Baddest B*tches Can’t All Be in LA: Some Work Remotely

Why Women Are Taught to Leave Home for Success

Many of us grew up consuming stories where a woman seems to become someone only after leaving home. We know the scene: suitcase in hand, hometown behind her, bigger city ahead. In Sweet Home Alabama, for instance, Melanie leaves Alabama and builds a life as a New York fashion designer. The film eventually complicates that fantasy, but the image itself is familiar.

The more these stories repeat themselves, the easier it is to mistake them for a natural order of things. A woman leaves, moves somewhere bigger, and suddenly her life appears to begin. After seeing that story often enough, distance from home can start to feel like a proof of progress. Leaving begins to look less like a choice. 

Women leave home for very different reasons. Some seek independence or careers unavailable nearby. Others face low wages or limited employment that leaves little room to choose. In some rural communities, families may borrow money or part with their livelihood to finance migration. UN Women has documented how poorly regulated sectors can leave women migrant workers exposed to trafficking and exploitation.

Choosing to leave is one thing. Leaving because staying offers too little is another. When better jobs sit elsewhere, women are expected to reshape their lives around opportunity. Some can now work remotely, though access to that option remains uneven.

So why should opportunity depend so heavily on relocation? Perhaps workplaces can also ask what they can bring closer to women where they already are.

The “Baddest B*tches Ain’t in LA” TikTok Trend, Explained

There is always a new trend circulating on social media. Most disappear quickly. Others stay because people see something of themselves in them.

ADÉLA’s “Ain’t in LA” became one of those trends. Users began making the song’s premise their own. The joke was that the “baddest b*tches” could not all be in Los Angeles. Someone’s gotta hold it down in Mexico, Manila, Surabaya, Punjab, Bratislava, and countless other places. 

Women in particular seem to have found room in that joke. Hometown pride becomes something more personal. They say that ambition and confidence can exist outside places that popular culture treats as centers of possibility.  

ADÉLA’s cultural context gives the song another layer. She grew up in Slovakia with Western pop culture around her, then moved to Los Angeles for music. She has spoken about how distant global success once felt from a small Eastern European country. 

The song also reaches back to her family. ADÉLA has described seeing photographs of her mother as a teenager in Slovakia, surrounded by Western pop imagery. Those pictures made her think about women with large dreams who may never receive the same access to recognition. Perhaps that is why the trend travels so easily. It takes a lyric about Los Angeles, a city deeply tied to the American Dream, and lets women answer from somewhere else. Home enters the story as a place where ambition already exists, rather than somewhere success requires them to escape. 

 Who are the “Baddest B*tches”?

The word “bitch” has carried questions of power for centuries. More than a thousand years ago, Old English recorded bicce as a term for a female dog. It later became a gendered insult for women considered outspoken, sexually confident, or difficult to control.

That history says something about acceptable female behavior. Traits such as authority and ambition could attract condemnation when women expressed them. The insult therefore did more than describe a person. It helped police the boundaries of how women were expected to behave. 

Language, however, can be reclaimed. Feminist movements, popular culture, and LGBTQ+ communities have repurposed “bitch” in contexts of confidence and self-possession. In ADÉLA’s song, “baddest bitches” carries this sense of confidence and power. It points toward women who claim space and recognition on their own terms.