Dara Kass, MD My original FIX18 was going to be about resilience. I figured a talk about rejection, resilience and pushing through fear would be a great way to start the conference. It was going be great: emotional, honest, heartwarming and hopefully funny.
But then the we all got “Choo’d” (I know this is not a thing, but I am trying to make it a thing[1]). Esther Choo did something brilliant and we were hooked. She started using the #ottertime hashtag to respond to Twitter trolls. She threw up otter GIFs and pictures, muted and moved on, hatching a mini-movement amongst the #WomenInMedicine. The otters were so damn cute, and each time an otter appeared on Twitter, it felt like a rally cry.
It came together so quickly. We were galvanized. And then, magically, she appeared. An EM doctor with the twitter handle @OlgatheOtter. Was she real? Had Esther converted someone so hard that she legally changed her name to Otter? [2] We had an otter-lady-doctor!
Otters sleep in the water in gender segregated groups with interlocked paws to keep each other safe called rafts. The raft metaphor took off on twitter. Each tweeted raft felt like a collective hi-five or fist bump amongst women in medicine. It was fun. It was empowering. It was perfect.
But it got better. Somewhere in the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, I realized that female sea otters were called bitches. Like female dogs. That group of female sea otters in the GIFs was actually a raft of bitches keeping each other afloat. The term “raft of bitches” felt right to me. It felt strong and powerful. It felt perfect.
The word bitch is laden with all sorts of cultural baggage. My friend Ali Yarrow just wrote a book called 90’s Bitch:Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality about the bitchification of woman in America in the 1990’s. Her book is excellent and enlightening[3]. If you were a confident, smart and unapologetic female leader in the 1990’s you were most definitely labeled a bitch. I would have no doubt been bitchified in those days. That was not a good thing. Reading the book made me second guess the title of my talk- for a couple of days.
In the end, I kept the word. In fact, I embraced it. Because a word that was used to shame and silence strong women in the past gives me power. There are so many the rafts that keep me afloat, personal and professional, large and small. They give me support. They are full of confident, smart and unapologetic female leaders. And I couldn’t think of a better way to describe them than my raft of bitches.
[1] This is a Mean Girl reference. Not a great one, but it does have context.
[2] It turns out that Olga Otter is a real EM doctor, and that has been her legal name since she got married. This was not a Choo effect.
[3] As a side note, reading this book made me feel nostalgic and old. I had a first-hand memory of almost every single cultural reference in the book.
Watch the full FIX18 talk below!
I think there is some real brilliance in the image “raft of bitches.” First, it reclaims the term, puts women in charge of what they will be named and narratively associated with. Second, it resonates power from simultaneously reminding everyone that “bitch” is first and foremost a neutral,descriptive term, a term of science. That’s very fitting for the women in medicine to whom your site is dedicated. Well done! I’m wondering, though, has there been any backlash, not from the lunatic fringe but from other women’s groups or individuals? The term “bitch” is obviously culturally loaded and undoubtedly carries painful… Read more »