go, bad girl, go

The bad girl.. She’s generally inappropriately dressed, or dressed incompletely. She’s the one in the upskirt shots, playing all faux-surprise flashy-flashy with her panties or her naked nethers with the paparazzi. She might be the one who is admitting some truth a bit too titillating to be wholly healy to Oprah, or whomever. She poses in the nude. She admits to doing drugs. She steals other women’s boyfriends or husbands. She steals other women. She is not above neither saying “fuck” nor doing it. Gleefully.

She’s Lindsay Lohan. She’s not Mandy Moore. She’s Angelina Jolie. She is not Reese Witherspoon. She’s the old drinking short-short wearing Madonna. She is not the new world-hugging, duty-free accented, garden-mummy Madonna.

Bad girls of the past include spy, dancer and prostitute Mata Hari; spy, playwright and nominal prostitute, Aphra Behn. Dorothy Parker was a bad girl. So was Jean Rhys. Mae West is probably the ultimate bad girl, the bad girl to whom other, lesser bad girls like Pamela Anderson, Ariana Huffington, Sarah Silverman and  Jenna Jameson should kowtow, toast with their glasses of expensive champagne and name their pets after.

P!ink is a bad girl, and so is Paris Hilton, whom P!nk has joyfully skewered in song and video. Bad girls can be smart as a dominatrix’ whip, and they can be dumb as a box of hair extensions. It’s not intelligence that makes the bad girl. It’s not something as simple as a lack of class or manners, either. Lauren Bacall is a bad girl, and the woman oozes class from every scotch and cigarette-soaked pore. Audrey Hepburn was not a bad girl; one could make a strong argument that Katherine Hepburn was. She’s on the fence, really. She was probably a reluctant bad girl. A really healthy, country-walking bad girl.

Bad girls are not without their contradictions. Being contradictory, actually, is one of the things that makes a bad girl bad.

The public imagination holds Marie Antoinette to be a bad girl. She wasn’t, really. She very much conformed to the culture at hand—she was even considered to be a bit of a prude by her contemporaries. However, she was queen, and anti-monarchists excoriated her for multiple fictive transgressions. She wasn’t a lesbian. She didn’t have multiple affairs—only one or two, which in the court of France was a positively puritan track to tread. She never said, “let them eat cake.” She didn’t play dairymaid to a stable of randy faux cowherds. In the light of a real bad girl, Marie Antoinette was a bit of a bore.

Being a bad girl is something that our culture has castigated women with, as much as we enjoy the bad girl. We love the bad girl. We crave them. We hold them close to ourselves, and we are use them to feel better about ourselves. Whether we’re comparing ourselves favorably with the hott mess that is Tara Reid or Britney Spears, or whether we’re identifying with the life struggles of Abby Lee or Elizabeth Wurtzel or Anna Nicole Smith.

We need the bad girls a lot more than we need the good ones. The good girls—the Katie Courics, the Doris Days, the Gwyneth Paltows, the Linda Evans, the—gasp—Anne Coulters—are just less necessary. They may be talented, they may be pretty, they may be smart, and they may even be inflammatory, but at the end of the day, they’re a bit tiresome. If a good girl reveals herself to be bad at the core, and perhaps just acting the bad girl, as Elizabeth Taylor did when she stole Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, she becomes infinitely more interesting (so too does the good girl. Debbie Reynolds gets a big blank check for bad-ass irony, and you really have to love the woman).

When a formerly bad girl goes good, like J-Lo in her recent matriarchal make-over with the zombie-esque Marc Anthony, it’s just tragic. Nothing’s worse than asking the entirety of pop culture to take an oath of oblivion and forget your bad-girl past. Plus, it’s mind-boggling why after treading the tortuous course of bad girldom any woman would choose the torturous course good girldom.

Because good girldom is, let’s face it, hard. It’s tough to say which path is harder: that of the good girl or that of the bad. I recognize the reductiveness of my argument here, for there are as many different paths of bad girldom as there are bad girls (George Eliot and Marilyn Mansfield were both bad girls, and they have little in common beside that trait), but there is only one way to be good.

Good is definitely straight and narrow. If you are good, you are monogamous. You probably have children, or adopt them if you can’t. You dress nicely. You comport yourself well. You keep yourself attractive, and you do what you need to do to conform to the cultural standard of attractiveness. You do your best to recycle. You don’t go too badly into debt. You tend not to have addictions, but if you do, you twelve-step and repent. You do not advocate radical points of view. You probably think PETA is going too far. You are good. Good. Good. Good.

You are  Rosaline Carter. You are Betty Ford. You are Lady-Bird Johnson. You are not Eleanor Roosevelt. You are not Mary Todd.

There are girls who elide, escape, evade the boundaries. They play in the dark like cultural ninjas. Hillary Clinton? Good girl or bad? Charlize Theron? Good girl or bad? Virginia Woolf? Good girl or bad?

And clearly no small part of the problem is our incessant will to categorize women. We don’t put men in the same categories. A bad boy is charming. He is just being naughty. He doesn’t decimate the culture at large with his badness. No senator’s wife will ever call for Colin Farrell’s death as one famously did for Britney during her husband's 2004 campaign. A bad man is very bad indeed, but a man has to be really bad to be called “bad.” Idi Amin was bad. Mussolini. Hitler. Bad, bad men.

We women get very little cultural latitude. It’s really no small wonder, then, why so many of us now are venerating the bad girl, perhaps more than ever. It’s really pretty overdetermined to be a good girl. You have to be so much to so many; you kind of have to wonder when you get to be what you want to yourself. Good girls are allowed to like sex now, and that’s a new phenomena. However, they still have to like it only in certain prescribed regulated ways. Girls still wonder how many sex partners are too many, as if there’s a golden number and past that you are forever emblazoned with a big baroque “S” for “slut.”

Good girls can work. They can suffer life’s slings and arrows. They can emerge,  maybe beaten slightly, but still smiling and they are still good (see Berry, Halley and Aniston, Jennifer). Good girls can divorce (see Garner, Jennifer), have children out of wedlock (see Flockhart, Calista), and be lesbians (see Bono, Chastity). Good girls seem to have a lot more leniency than they used to.

And yet, perhaps not. It might be that even in the third wave of feminism the old adage remains true: Good Girls Go to Heaven, but Bad Girls Go Everywhere. If you want real movement in this culture; if you want to be able to kick up your heels and enjoy your life on your own terms; if you want to speak your mind, good, bad or ugly; you’re gonna be a bad girl. Or you’re just going to look at them wistfully, wishing that you too had those invisible balls that makes all things—from the nadir of the upskirt to the apogee of art—possible.

Comments

[Alana]

Hot fucking damn, CG. This is an incredible essay deserving not only much praise but wide-spread publication. This is now my most favorite piece of writing from you. What an argument you make. As per usual, you've got me thinking.

XXOO
A

[Mark]

That was a really good read. My two cents: why be good when being bad is so much more fun. :)

[O]

I have a theory that the default setting for most women is "good girl". It's not easy being a "good girl", but it's about conforming. Being a bad girl requires some self-invention, at least. Maybe that's why it's so appealing to be one.

I loved this post.

love
O

[Heidi]

I spent a good part of my life admiring bad girls but too afraid to be one, and too lacking in confidence (having always been fat) to think I could be one. When I truly embraced a polyamorous path, I confessed on some email list that I'd always wanted to be a slut. Now I am, kinda sorta.

Publicly, mostly I am still a good girl. I volunteer, I do work for the public good. I worry that the good works could be harmed by my bad girlness if the right people discover it. I don't keep it secret, but I don't advertise it either.

When I think back to the bad girls I admired in high school, I think that I wanted their power of choice. They could openly enjoy sex and sexiness. They certainly didn't seem to fear that.

They were friendly too, unlike the 'good girls'.

I admired (and still do) their boldness. I admire that about you, Chelsea Girl, as well as your intelligence and your sexiness.

[mishagray]

Excellent. I'm digging it!
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/Go_bad_girl_Go

[Prince of Darfur]

Bad girls are more daring and enjoy more freedom, but they don't have near as many dimensions as good girls. It's a false dichotomy. Your "(good girls) still have to like it only in certain prescribed regulated ways" tells me you have never fucked a good girl. Good girls are much better in bed than bad girls, in my experience.

[Raven]

Great writing. I have been analyzing this bad/good girl myths in my own life recently. This was eloquent.

[liese]

if you haven't read Elizabeth Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, you should. she's not nearly so succinct as you, but it's an interesting and entertaining read.

[Chris]

Mae West was certainly queen of the Bad Girls, but there was one other rival for that crown: Tallulah Bankhead. What she had to say on the subject was, "Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have the time." You, along with every other female sexblogger, seem to have proved her wrong nicely.

[Krysta]

I only wish I could write half that well. Permission to reprint?

[Goose]

I'll have to post a full response to this. I think its time for a hybrid.

[Jonathan]

You might be interested in a test I did on my blog over the weekend - a fake post about Britney... you should have seen the hit spike it caused...

[Orv]

How could you skip the baddest bad girl of them all, Courtney Love? I just adore her, obviously brilliant (musician, actor, poet) and obviously totally out of control in almost every way. She has pissed off just about everyone and everything at some point, and we can all kiss her ass. I for one would be delighted to do so.

[Paul]

I think this is a false distinction, and it creates a silly opposition between personality traits that one could reasonably expect to find blended together in many people. Mae West might have been a bad girl, but she wasn't all bad girl. There are many women who are good girls but not all good, thankfully. Don't you think you're just playing to the stereotypes by offering up this either/or choice? Why can't Mommy whip daddy after the baby is in bed? Why can't the dominatrix harbor her own fantasies, not of whips and chains, but of domestication and smiling sweetly at dinner parties with boring people? Why should anyone have to choose between these roles?

[chelsea girl]

Yes, obviously the good girl/bad girl dichotomy is a false dilemma. I think that idea is the subtext of my piece, though perhaps I should have made it more oblique.

My point is less that there is this dyadic distinction than that our culture feels--even feels increasingly--the need to make it. I would have like to believe that feminism would make it less necessary, not more, to divide the good from the bad. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true.

No one is either bad girl or a good girl. Each, in its own way, is a fiction, is problematic and is impossible to inhabit.

I suppose I can attribute my lack of clarity on this matter to the fact that I wrote this piece in about 45 minutes and on cold medication. Of course Mommy can whip Daddy, if Mommy and Daddy want that. No one is arguing with your right to pleasure--or anyone else's--least of all me. I'm merely suggesting that perhaps as necessary as these terms have been to both proscribe and prescribe behavior, it's time to reconsider them.

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

[Caliban]

Someday someone somewhere will search for "Lindsey Lohan and Jean Rhys" and get to this post. But my question is: what do you know about Ariana Huffington that I don't (that makes her a bad girl)? I mean, she's just BAD, right? Also, for the record: Virginia Woolf, bad. Charlize Theron, good.

[t'Sade]

A wonderful little essay. It really does point out the double-standard in life, but also how there are so many people who are so... skittish about preceptions. I've been looking at the various "OMG" news in my mate's US Weekly and going "and..." because it was just someone expressing themselves, no reason to think they are destroying the world. The backlash from little things like that I feel is so completely out of place, it confuses me.

I say let them do what they want, as long as they harm no one. :)

[Mu Ling]

Great writing, but I think that the post only serves in the end to perpetuate and reinforce the dichotomy that you say you're critiquing. In the comments, you wrote, "Yes, obviously the good girl/bad girl dichotomy is a false dilemma. I think that idea is the subtext of my piece, though perhaps I should have made it more oblique."

More "oblique"? I'd have to say, maybe less "oblique." The subtext was so deeply buried behind the repeated invocation of the divide, with the accompanying proliferating examples, that I think most people missed it, especially judging by most of the comments. True, you did say, "And clearly no small part of the problem is our incessant will to categorize women. We don’t put men in the same categories." But after briefly expounding on that idea, the post seems to me to drop it instead of developing it further. And the last paragraph-- I got that the invocation of "balls" is meant to be ironic, but even so, in the context of the entire post, it felt to me as a valorization of "balls" as the sign of individuality, creativity and courage.

I don't know. I might be taking this all a bit too personally. I'm a good girl. Multiple degrees, married young, contributing to my retirement account, writing thank-you notes. I'm not hawt, I'm not rebellious, I'm not wild. If a guy tells me to go away, he's tired of me -- I go away, I don't smash in his windshield. I don't flash strangers in public. But none of this makes me a tool of the cultural order. I do try to see the world as it is, without illusions, to speak my mind, and to live my life on my own terms. How can someone like me exist? In the terms set out by this post, I can't, not really. The post touches on the possibility of living in the tension created by the divide, but it slides off that edge in the end.

[chelsea girl]

It's. A. Blog. Post.

I wrote it in 45 minutes on cold medicine. It's not a book. It hasn't been edited by an editor or vetted by scholars. I haven't spent hours or years agonizing over its organization or its phrasing. In rereading it and reading comments, do I find there are things I wish I'd said or said differently?

Yes. But let me reiterate for again time: blog post.

Something people sneak in reading while at work or before thier morning coffee.

Mu Ling, you exist as much as any of us do.

Holy crow, people.
chelsea

[Mu Ling]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Gee whiz. I thought I was paying you a compliment by taking your ideas seriously. I know it's a blog post! I thought it was great, very thought-provoking. So yeah, my take on it is a little different from that of most of your other commenters. Surely you write to engage our minds and not just that part of us that goes all gooey over you!

I don't think I said anything that was rude or offensive. Maybe I was critical of your ideas, but I was civil about it. I offered my thoughts, not nitpicking over your grammar and wording.

I was hoping for an interesting discussion, and yeah, of course it would be a bloggy discussion, not a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study. Given that this is a thinky blog as well as a sexy one, I didn't think I was being out of line, but I do apologize if I was.

[StripGoddess]

What a gorgeously well written ode!

Great job! <3

[e]

Sometimes being bad isn't as much fun as people think.

I spend most of my 20's being very, very bad. I was gleefully bad. It was simultaneously fun, exhilirating and exhausting, dangerous and depressing. Being bad is sometimes nothing more than being self-destructive.

The "good" path got it's reputation for a reason... it is well traveled and has reletively few dangers. It may not be an easier path, but it is less risky. Less risky but also less exciting. Funny how when you get a little older, excitement just seems, well, less exciting to you. That's probably what happened to Madonna.

The trick is reaching that point with as few scars as possible, I suppose. Or at least only with scars you can live with.

[tom paine]

Human nature has a love/hate relationship to success. Bad girls are successful, in that they're getting what they (and probably most of us) want. It's why Tony Soprano is sexy and admired: he does whatever he wants with no consequences. It's an old paradigm (the "tricky slave" of Roman comedy, or Monkey King in China).

So we admire a bad girl who does well for herself, then hoot and holler when she falls. It's definitely an example of bad faith, but perfect human.

I wrote a long post in praise of women who take control of their sexuality. I despise passive women who wheedle and moan about sex, and adore those ones who know what they want and go get it.

[Kitty Laverne]

I agree that Mu Ling was paying you a compliment with her close reading of your writing. The response of "it's just a blog post, written quickly, on meds" is not a rejoinder worthy of you, Ms. Post Graduate Faster Faster Kill Pussycat!

And while I'm here may I add that the silent film "Pandora's Box" starring Louise Brooks as Lulu is a fascinating study of this paradox, false dilemma, whatever you call it. Hell, her whole life was that story.

Your fan, Kitty

["gina']

i was always afraid to be a bad girl. people always saw me the EXACT opposite. i never thought that i had it in me. now that i'm coming into my new self i realized that being a bad girl is a hell of a lot more fun. and now i always get what i want! keep up the good work