What’s behind increased use of the B-word?

By Sandy Cohen

AP Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES

No one could imagine seeing the N-word in the title of a network TV show, but the B-word is OK with ABC.

The network uses the letter B as an abbreviation for “b****” in the title of its new sitcom “Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt. 23,” which premiered last week. ABC also insists the B in the new prime-time soap “GCB” — based on the book “Good Christian B*****s” — actually stands for “belles.” Both shows are about women and aimed at female audiences.

Both may have started out with the complete B-word in their titles, but the network abbreviated it before introducing the shows to advertisers.

Paul Lee, president of the ABC Entertainment Group, said in January that “on broadcast television, as it turns out, that isn’t a word you want to use in the title.”

Broadcast standards allow the word on TV, and its use has tripled in the last decade, but these are the first American shows to tease with B’s in their titles.

Is it just coincidence? A hip reclaiming of the word? A blatant attention grab? Or could it reflect something more telling, given the current climate of political rhetoric challenging reproductive rights: a linguistic representation of backsliding efforts toward gender equality?

No ABC executives were available to answer these questions, but experts in media, language and women’s issues say yes to almost all of the above.

“Obviously, they’re using it to be polarizing and controversial and attention-getting. Why else would you use that word?” asks Erin M. Fuller, president of the Alliance for Women in Media. “I don’t think we’re in a time where that word is a celebration of women.”

Especially when politically, “birth control has been reopened as an issue for the first time in decades,” said Erin Matson, action vice president for the National Organization for Women. “There’s a frightening commonality between what you see on TV, in entertainment, and in Congress, where the war on women is being led: The conversation is being driven almost exclusively by men.”

“GCB” is based on a novel by Kim Gatlin, who serves as the lone female writer on the show. Starring Kristen Chenoweth and Leslie Bibb, “GCB” satirizes female stereotypes and the hypocrisy of devout, grown-up mean girls in a wealthy Dallas church-going community.

In one episode, Chenoweth’s character declares, “Cleavage makes your cross hang straight.”

“Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt. 23” stars Krysten Ritter as an unpredictable New York live-wire who bullies her naive Midwestern roommate. Created by Nahnatchka Khan, one of three women credited on the writing team of six, the show seems to take stereotypes to heart (at least in the first two episodes): A woman who seems sweet and helpful at first glance is really an untrustworthy snake who’s friendly with men and cruel to women, stealing her roommate’s money in one episode and sleeping with her fiance in the next.

“It’s very clear that she’s actually a sociopath,” says Andi Zeisler, co-founder and editorial director of B**** Magazine. “It’s not like here’s a strong, confident woman and she’s head b**** in charge. She’s actually a sociopath and she treats people horribly.”

The B-word was rarely heard on TV when B**** Magazine began in 1996. Founders of the feminist pop-culture magazine “were reacting to the idea of b**** as this go-to gendered insult in a world of very feasible and accessible gender-neutral ways of saying you don’t like what someone is doing,” Zeisler said.

ABC is using the term the old-fashioned way.

“Their intention was never to really reclaim the word,” she said. “Television shows ultimately want to be apolitical. They don’t want to engage with the kinds of rhetoric that in real life translates into incredibly ugly reminders that these judgments are still really powerful and really commonplace.”

Because the insult is abbreviated, it “kind of defangs what’s supposed to be edgy” about the shows, she said.