Last winter over lunch, CNN anchor Dana Bash got the idea to profile powerful women serving in politics and government. She and two female colleagues were mourning Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign when inspiration struck. There would be a web series. To celebrate women. But it needed a name. Why not Badass Women of Washington—with the “badass” scrawled over top the logo like so much lipstick graffiti?
OK … Etymologically minded prudes might wonder, How and when did powerful women come to be known as badasses?
As with some of the language’s best slang, “badass” worked its way into the mainstream vernacular from the military. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, badass, adj., n. described a Marine who pretended strength beyond his actual faculties. (“Look who’s a big badass now,” one would say to cut a posturing soldier down to size.)
And we all know its unsarcastic use as an honorific to describe the bold, rule-breaking, and fearsome—a terminology OED traces to Airplane-era jive. It was the sort of language you’d hear in the barracks or the pool hall, in other words. But now we can say it’s “badass,” without a trace of irony, to be a woman and to succeed in government at the same time.
Hermione Hoby in the Guardian two years ago went after the ubiquity of “badass” as a descriptor for all famous and influential women, claiming that the word’s root reference to a continuum of male bravery connotes masculine superiority when used in praise of women. Can’t ladies be celebrated for their superior qualities without these implicit comparisons to men?
The title of the series seemingly invites Bash to ask women about their biggest battles, their toughest skirmishes. Yet what we get from the streaming interviews is Bash asking California senator Dianne Feinstein (whose husband doesn’t quite get Bash’s use of “badass” either) about the assassination of Harvey Milk, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao about whether she regrets not having kids, Army Surgeon General Nadja West about growing up an orphan.
Bash draws out her subjects’ human frailty, so the choice to highlight their “badassery” casts an unseemly contrast to the series’ best moments. Tearful interviews approach peak Barbara Walters (she invented the genre of making famous people cry). They’ll all air on CNN soon, and it’ll make good TV: a look behind these iron ladies’ armor. Celebrating Cabinet members, congresswomen, senators, the chairwoman of the GOP, and a surgeon general as badasses—and then highlighting the least bold, brash, and rule-breaking aspects of their lives may be standard for cable news fare. But it’s still tone-deaf and tacky.
And the series is all the more mistitled for the conspicuous absence of one actual badass currently serving in the president’s Cabinet: Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon. The longtime CEO of WWE got tombstoned by a 300-pound bodybuilder without wrinkling her power suit and was too badass for the variably dull and stuck-up state of Connecticut, where she ran for Senate and lost twice. If one gets the impression from its ridiculous title that the Badass Women of Washington are going to duke it out in some kind of tournament, all I’m saying is: You’d need McMahon on the bracket.
