve to heighten a word’s power. That same year, civil rights activist Al Sharpton tried to ban “bitch,” “ho,” and “nigga” in the music industry as part of his “Decency Initiative.” He was unsuccessful too. Then in 2014, Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, announced that she was starting a campaign to ban the b-word. But it turned out the word she had in mind was bossy, a PG version of bitch. The Ban Bossy campaign was criticized heavily, and it was pointed out that telling people what words they can or can’t use is inherently bossy.

As recently as 2019, Massachusetts legislators proposed a bill that would criminalize certain uses of the word, stating, “a person who uses the word ‘bitch’ directed at another person to accost, annoy, degrade or demean the other person shall be considered to be a disorderly person.”¹¹ The bill would’ve made these acts punishable by a fine of up to $200, or up to six months in jail. It turned out that the bill was filed by a constituent, not a senator. At any rate, many deemed the idea to be unconstitutional and the bill wasn’t passed into law. Some activists are more concerned with raising awareness of how and why certain words can be offensive rather than trying to ban them. As part of the “You Don’t Say” campaign, students from Duke University in North Carolina started a public discussion about the offensiveness of hypermasculine words and phrases like pussy, that’s so gay, man up, and also bitch, because they imply that femininity is inherently negative.

Apps have been devised to “clean up” language that’s judged to be offensive. Most software contains default profanity filters for naughty words, while autocorrect famously “corrects” “fuck” to “duck.” One e-book reader app set out to enable readers to, in its own words, “read books, not profanity.” Clean Reader applies a filter that censors bad language and replaces it with less risqué alternatives. Bitch becomes “witch,” whore becomes “hussy,” Jesus Christ is “geez,” and blowjob is swapped with the euphemistic “pleasure.”¹² Swear words like fucking and fucker become “freaking” and “idiot,” hell becomes “heck,” and shit is changed to “crap.” It isn’t only profanities that are scrubbed from books, but also body parts. Penis becomes “groin,” vagina is swapped for “bottom,” and breast changed to “chest.” The program comes with three settings: clean, cleaner, and squeaky clean, which would “block the most profanity from a book including some hurtful racial terms.” A number of authors, publishers, and distributors came out in protest of this censorship and lack of authorial consent, including novelist Chuck Wendig, who posted to Twitter, “Personally I think CleanReader is a bunch of hot jeepers mcgee and a bucket of monkey flopping cupcake batter oh gosh they got to Twitter.” In response to the backlash, the company removed all book titles from its online catalog.

The Internet has always had something of the Wild West about it, including its lawless language. Bold behind a keyboard or hiding behind a handle, many people feel free to swear and insult others on social media in a way they wouldn’t dare to do face-to-face. The Internet is a place of freedom of speech, but also a place of unbridled bullying, harassment, and abuse. One study found that bitch is the fourth most popular curse word on Twitter, after fuck, shit, and ass.¹³ In general, bitch is a high-frequency word online. A Google search for “bitch” brings up almost one billion hits. The Internet is also the least policed of all media. But even without any censorship imposed on people, some choose to self-censor the word anyway; spelling bitch as b*tch, substituting it with a rhyming word like “rich,” euphemizing it as “the b-word” or avoiding it altogether. Some try to censor other people’s use of the word. In 2019, then US President Donald Trump complained on social media that he wasn’t getting enough credit for a criminal reform bill that had passed through Congress and been signed into law. He referenced “boring musician @johnlegend and his filthy mouthed wife [who] are talking now about how great it is – but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed.”¹⁴ This obviously referred to television personality Chrissy Teigen, who responded by calling Trump a “pussy ass bitch.” This implied that Trump was talking big, but his bark was bigger than his bite. The White House immediately contacted the platform to demand the tweet be removed. However, they don’t screen content or remove potentially offensive language, so the remark was not taken down.

Some people have even attempted to remove “bitch” entirely from the dictionary, while others have, more realistically, petitioned to have the definitions updated. In 2019, more than 34,000 people signed a petition calling on Oxford University Press to change their dictionary definition of “woman,” which included “bitch” as a synonym. In several other dictionaries, “bitch” is also defined as “a woman.” In certain slang, bitch is invoked to refer to women, but of course, this use has additional, and usually negative, connotations – “bitch” is definitely not a direct synonym of “woman.” The petition noted other offensive words that were listed as synonyms of woman, including “bird, biddy, bint, mare, and wench.”¹⁵ The document also cited example sentences of the word listed in the dictionary that portray women as sex objects or subordinate, including such gems as: “Ms. September will embody the professional, intelligent yet sexy career woman” and “I told you to be home when I get home, little woman.” Oxford University Press responded that excluding derogatory terms in the dictionary would be “akin to censorship.”¹⁶ They argued that dictionary makers have a responsibility to accurately describe how language is used and that includes sexist terms. Despite the dictionary’s defensiveness, the petition prompted an extensive review of its entry for “woman.” The OED finally conceded that it’s important for sexist words to be contextualized, “So if a word is derogatory or highly offensive we should say it.”¹⁷

And yet, despite centuries of censorship and suppression of the word, bitch was not marked as offensive in dictionaries until recently. Hundreds of years ago, Samuel Johnson qualified “bitch” as only “a word of slight contempt” (to him anyway). A few decades later, Francis Grose described it as “the most offensive” name for a woman, but in modern-day English marking the word as offensive is only a recent phenomenon. In an episode of the History of Swear Words, host Nicholas Cage reads from the dictionary, “Bitch: a female dog.” Shaking his head he adds, “No mention of how 99.99 percent of the people use the word. I mean, what year is this from, 1885? No! It’s from 2015. That’s right. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary didn’t label the word ‘bitch’ offensive until the same year it added the word ‘twerk!’”¹⁸ When Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper was charged with the task of updating the definition of “bitch” in the 1990s, she noticed the entry didn’t have any warning labels to explain that some meanings of the word are offensive.¹⁹ She delved into the dictionary’s archives and discovered it wasn’t until the 1960s that bitch was flagged as an abusive term, when the editor was a woman. But her recommendations were completely ignored by another editor – a man – who didn’t have the same real-world experience with the word that the woman editor did. And that’s how bitch stayed for the rest of the twentieth century. Stamper’s efforts eventually resulted in the entry being updated to reflect the insulting uses of the word, while the aforementioned petition was instrumental in the Oxford English Dictionary finally following suit years later. Similar campaigns have been launched in other countries and languages. One such effort in Europe led Italian dictionary Treccani to scrap the use of puttana (“whore”), cagna (“bitch”), and other words for sex workers to define donna (“woman”).²⁰

Nowadays, most dictionaries acknowledge that many senses of “bitch” are insulting and sexist, while the word is finally labeled as “offensive,” “vulgar,” “coarse,” or “derogatory.”

Super Bitch

The inaugural use of bitch in cinema coincides with its first use in modern literature, although initially its rise wasn’t as stratospheric. The 1930 film Hell’s Angels starring Jean Harlow has the distinction of being the first movie in which someone utters the words “son of a bitch,” along with other profanities like hell, ass, bloody, goddamn, for Christ’s sake, and shut up. Language like this had never before been heard in movies, but that’s because this period marked the gradual transition from silent films to talkies. The movie’s producer, eccentric entrepreneur Howard Hughes, was able to avoid censorship because there weren’t any censors at the time. During the Roaring 20s, the movie industry was notoriously lawless, so in response, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America was founded. The goal of the organization was to “clean up” the image of the movie industry, especially in the wake of a scandal surrounding actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe. The Motion Picture Production Code was introduced in the early 1930s. Informally known as the Hays Code, named after Chairman (and Presbyterian deacon) Will H. Hays, this was a set of moral guidelines that major film studios were forced to follow if they wanted their films to play in American theaters. The code stated that, “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it.”²¹ The rules included prohibitions on profanity, nudity, the superfluous use of liquor, the use of illegal drugs, the mocking of religion, lustful kissing, scenes of passion, and even interracial romance. Hughes, who was known for stretching the boundaries on sex and violence, would go on to challenge the supremacy of studio moguls and the industry’s restrictive moral codes. But most producers and directors toed the line to avoid their movies being banned. The Hays Code ushered in the era of a more “wholesome” and “innocent” Hollywood.

The Hays Code was in place until the late 1960s, when American culture was shocked out of its innocence with the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the general civil unrest at the time. The authority of the Code waned over the years too, and many films began to openly flout the rules. The 1959 courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder was one such movie. This was the story of a lawyer who took on a difficult case, defending a young army lieutenant accused of murdering a local tavern owner who he believed had raped his wife. The movie was groundbreaking for its frank discussion of sex, which included the use of shocking words like panties, penetration, rape, sperm, and bitch. It starred James Stewart, whose father called him at four in the morning to let him know that he was upset by customers coming into his hardware store to disapprove of his movie-star son appearing in a “dirty picture” that was full of profane language. Stewart said, “He took an ad out in the local paper saying: ‘My son, Jim, has just made a nasty picture and I advise no-one to go see it.’ Well, of course, the film did much more business than it would have done otherwise.”²² Some time later, Stewart’s father called him again at four in the morning. He admitted he’d sneaked into a drive-in screening of the film to see it for himself, but he didn’t think it was dirty after all.

Anatomy of a Murder was the gateway for bitch to become a mainstream word in Hollywood movies. Although just like in the Westerns, son of a bitch was often preferred over bitch, because it was a softened version. In 1966, Elizabeth Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a movie that stands at the crossroads of old and new Hollywood. The boisterous Martha is intoxicated throughout most of the movie, and as a mean drunk she utters the insults “bastard” and “son of a bitch.” But within a few years, bitch was so acceptable in cinema that it even appeared in the title of the 1973 film Super Bitch that we’ve already mentioned. Fast-forward to today, and dozens of movies include “bitch” in their titles, while many thousands more feature the word in their scripts. That is, unless the movie is G-rated. In 1968, the Hays Code evolved into the Motion Picture Association (MPA) film rating system. The scheme is voluntary, although most cinemas refuse to exhibit non-rated films. The MPA system is used to help parents decide what films are appropriate for their children, although some kids’ films do allow a little salty language. G-rated (General Audience) films don’t permit strong language. Mild language is permitted at the PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) level, but bitch only when it means a female dog. PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned) allows a little more, including violence, partial nudity, and language like bitch, dick, ass, cock, and even the occasional f-bomb. In the PG-13 film The Monster Squad, the villain Count Dracula is in search of a powerful amulet so he can take over the world. In one iconic scene, he lifts up little five-year-old Phoebe by her throat, bears his fangs, and snarls, “Give me the amulet, you bitch!”

Words You Can Sometimes Say on Television

In 1972, George Carlin took to the stage in Santa Monica, California, to debut his now legendary monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” for his album Class Clown. These “Seven Dirty Words” were: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. “Those are the heavy seven,” said Carlin. “Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.”²³ This was Carlin’s attempt at exposing the absurdity of outlawing words, but the comedian knew he was treading in dangerous territory that could put his career in jeopardy. He’d been hanging out with Lenny Bruce a decade earlier when his mentor was arrested on obscenity charges for saying, “fuck” and “tits” during a show in Chicago. Bruce was blacklisted from performing in US clubs because of his profanity-laced shows. He’d previously performed a ribald routine of the “nine dirty words,” a list that included ass and balls too, which had inspired Carlin’s stand-up routine. Sure enough, Carlin met the same fate as Bruce a few months later when he was arrested for disturbing the peace while performing his “Dirty Words” show in Milwaukee. The charges were thrown out, luckily for Carlin, but the bigger battle was just beginning. When the show was replayed on radio during the afternoon, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determined that it was “indecent.” The FCC prohibits profane content on broadcast radio and television between the hours of 6am and 10pm. The Carlin case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the FCC’s right to restrict adult language on television and in radio broadcasts, just in case children were listening. Carlin’s routine, however, raised questions about censorship that remain unresolved today. The “Dirty Words” are, for the most part, still dirty.

When Carlin created his list, bitch didn’t make the cut. Depending on its context, he reasoned, the literal meaning of bitch as a female dog was safely allowed on television and radio, along with cock, as in rooster, and ass, as in donkey. Bitch, ass, and cock might be acceptable on air if referring to animal husbandry. Lenny Bruce’s “balls” were okay too, because sports announcers said this innocent word all the time. Prick could even be appropriate, but only in the right context. As he noted, “you can prick your finger, but you can’t finger your prick.”²⁴ Carlin called these “part-time” dirty words, because they were acceptable when literal, but still considered to be taboo when used in a figurative way. But the comedian wasn’t reporting actual network policy as some might believe; the FCC had vague standards for indecency and obscenity. Profane speech was defined loosely as material that “depicts or describes sexual or excretory organs or activities” in terms that are so “grossly offensive” that it becomes a “nuisance.”²⁵

Television was strict in those days. In the 1960s, talk show host Jack Paar stormed off the stage when censors wouldn’t allow him to tell a joke in which a toilet was called a “WC,” short for water closet. Lucille Ball was pregnant during an entire season of I Love Lucy, although the word “pregnant” wasn’t allowed on air because it was considered too suggestive. The writers settled for “expecting” instead. And as late as 2006, the doctors on Grey’s Anatomy were not allowed to say “vagina” during a childbirth scene, so they opted for “vajayjay” instead. (This catapulted the word into mainstream speech, along with Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic embrace of the euphemism.) As for the “Seven Dirty Words,” Carlin seems to have chosen them more for comedy rhythm than fact. The full list of forbidden words didn’t include just seven of them; it also included asshole, goddamn, bastard, bitch, and many others.

The first uncensored use of “bitch” on American prime-time television is often claimed to be its appearance in a 1979 episode of M*A*S*H. In “Guerilla My Dreams,” Lieutenant Park, a South Korean intelligence officer, wanted to interrogate a North Korean patient. The young woman was accused of being a spy. The commander was known for his brutal interrogation tactics, and it was assumed that he would torture the woman into a confession, before killing her. As it was put, “To take your mind off the pain, he kills you.”²⁶ Knowing this grim reality, surgeon Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce tries, but fails, to save her life by getting her transferred as a US prisoner of war. As the officer hauls away the hapless woman, Hawkeye angrily calls him a “son of a bitch.” The show’s producers had to receive a special dispensation from the FCC to be allowed to use the profanity, which was justified as necessary to emphasize the gravity of the scene. The shocking decision received a high level of media coverage ahead of time, and so when the show aired, millions of people tuned in to hear Alan Alda utter the scandalous words.

But this well-publicized use of the phrase eclipsed an earlier one. Contrary to popular belief, the first use of “bitch” on network television appears to be an episode of the sitcom Maude that aired five years earlier in 1974. In “Walter’s Heart Attack,” Maude’s husband Walter suffers a mild heart attack while trying to save his accountant from taking her own life because her husband was leaving her. At the hospital, Walter tries to hide from his wife the fact that he’d visited the young woman’s apartment. When he recovers, and the threat of infidelity has subsided, Maude cries, “Oh Walter, I’m the happiest woman in the world!” She hugs him, but then mutters through clenched teeth, “You son of a bitch!”²⁷ When the Head of Program Practices at CBS first read the script he insisted, “You’re kidding about that last line. You can’t use that language!” The show’s scriptwriter Norman Lear replied, “If you can come up with a line for Maude that’s every bit as good as saying ‘son of a bitch,’ every bit as right, I’ll do it.”²⁸ In the end, the episode was filmed with the offending line intact. Amazingly, the show went to air without any fanfare, unlike the media circus that preceded the episode of M*A*S*H. The use of the phrase caused some shock among viewers, but it largely went unnoticed, even by the FCC.

Broadcast channels broke FCC rules often, either accidentally or by deliberately pushing the boundaries. In some cases, rule breakers faced fines for using profanity. In others, the FCC decided arbitrarily that the rules didn’t apply or they simply didn’t bother to enforce their own penalties. In 2003, when U2’s Bono accepted the Golden Globe award for best original song, he exclaimed, “This is really, really fucking brilliant!” The FCC reviewed the incident and determined that Bono had used fuck as “an expletive to emphasize an exclamation” rather than using it to describe “sexual organs or activities.”²⁹ So they decided that he didn’t violate their regulations. Bono’s use of this “fleeting expletive” set a precedent for other celebrities, like Cher and Nicole Richie, to cheekily use the word in the same way during live television performances. These incidents occurred around the same time as Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during her live performance at the Super Bowl, in which her right breast was bared, but adorned with a nipple shield. (This became such a controversy that it’s sometimes referred to tongue-in-cheek as Nipplegate.) Bowing to ever-increasing moral pressure, the FCC immediately cracked down on obscenity. It also changed its mind and ruled against Bono, but declined to fine him.

When Bono cussed, NBC was broadcasting the awards live around the world. The network’s engineers had failed to hit the censor button during his speech, so the expletive went uncensored. Broadcast delays have their roots in 1950s radio, when the method was used, not for censorship, but to increase sound clarity and depth.³⁰ But the delay became a standard both in live radio and television to keep the public “safe” from indecent exposure. Often called the seven-second delay or profanity delay, this allowed a few seconds for editors, directors, or engineers to catch anything they deemed to be indecent content before it hit the airwaves. This delay gave them time to replace the offending language with a 1000 Hz tone, known as a “bleep,” because this onomatopoeic word echoes the actual sound. Unsure about the confusing nuances of FCC regulations, broadcast networks tried to skirt the rules by writing profanity into scenes and then obscuring it with taxi horns or other background noise. The bleep has become so embedded in popular culture that some shows employ it for comic effect. In a famous cinematic example, at the climax of the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tuco the bandit shouts at Blondie the outlaw, “You know what you are? Just a dirty son of a —. ” Bitch overlaps with the trademark coyote howl that transitions into the movie’s iconic theme song.

Yo, Bitch!

Well into the early 2000s, bitch was still causing waves on network television, but mostly among audiences. The word appeared frequently on Friends over the years, which earned the show many angry viewer complaints to the FCC. In one episode aired in the show’s final months, Ross takes a photo of his baby daughter in the park when a bigger child on the swings slams him to the ground. “Son of a bitch!” he moans, much to the wide-eyed amazement of nearby youngsters. “Oh relax,” he snaps at them. “I didn’t say the f-word.” Criticisms of this particular episode also included other characters’ use of the words crap, hell, pissed, and bastard. One viewer even objected to Ross merely alluding to “fuck” by saying “the f-word.”³¹ The reviewers of the complaints, however, decided that the words weren’t sufficiently graphic or explicit in context to be grossly offensive and therefore were not considered to be indecent.

When bitch was still taboo on network television, it was already acceptable on pay TV. Subscription-based media providers haven’t faced regulatory scrutiny in the past because they were not licensed by the FCC, and therefore received strict First Amendment protection. Many shows took advantage of this freedom to do and say as they pleased, like the AMC network’s Breaking Bad. The methamphetamine-cooking Jesse Pinkman is celebrated for his relentless use of “bitch.” His signature phrases were “Yeah, Bitch!” and “Yo, bitch!” which became fandom favorites and made the word synonymous with the show itself. Observant fans have calculated that the anti-hero utters the word fifty-four times during the show’s run. Today, bitch is so commonplace that networks have even greenlighted the word in the title of television shows, like the supernatural teen sitcom Boo, Bitch. In a news story related to subscription television, one customer reported to the media that she’d complained about her cable service, only to receive her next bill addressed to “Super Bitch.”³² Other customers have reported similar account name changes to insults such as “dummy,” “asshole,” and “whore.”

In recent decades, television taboos have been tumbling left and right, and bitch was among the words that were finally unbleeped. Nowadays bitch is ubiquitous on network television. Some shows go out of their way to say the word as frequently as they can. How I Met Your Mother became feted for its use of “bitch.” The sitcom ran for nine seasons and 208 episodes, during which “bitch” was uttered a total of 121 times.³³ But even recently, the use of bitch has been bowdlerized. The word was censored in the title of the comedy drama GCB, based on the novel “Good Christian Bitches,” and also the sitcom Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. (In the French version of the show, Garce (“Bitch”) isn’t censored, while the German adaptation is just called Apartment 23.) Sometimes the word is removed altogether. Black Bitch was the working title of a political drama about systemic injustice toward Indigenous Australians. The producers said they were trying to reclaim the racial slur, but its use caused a media storm among members of the Indigenous community. Amid the backlash the show was renamed Total Control. In comedy, bitch can carry a certain grrl power, but in drama, the word still retains its sting.

The different rules and regulations for movies versus television have often clashed. With the stereotype in mind of the family gathered around the TV set, television has often been more concerned with propriety than cinema. In the edited-for-television cut of Jaws, Martin Brody growls at the shark, “Smile, you son of a —” before he fires a gun. “Bitch” is muffled by the gunshot and explosion. When Smokey and the Bandit was shown in cinemas in the 1970s, Buford T. Justice’s catchphrase was “sumbitch,” usually uttered in reference to Bo “Bandit” Darville. But when it first aired on television a few years later, sumbitch was overdubbed with “scum bum.” The nonsensical phrase achieved a cult level of popularity with kids and teenagers, so the scale-model car company Hot Wheels released a replica of the 1970s Firebird Trans Am with “scum bum” emblazoned on its tail.³⁴ Sometimes the replacement choices for taboo words were ridiculous. In the edited-for-television version of Back to the Future, “damn,” “hell,” and “bastard” were acceptable, but “bitch” and “ass” were redubbed when Biff the bully grabs Marty McFly and says, “You caused 300 bucks worth of damage to my car, you son of a butthead, and I’m gonna take it out of your hide.” But the censors weren’t fooling anyone; any kid who’d ever heard the words before knew what was really being said, and besides, viewers could often lip-read the badly dubbed rude words.

Fans often railed against these edits because they changed the meaning of the dialogue and the intensity of the scene. In the iconic climax to Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley tries to protect the little girl Newt from the alien queen when she screams, “Get away from her, you bitch!” In the original cut-for-television version, bitch is replaced with “butcher.” TV censorship had altered one of the most memorable lines in film history. “Get away from her, you bitch!” underlined not only that specific moment, but every moment like that in real life where a mother will do anything to save her child. “Butcher” just wouldn’t cut it …. This kind of censorship annoyed not only the fans but also the artists themselves. Artists often had to compromise their art in exchange for exposure on television. In 2005, the theme song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from Hustle & Flow won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. There was a live performance of the song at the Oscars, but given its salacious theme, the lyrics posed a problem for the censors. During the live rendition, “witches” replaced “bitches” and other words like “hoes,” “shit,” and “fuck” were cleaned up as well.

Although bitch is considered tame by today’s standards, sometimes it’s still abridged, bleeped out, muted, and substituted with popular euphemisms like beech and biotch, or even more creative ones. Censoring bitch is sometimes done, not because it must be, but because it’s funny. In The Big Bang Theory, for example, Sheldon was well known for his favorite curse “Son of a biscuit!” In one episode, Leonard refers to “bitches” and Sheldon rebukes him with “I call the B word!” The euphemism in this scene ends up getting more studio audience laughs than the naughty word. In many shows, the scriptwriters let the viewers’ dirty minds do the work for them. The sitcom Son of the Beach was a spoof of Baywatch, with much of its humor based on double entendres and innuendo like this. Similarly, The Good Place was a comedy about a virtuous afterlife where bitch was replaced by “birch” and “bench,” ass became “ash,” fuck was “fork,” and shit became “shirt.” On the other hand, cursing was allowed, and even encouraged, in the hellish “Bad Place.” This gimmick is also used in marketing. In an advertisement for the Hyundai Santa Fe, instead of bleeping out the offending word, “bitch” is swapped with the innocent “blueberry.” With so much public exposure to “bitch” and other “dirty words” nowadays, sometimes a euphemism can have more shock value and impact than a swear word among jaded audiences, because it catches people off guard.

Bitch was banned from television for decades, but by 2009, the New York Times reported that the use of bitch on prime-time TV had tripled between the years 1998 and 2008.³⁵ Some think that the increase in swearing on television reflects a general increase in swearing in society, and also reflects a moral decline. But as we’ve seen, swearing has always been around, although it has often been censored to avoid offending some people. Others speculate that television is just catching up with the actual use of swearing in society. If nothing else, the increase in profanity on television definitely shows that there is an increase in public displays of profanity, and an increase in the acceptability of swearing. Nowadays, instead of avoiding “dirty words,” television writers pepper their scripts with them in the hope of attracting a wider audience. Profanity may still be offensive; it might drive away some viewers, but it also attracts viewers. Swearing, like sex, sells.

The Bitch Is Back

Well before there was Meredith Brooks and her 1990s anthem “Bitch” (the title of which was often censored as “Nothing in Between”), the word had already appeared in many songs in the past. In terms of music, bitch has its roots in jazz and the dirty blues, a sub-genre of blues that dealt with taboo topics like sex and drugs, couched in blunt and sexually explicit lyrics. And while “Bitch” seemed groundbreaking for its time, it’s rather tame compared to the scandalous songs of the past. Jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton composed some raunchy dirty blues tunes that he used to play in the Storyville saloons and brothels of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. (His nickname “jelly roll” was slang for female genitalia, a reference to a jam-filled, rolled up sponge cake.) Morton’s epic blues tale “The Murder Ballad” is about a lover killing her rival, and “bitch” amps up the intensity of the story. The woman threatens that if the mistress won’t leave her man alone, “Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking throat and drink your blood like wine.”³⁶ The mistress fires back, “I’d like to see a bitch like you stop me. This ain’t no slavery time and I’m sure that I’m free.” In a fit of jealousy, the heroine declares, “Bitch, your day has come. You fucked my man, but you will never fuck another one.” She pulls out a pistol and orders the woman to, “Open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between your thighs.” And she does. Charged with murder, she is sent to prison for fifty years. Completely unaffected by her plight, her man just moves on with his life, taking yet another lover. She ends up regretting her violent actions, warning other women to appreciate their independence and not follow her path of destruction.

In 1938, the folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Morton performing this half-hour extended blues song for the Library of Congress and gave it a title, because it didn’t have one. Morton was initially reluctant to sing the explicit lyrics, but aided by Lomax’s gentle encouragement and a bottle of whiskey, he played the tragic, hard-bitten song uncensored. He also played a bawdy version of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.” In this rendition, a pimp is having an afternoon tryst with a working man’s wife. Morton sings, “Come here, you sweet bitch. Gimme that pussy. Let me get in your drawers. I’m going to make you think you fucking with Santa Claus.” These history-making recordings reveal and preserve a now-vanished world of barrelhouse bards. Because of their profane language, the songs weren’t released, and neither were the lyrics printed, until 2005.

The word “bitch” was less exploited in country and folk music because it was deemed to be offensive, but it was still used by some stars to shore up their outlaw cred. Woody Guthrie is famous for the populist “This Land Is Your Land,” but in the 1940s he penned the hard-edged “Dopefiend Robber” about a World War II veteran who becomes addicted to morphine after recovering from a combat-related injury. The man’s addiction escalates into robbery and murder. Guthrie sings: “One seventeen-year-old bitch tells me, ‘Now you’ve knocked me up. You’ll have to fork me a thousand to pay my knocker doc.’ Here take this gun and come with me tonight. I’ll teach ya how to rob and you can payoff your doc.” In the song, “bitch” shows that the hero is a tough and rough rebel who doesn’t care for rules or decorum. But the bad boy image didn’t suit Guthrie, so he returned to his traditional ballads and children’s songs, and Dopefiend Robber remained unreleased. Bob Dylan rewrote the lyrics in the 1960s, sans swearing.

Johnny Cash, who was a true bad boy known for his antics on and off-stage, sings the word in “A Boy Named Sue,” based on the Shel Silverstein poem. The song chronicles a young man’s quest for revenge on his father who abandoned him at the tender age of three, leaving him with a guitar and the name “Sue,” as an act of tough love. One day, Sue confronts his father in a saloon. The two draw guns and then the old man finally recognizes his estranged son.

Cash replaced Silverstein’s “heartless hound” with the more hard-hitting “son of a bitch.” The profanity was bleeped out on the single and album, although it went uncensored in Cash’s original performance for the inmates at San Quentin prison in 1958. In a live show at the White House years later, he uttered a bleep-censored sound in lieu of the phrase. Cash also inserted “bitch” into the rockabilly “Cocaine Blues,” his reworking of the traditional folk song “Little Sadie.” This is the tale of Willy Lee, who, under the influence of whiskey and cocaine, murders his unfaithful girlfriend. Cash sings of her, “I can’t forget the day I shot that bad bitch down.” He famously played this song at his 1968 Folsom Prison concert, in which he sang the provocative lyric to an enthusiastic audience. The occasion was recreated in the biographical movie Walk the Line, although it fades into the next scene before the offending line is sung.

Men in music have often commandeered bitch as a way to dominate and diminish women. In the days of classic jazz, women singing the dirty blues wielded the word too, but in a different way. “Mother of the Blues” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, together with her protégée Bessie Smith, used bitch as a way to empower themselves in a world where men were in control.³⁷ Their songs were about women who celebrated their right to conduct themselves as expansively, and behave as badly, as men. Like Jelly Roll Morton, their hardcore songs were full of sexual braggadocio and often sung in brothels and bar rooms or recorded for clandestine distribution as a “party record.” But no one is known for lewd lyrics more than 1930s singer Lucille Bogan, especially in her absolutely obscene song “Till the Cows Come Home.” Calling herself “the bitch from Baltimore,” Bogan sings, “If you suck my pussy, baby, I’ll suck your dick. I’ll do it to you honey, until I make you shit.” Like male blues musicians, women also used the word to claim virility for themselves. Trailblazing funk singer Betty Davis, the onetime wife of Miles Davis, was also known for her sexually explicit lyrics. In “Nasty Gal,” she invokes the word to claim power over a lover who tried to use it to shut her down. She roars, “You said I was a bitch now. Didn’t ya? Didn’t ya? You said I was a witch now. I’m gonna tell ’em why.”

The first artist to use “bitch” in an album title was Betty’s husband Miles Davis. In 1969, the jazz trumpeter released his seminal jazz fusion album with the then-shocking title Bitches Brew. The album was groundbreaking, from the music to the cover art depicting free love and flower power, to its stark title. What the name actually means, however, is a mystery, although there are many theories floating around about it. Without an apostrophe at the end of the plural noun “Bitches,” some speculate that “Brew” is intended as a verb, not a noun, meaning “a thing that bitches do, is brew.”³⁸ Given the cover theme, the name might refer to brewing a strange potion that could help them achieve voodoo possession, or brewing a concoction used to create zombies. Carlos Santana suggested that the album was a tribute to the “cosmic ladies,” Davis’ wife Betty and her friends, who surrounded him at the time and introduced him to the music, clothes, and attitudes of the 1960s counterculture.³⁹ Others say that the “bitches” were the artists themselves, because the label was once a compliment for a highly skilled jazz musician. Whatever the title meant, it was provocative, just like the music. In modern slang, a “bitch’s brew” is similar to a “girly drink”; a disparaging term for a cocktail or flavored alcoholic beverage that women drink but supposedly “real men” don’t.

With the word’s seal of approval from none other than the “Prince of Darkness” Miles Davis, bitch quickly became central to the vocabulary of popular music. In 1971, the Rolling Stones released “Bitch” as the B-side to “Brown Sugar.” Mick Jagger penned the lyrics, and it’s suggested that the song was about his disastrous breakup with girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. Some say the song wasn’t about a specific person, but that it’s about love in general; “It must be love, it’s a bitch.” Others say it’s about Jagger’s substance abuse, with lyrics like, “You got to mix it child. You got to fix,” supposedly being a reference to a “heroin fix.” In the lines “I’m feeling hungry. Can’t see the reason. Just ate a horse meat pie,” horse is said to be slang for “heroin.” Some radio stations declined airplay of the song because of its profane title. Similarly, David Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” was banned that same year because it was thought to be in bad taste, as much for its title (“bitch” doesn’t appear in the lyrics) as its theme, with a story line about the singer’s boyfriend who looks for drag queens and hookups on the street. Bitch pops up in a number of Bowie’s songs, including the famous line in “Ziggy Stardust” in which his band The Spiders from Mars plan to exact revenge on their egotistical front man, “So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?”

Elton John’s 1974 song “The Bitch Is Back” was the first hit song with the word unapologetically in its title. Many radio stations refused to play it when it was released, but when the song charted they relented and added it to their playlists. A few DJs tried to edit out the word, which proved to be an overwhelming task because it appears in the song forty-two times. Some wags nicknamed the censored version, “The Bleep Is Back.” There’s much speculation about the lyrics, with fans asking: who is the bitch? The song was apparently inspired by Maxine Feibelman, then wife of John’s collaborator Bernie Taupin, who tutted, “Uh-oh, the bitch is back” every time John was in a bad mood.⁴⁰ (Some sources claim the song is about Feibelman herself, whom Taupin divorced a few years later.) Emboldened by David Bowie’s recent use of the word in a song title, Taupin wrote the lyrics with the refrain, “I’m a bitch. I’m a bitch. Oh, the bitch is back.” Instead of being offended by the characterization, John embraced the label and put music to the lyrics, saying, “It’s kind of my theme song.” At a 1974 concert he prefaced his performance with, “This is a song not referring to anyone in the audience, but mainly to me.” Some segments of the LGBTQ+ community have taken the song as a signal of John’s sexuality; at the time he hadn’t yet come out. The title has since become part of pop culture lexicon. With a nod to Sigourney Weaver’s famous cry “Get away from her, you bitch!”, “The bitch is back” became the tag line for the sequel Alien 3.

Bitch now appears in thousands of song titles and it’s embedded in many more verses and choruses. There are just too many songs to name. Even still, the acceptability of bitch, or its unacceptability, has been fluid over the years. While Elton John’s song was being played on the radio, other songs containing the word were banned. In 1992, rock band Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” was censored by MTV for its controversial title and lyrics, which include the verse:

On the surface, the lyrics sound extremely sexist, but this was actually a tongue-in-cheek song about obedience classes for disobedient dogs. And speaking of satire, with songs like “Wet Bikini” and “Shark Attack,” Slovenian punk band the Bitch Boys was a parody of the 1960s surf band the Beach Boys.

Other songs containing the word were banned for their implications of violence and misogyny. In 1997, Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” caused controversy for its suggestive title. The refrain consists of the line, “Change my pitch up. Smack my bitch up,” which is sampled from the hip hop song “Give the Drummer Some,” performed by Rapper Kool Keith. “Smack” is actually a heroin reference, while “bitch” refers to the vein in the arm used to inject it. (Of course, the band reveled in the lyrics’ double entendres.) The song performed well in the charts, even though it was banned from most television and radio stations; some played the instrumental version only and referred to the tune as “Smack.” The song was also controversial for its explicit music video, which depicted scenes of drug and alcohol-fueled sexual assault. Band member Liam Howlett joked, “No radio station was gonna play the song, so we thought we’d make a video that no one would play either.”⁴¹ In a twist at the end of the video, the protagonist is revealed to be a woman.

Other musical uses of bitch were banned only by certain genres that didn’t approve of the word. In 1979, the country music group the Charlie Daniels Band released their song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” This was a ballad about the devil’s failure to gain the soul of young Johnny via a fiddle-playing contest. The album version of the song goes, “Devil just come on back if you ever want to try again. I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best that’s ever been.” The censors had no problem doing deals with the Devil, but cursing was clearly out of the question. The controversial lyrics were censored to, “Cause I told you once, you son of a gun,” to accommodate radio airplay for country music. It seemed to be a matter of country music stations being more conservative than rock ones. Like complaints about movies cut for TV, fans were annoyed by the prudish radio edit, arguing that it blunted the song’s intensity. In 1998, the song was re-released with the offending word intact, while the record company “accidentally” sent this uncensored version to country music stations too. When the error was discovered, much to the embarrassment of DJs around the US, the records were quickly replaced with a “clean” version.

Censorship of the music industry, or the threat of censorship, was about to get much worse before it would get any better. In 1983, an American committee was formed called the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), who advocated for warning labels to be placed on music deemed to have violent, drug-related, or sexual themes. Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore, former wife of politician Al Gore, founded the committee because she heard her eleven-year-old daughter listening to the “embarrassingly vulgar lyrics” of Prince’s song “Darling Nikki” that refer explicitly to female masturbation. Gore dubbed this kind of music, “a poisonous source infecting the youth of the world with messages they cannot handle.”⁴² Through their intensive campaigning, the PMRC were successful, and it became obligatory for record labels to place black-and-white “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” stickers on records featuring violent or sexually explicit language, especially from the heavy metal, punk, and hip hop genres. Some retailers refused to sell those stickered albums, affecting the visibility and income of many artists.

The campaign ultimately backfired, however, because the label was no longer a protective device but a guarantee of forbidden fruit. In an infamous photo of Gore, she’s posed holding the album Be My Slave by the heavy metal band Bitch, which she singled out as an example of “vulgar” content, although the artist thanked Gore in the album’s liner notes for this exposure, which greatly increased her album sales. These events also inspired many angry songs about Gore, including “Pro Me” by BWP (Bytches With Problems) and Ice-T’s “KKK Bitch.” In “Freedom of Speech” Ice-T raps, “You’re bitching about rock ’n’ roll; that’s censorship, dumb bitch.” In the rapper’s memoir he wrote, “Tipper Gore is the only woman I ever directly called a ‘bitch’ on any of my records, and I meant that in the most negative sense of the word.”⁴³ In the end, this crusade didn’t affect the use of bitch in music, which was steadily increasing, especially in rap and hip hop.

Perfect Bitch

When Jelly Roll Morton performed for Alan Lomax, he explained why his songs were so “smutty,” as he called them. During his days of playing piano in the red-light district of New Orleans, the instrument was considered to be effeminate. For turn-of-the-century Black and Creole women, learning to play the piano meant respectability and class status. Famous contemporary pianists included Mamie Desdunes (who had instructed Morton) and also Dolly Adams, “Sweet Emma” Barrett, and many other talented female musicians. This was a time, however, when the male-dominated jazz scene didn’t fully accept women as performers or professional musicians. And while instruments like the trumpet and trombone were seen as masculine, the piano was viewed as feminine. As Morton put it, “When a man played piano, the stamp was on him for life, the femininity stamp, and I didn’t want that on. So of course, when I did start to playin,’ the song were kinda smutty a bit.”⁴⁴ Playing smutty music made him more masculine in the eyes (and ears) of his audience. Morton proceeded to play “Winin’ Boy Blues” for Lomax, one of his own compositions, which was another smutty song about a sexual conquest. The lyrics include, “I had that bitch and had her on the stump. I fucked her ’til her pussy stunk.” The aggressive cries of “bitch” seem to embody both desire and scorn for women at the same time. The song was written in the late 1800s, although it’s reminiscent of contemporary rap and hip hop. It’s clear that Morton’s smutty lyrics rival the most explicit language of today’s rappers. In other words, the roots of modern gangster rap and hip hop music go back to the dirty blues of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rap and hip hop laid claim to “bitch” and promoted much of the violence and misogyny associated with it today. Grandmaster Caz claims he was the first to use the word in the 1970s, in an unrecorded song about a girl who “wouldn’t give me any play.”⁴⁵ Although the first to say it on the record was English-American rapper Slick Rick in the 1985 beatboxing classic “La Di Da Di” with Doug E. Fresh. Rick sings about a jealous and violent older woman who tries to flirt with him, “The bitch been around before my mother’s born.” A year later, Ice-T rapped about beating up a “bitch” who dared to talk back to him in “Six in Da Morning.” With the original gangsta rapper Ice-T giving the word his blessing, the use of bitch rapidly escalated from this point. Bitch went hand in hand with unflattering stereotypes of women. In NWA’s “Bitch Iz a Bitch” Ice Cube raps, “Now the title bitch don’t apply to all women, but all women have a little bitch in ’em.” The song characterizes women as manipulative, materialistic, and money hungry. Public Enemy’s “Sophisticated Bitch” does this too, as a scathing takedown of a gold-digger in which Chuck D raps, “Get ready to only throw money at the bitch.” Bitch also dehumanizes women as sex objects, implying they’re sluts and whores. In “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” Dr. Dre sings, “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks. Lick on deez nutz and suck the dick. Gets the fuck out after you’re done.” A bitch was someone without value, a woman to be used and discarded.

Rap and hip hop have been heavily condemned for their misogynistic and violent imagery and lyrics, and also their sexist music videos full of scantily clad women. Some studies conclude that rap music is problematic, claiming that exposure to it increases negative stereotypes of women, and especially Black women.⁴⁶ Its language is also believed to glorify and promote real-world acts of violence against women. During a joint concert in 1998, the Beastie Boys called Prodigy beforehand and asked them not to play “Smack My Bitch Up” in their set, because of the song’s sexist and violent implications. On stage, Prodigy’s Maxim lambasted the Beastie Boys for this request, telling the audience, “They didn’t want us to play this fucking tune. But the way things go, I do what the fuck I want!” before launching into the song.⁴⁷ Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys later commented on the incident, saying, “You know, a woman in America gets murdered every 20 minutes every day in domestic violence. So ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ isn’t that funny.”⁴⁸

Rap artists defend their music as an art form, saying that rap and hip hop have been unfairly demonized. It’s often argued that rapping is just rhythm, but not “real music.” Rap and hip hop have been criticized and compared unfavorably to Eurocentric standards of what music should be. The debate around rap music’s validity is often rooted in racism, which has affected every African American music style, from jazz to blues to rap. Rap artists explain that rap music is the voice of the street, telling it like it is. Their lyrics are raw, honest, and authentic. Rap and hip hop music are often described as the soundtrack to modern social issues in Black communities across the United States, like drug use, gang activity, prostitution, poverty, and gun culture. Their music is a reflection of the harsh realities of people of color, and so they call it “reality rap.” Speaking about these issues, Ice Cube refuses to compromise or apologize for the subject matter of his band’s lyrics, explaining, “Our raps are documentary. We don’t take sides.”⁴⁹

Bitch features heavily in rap music, and also the trash talk tradition that gave birth to the genre. Originally known as “The Dozens,” this is a street game rooted in the art of the insult. In another example of everything old is new again, we go back to Jelly Roll Morton and the dirty blues. In the 1930s, Morton played another smutty tune for Lomax called “The Dirty Dozens.” Some of the verses come straight from the insult game: “Oh you dirty motherfucker. You old cocksucker. You dirty son of a bitch. You bastard. You’re everything; and your mammy don’t wear no drawers.”⁵⁰ The “smutty” language of the dozens game is intended to be humorous, boastful, insulting, and provocative, and it’s always performed in front of an appreciative audience. This tradition clearly influenced rap and hip hop music, and also modern “Yo Mama” jokes. Another verse of “The Dirty Dozens” begins with a couplet that was a common street rhyme in the 1970s. “Said, look our bitch, you made me mad. I’ll tell you ’bout the puppies that your sister had. Oh, it was a fad. She fucked a hog. She fucked a dog. I know the dirty bitch would fuck a frog. ’Cause your mammy don’t wear no drawers.” Insults about mothers or sisters having sex with dogs have always been common in dozens playing, by way of extending the metaphor inherent in “bitch.” Whether uttered in a blues murder ballad, a street game, or a rap song, bitch can be a weapon of sorts, a way of demonstrating dominance and power over other people, and especially women.

Since the time of Lucille Bogan, the self-professed “bitch of Baltimore,” Black female artists have reclaimed bitch as both a gun and also a bulletproof vest. Like Bogan’s X-rated dirty blues, the rapper Trina’s use of the word goes back to the earlier meaning of bitch as a highly sexual woman. In “Nasty Bitch” she describes her sexual prowess in graphic detail, she’s a dirty girl who’ll do anything, while in “Da Baddest Bitch” she sings, “If I had the chance to be a virgin again, I’d be fucking by the time I’m ten.” The explicit sex raps of Nicki Minaj’s “Boss Ass Bitch” are also reminiscent of Bogan’s sexual bragging in her raunchy tunes of the 1920s and 30s. In other modern songs, “bitch” is about female rappers asserting their dominance in the “man’s world” of music. Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” often censored as “bbhmm,” is a revenge fantasy story that’s inspired by the artist’s real-life experience with an accountant who mismanaged her finances and cheated her out of money. In using the word, Rihanna shows us that she’s tough, formidable, and not someone to mess with. Hip hop artist Lizzo declares that a bitch is a woman who believes in herself and never gives up when she raps unapologetically, “I did a DNA test and found out I’m 100% that bitch.” Lizzo liked the phrase so much that she trademarked it.

But not all artists have embraced the role of bitch. Some female rappers have railed against the label, including MC Trouble and Lauryn Hill. Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. speaks out against the disrespect of women in society, addressing issues of sexual harassment, sexism, and slurs against women in rap and hip hop culture. In the song she asks, “Who you calling a bitch?” Then she tells her listeners, “You got to let him know, you ain’t a bitch or a ho.”

In the ongoing debate about who gets to dictate the word’s use, a few male artists have stood up for women. In Lupe Fiasco’s song “Bitch Bad,” he made a heroic attempt to address the issue, “I say bitch bad, woman good, lady better.” But most rappers use it as a pejorative. In “Call Her a Bitch,” Too $hort raps, “One thing’s for sure, you will get called a bitch … Bitch.” And bitch is still used to objectify women. In Tyler the Creator’s “Bitch Suck Dick,” he suggests women should use their mouths for giving blowjobs, not talking. Appealing to the “psycho bitch” ex-girlfriend trope, “bitch” is also wielded to get revenge on exes. In his song “I Don’t Fuck with You,” Big Sean refers to his former fiancée Naya Rivera as a “stupid-ass bitch,” “crazy bitch,” and “dumb-ass bitch.” In fact, he invokes the word dozens of times in the song to refer to her. In Jay-Z’s “That’s My Bitch,” he teams up with Kanye West to diss their ex-girlfriends. In reference to the song’s title, Jay-Z also name checks his wife Beyoncé, warning any men who leer at her to “Get ya own dog, ya heard? That’s my bitch.”

In the rap lexicon, “bitch” is infamously used as a synonym for “woman” (as we’ve seen reported by some dictionaries). In Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” for example, he uses the word as a stand-in for “woman.” Fans speculated that he would renounce the word, based on a widely circulated poem that surfaced when his daughter Blue Ivy Carter was born. The poem read: “Before I got in the game, made a change and got rich. I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch. I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it. Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.” It turned out, however, that the poem was penned by a blogger as a prank.⁵¹ The birth of his baby daughter did not stop him from using the word. It was only a few years before that Al Sharpton had tried to ban “bitch,” “ho,” and “nigga” from music, but Jay-Z refused publicly, protesting that Sharpton didn’t represent him. In “Say Hello” he raps in response, “I’ll remove the curses if you tell me our schools’ gon’ be perfect, when Jena Six don’t exist, tell him that’s when I’ll stop sayin’ bitch, bitch.”⁵²

Jay-Z’s collaborator Kanye West is also fond of the word and has created controversy with his frequent use of it. He dedicated the song “Perfect Bitch” to his then-girlfriend Kim Kardashian. (Makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury later launched a cult peachy-colored lipstick called “Bitch Perfect”.) Kardashian reportedly told friends that West’s gesture made her feel special. “I’m honored. I love it. I know he doesn’t mean it in a negative way when he says the word ‘bitch.’ The song talks about how he was with so many other girls but could never find the right one until he met me.”⁵³ A few years later, however, when Kardashian was his wife, she’s no longer branded a bitch in his song “Bound 2,” but instead she’s a “good girl” who’s worth “a thousand bitches.” West later had second thoughts about whether bitch was acceptable in rap and hip hop. He took to Twitter to ask fans their views on its use in music, musing that “Stevie Wonder never had to use the word bitch.” He concluded, “Perhaps the words BITCH and NIGGA are now neither positive or negative. They are just potent and it depends on how they are used and by whom?”⁵⁴ West’s final verdict was that it’s okay to call women bitches. He continues to use the word in his lyrics, including the notorious song “Famous,” in which he says of artist Taylor Swift, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made the bitch famous.” This referred to his interruption of Swift’s acceptance of the award for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Music Video Awards, in order to proclaim that despite her victory, Beyoncé still had “one of the best videos of all time.” Criticized heavily for his use of the slur in the song, West claimed he “did not diss” Swift, but had first obtained her approval of the lyric. Swift, however, denied this version of events and denounced the line as misogynistic. West argued in his defense, “Bitch is an endearing term in hip hop, like the word Nigga.” This is, of course, all in the interpretation.

Given the word’s long tradition in rap and hip hop music, it’s unlikely that male artists will stop calling women (and some men) “bitches” anytime soon, as long as they also continue to call themselves “niggas” and “dogs.”

B*#%$

People have always complained about so-called “bad” language. It’s not just a modern trend. Social critics in the 1940s railed against the colorful language of the GIs returning from World War II. In the 1920s, some condemned the “mucker posers,” the well-bred young people who emulated “the manners and language of the longshoremen.”⁵⁵ And so on down to the Victorians, whose sermons and statutes were full of references to public profanity. Earlier still, Samuel Johnson eschewed the “low bad words” in his famous dictionary, while even Francis Grose censored “cunt” in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. As the philosopher Charles de Montesquieu once observed, people have been complaining about the decline of manners and morals since the time of Aristotle.⁵⁶

Some may complain about “indecent” words, fine people when they use them, or even try to censor or ban them, but no matter what any organization or committee says or does, these efforts are not likely to have much of an effect on the way we talk. Profanity, obscenity, and taboo words in general seem to fill a basic need of human communication. This category of words has probably always been around, and probably always will be. But the moralists are correct about one thing: this kind of language has become more widespread and audible than ever before.

Whether it’s perceived as profanity, a part-time dirty word, or simply benign, it’s undeniable that bitch is a controversial word. It’s also an everyday word. Bitch is so common nowadays that we take for granted how hard it was for early writers, actors, and artists to write, speak, or sing the word at all. Little did they know how much the word would eventually take off. Because it’s so commonplace today, bitch doesn’t quite have the shock value that it once did back in the days of Francis Grose. Some remark that the word is so prevalent nowadays, on television and the Internet and in books, video games, movies, and music, that bitch has lost its bite. But is this true?

Let’s now look at the way bitch is used today and how it might be used in the future.