If you came of age on Instagram and TikTok, you already know what a baddie is.
A “baddie” has traditionally been defined as a confident woman, impeccably styled, with makeup on point, and not to be crossed. The term carries an edge of fierceness, and for many young women, it became a personal brand, a standard to live up to, and increasingly, a burden.
According to Pew Research Center data published in 2025, nearly half of all teenagers (48%) say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. Among teen girls specifically, 25% say the platforms hurt their mental health. That shift did not happen in a vacuum.
Baddie culture transformed social media into a performance stage where anything less than perfection felt disqualifying. Young women stopped posting candid photos. They began spending hours staging, filtering, and editing images to meet an aesthetic standard that was never realistic to begin with.
The problem deepened when baddie culture moved from Instagram filters to television screens. Zeus Network’s Baddies franchise, created by former Bad Girls Club cast member Natalie Nunn and launched in 2021, took the baddie concept and stripped it of nuance. The show, which follows women traveling together, making club appearances, and navigating manufactured conflict, markets itself around boldness and getting to the bag.
The franchise has drawn widespread criticism for centering physical altercations, hyper-sexualized portrayals, and interpersonal chaos as entertainment. Viewers and cultural commentators have argued that Baddies does not simply reflect the realities of Black womanhood; it exploits harmful stereotypes about it.
The ‘Angry Black Woman’ trope, the hypersexualized Black body, and the idea that aggression is authenticity are narratives that Black women have fought against for generations. Baddies packages those narratives as content and sells subscriptions with them.
When the dominant images being broadcast show Black women screaming, fighting, and degrading one another for clout, those images seep into the broader cultural consciousness and shape how Black women are perceived, by others and, more painfully, by themselves.
Defenders of the franchise argue that demanding Black women perform respectability to earn basic dignity is itself a form of racial policing. Some cast members and producers describe the conflict on screen as structured entertainment, closer to professional wrestling than unscripted reality. There is something to that argument. Black women have long been told how to speak, dress, and conduct themselves to be deemed acceptable.
Fighting back against respectability politics does not require trading one harmful performance for another. Rejecting the idea that you must be quiet and palatable to deserve respect should not mean embracing the idea that you must be loud, combative, and physically aggressive to prove you are not to be crossed. Both are performances. Neither is freedom.
I am a Black woman. I am confident. I am self-assured. I do not need to manufacture outrage or fight on camera to feel that way, and I never have. Although I’m sure these women have their reasons for going on this type of program, I’m not going to be the judge. The difference matters, particularly for the younger generation watching these images and internalizing what a “baddie” is supposed to look and act like.
The original concept of being a baddie, confident, unbothered, walking in your purpose belongs to every woman who wakes up, does the work, and moves through the world on her own terms without needing anyone’s applause. That version of a baddie is worth celebrating.
