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.
What can I say that she didn't? I loved this post, and felt the need to share it with those who may not know of Chelsea and her greatness. I only wish I could write half as well as she does.
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