"You're that BITCH from TV"
I was on a little TV show, and suddenly I was hearing people refer to me as a BITCH everywhere, from magazine articles, to social media, and even in the grocery store.
Then I got my own show and it seemed like that word might be forever be linked to my name.
How it started
"Why You Need To Be A Bitch"
2017 TED Talk by Tabatha Coffey
Like most women, when I was growing up, BITCH was not a nice word to call a woman. It had very specific intention and implications: that somehow a woman is too much. She's too strong, too honest, too efficient, too real, too quick...
she's just too much. But - too much for who?
It wasn't all men calling me a BITCH, it was women too - but, it didn't seem like they were all intending it to be mean or insulting. Yet it was taking it's toll on me - so, me being me, I had to get to the root of it: Why? What did they mean by it? What about me are they responding to, and why that word?
And then I had to decide how to deal with it.
I couldn't stop everyone else from using that word (countless women have tried for generations before this) - no, I could only change my way of thinking about it. So I did.
I realized that what they were responding to in me, and in so many women before and since, is their power. Their authenticity. Women who didn't choose to make themselves smaller so that others might outshine them. Women who owned and accessed their strengths. Like...
Bravery, Intelligence, Tenacity, Creativity and Honesty
...and B.I.T.C.H. was (re)born.
I was and am, most definitely, a B.I.T.C.H. - and proud of it!
And with that, I started to talk about it, whenever I could, which soon turned into the TED Talk, which has followed me around since. I've had countless women - and men - approach me to talk about that TED Talk, and how it's helped them to reframe insults (and the insulters) and take back their power & confidence. That one speech has followed me as much as several seasons of TV shows and thousands of classes!
2 years later I was workshopping BITCH Camp as it's own class and preparing to launch it across the US in 2020, when the pandemic hit...
But here we are now, in 2023, launching BITCH Camp and I couldn't be more excited to share it with all of you.
Welcome.
2017 TED Talk by Tabatha Coffey