Sociology of the B*TCH!

Words hold considerable power in society; they are vehicles for emotions, can enforce power dynamics, break people or mend them back together.

Not all words are created equal, though. Some carry such deeply sensitive meanings that they can distort the matrix of the social world.

The b-word is one of those special linguistic phenomena.

Originally referring to a female dog, the meaning of the term shifted in the 1400s when people started to use it to refer to lewd or immoral women.

Today, 'bitch' is a key word in popular culture that can convey contrasting meanings and intentions.

In this project, I investigate the meaning of the word across a repertoire of over a thousand movie scripts ranging from the 1980s to the 2020s.

The word bitch was used to refer to a woman 1226 times. In this graph, each square represents one of those occurences. 57% of the time, it was a man speaking.

1 out of 5 times, women used the word in a non offensive way to neutrally or positively refer to another woman or themselves. This is something male characters rarely did.

Male characters used 'bitch' as an offensive term to describe or talk to a woman three times more than female characters did.

I categorized offensive uses of the word 'bitch' in three levels of offence - disrespectful, hurtful, and threatening.

When female characters used the word bitch as an offensive term toward another female character, they framed the word in a threatening sentence only 2 % of the time.

Male characters, in contrast, were 12 times more likely to use the b-word in a threatening sentence which often led to an outburst of physical violence.