October 13, 2007
The Good, The Bad, and the Angry


cydytame071.jpgI have been known to flash a panty or a pussy. I’ve been guilty of my fair share of nipple slips, long before that was a term in cultural use. I have many tattoos. I’ve been paid to Jello wrestle, and I was a stripper. I have, from time to time, engaged in some brief fisticuffs. I’m not above or beyond getting into near-physical altercations with taxi drivers. I have drunk to excess and dabbled in illegal, unprescribed and pleasurable drugs.

I’ve shoplifted. My parents have caught me in bed, naked and rubbing naughty bits with another woman. I’ve fucked more men than I can recall; insert the verb “blown” and that number doubles. I swear like a longshoreman. I’ve stolen men from my girlfriends, and I’ve knowingly carried on affairs with married men. In many ways, I have been a prototypical bad girl.

Currently, I suppose, I’m not that bad. I don’t smoke or rat my hair. I stand by my woman. I’ve stolen neither boyfriend nor clothing for decades. I guess I’m no longer bad-I’m just drawn that way. Still, I’m not quite a good girl either. I live in a purgatory of social distinctions, some nameless no-woman’s-land, that utopia between Sandra Dee and Lindsay Lohan, between Judy Collins and Janis Joplin, between Eudora Welty and Edna St. Vincent-Millay, between Daphne Blake and Betty Boop. I’m in a place which gives me, frankly, an interesting perspective.

Wedged between Goodgirlville and Badgirltown I’ve sat in quiet amazement at the vitriol slung in the general direction of our culture’s current crop of bad girls. Whether it’s Paris or Lindsay or Britney or Angelina, our bad girls get taken down by popular culture-all of it.Television, radio, print, blogs, you name it; media has a hard-on for putting the smack down on our bad girls.

Unquestionably, these women have made some very dubious life choices. Anyone who isn’t living under a rock knows that currently Paris is serving soft time in a California pokey for repeated DUI offences; that after a few traffic accidents and some unflattering photos, Lindsay is in rehab, again; that in the past two years, Britney has married badly, popped out two kids, palled around with Paris, gone to rehab and is now busy trying to resurrect both her career and her hairstyle; and that Angelina probably seduced her partner Brad Pitt while he was married and most recently has celebrated the opening of a film about journalists by limiting free speech.

There is no debate that these women have, to varying degrees, done some bad things. Immoral, problematic, unconscionable, and even dangerous things. I just wonder if what they’ve done deserves the kind of unanimous vitriol that they systematically receive in the press, on the Web, and on the street. A cursory Google search, a brief scan of headlines, ten minutes of watching ET or Access Hollywood, and you’ll see any number of stories on these women-and others from Paris’s frenemy Nicole Ritchie to Justin Timberlake’s beau Jessica Biel-that excoriate them for their recent, and past, excesses. Derision is heaped upon ridicule is heaped upon scorn as a matter of course when the media covers these women.

What it looks like to me, sitting pretty as I am on that isthmus between bad and good girlhood, is that our media is really pissed off at our bad girls. And so are we who consume the stories that the media forcefeeds us, like geese, regularly. We are nearly toxic with Paris, Britney, Lindsay et al. We are mad as hell, and we just can’t take it anymore. Except, of course, we can, and we do.

I have to wonder exactly what these women have done that has pissed our culture off so mightily. Definitely, Paris’s driving while drunk endangered both herself and others, but lots of people DUI and they don’t receive the kind of hatred she has. Lindsay allegedly hit a paparazzi, but we don’t really seem to care about that. Britney has shown herself repeatedly to be a careless mother at best, but again, we seem to have forgotten the time she nearly dropped her baby in the excitement over her inebriated shaving of her head. We forget that Angelina’s good works absolutely should outshine her possible adultery or the fact that she used to tout her wild sex life with then-husband Billy Bob Thornton loudly and at uncomfortable length.

A couple of weeks ago, CNN ran a story called “Lessons for Bad Girls”; in it the reporter, Brooke Anderson, held up squeaky-gleaming versions of good girls like Kelly Clarkson, Hillary Duff and Jennifer Love-Hewitt to serve as exemplars of behavior to the bad girls, girls who, according to Anderson, were vying for “Miss Party Thing 2007,” a term she deploys in acid tones. Anderson, buttressed by various talking heads, avers that what the “good girls” do that the “bad girls” don’t is work hard, keep their private lives behind closed doors, and stay at home rather than work the red carpet.

Lindsay, one might note, has put out six movies in the past two years, while Hillary Duff has put out one film and has one in post-production. Sure, both Kelly and Jennifer have been busy recording CDs and television shows, respectively. But Paris Hilton has put out two films, albeit minor, but she’s also been in four television series and several advertisements and recorded an album (even if it wasn’t very good, she still did it). Of the three women that CNN picks out, only Britney hasn’t been working in the past two years, but she has had two kids. These women are not slouches, whatever they may be. They work hard, even if what they do isn’t always Oscar quality.

It’s not their work that makes these girls bad; it’s their clubbing. Which is weird to me because I remember the bad boys of the 80’s and 90’s, the days when Johnny Depp wrecked hotel rooms, when Sean Penn punched photogs, when Charlie Sheen rented hookers by the dozen, when River Phoenix OD’d in front of the Viper Room, and what I remember is that these boys were genially chided for their antics. They certainly weren’t raked over the coals. We just don’t treat our bad girls with the indulgence that we treat our bad boys.

Let’s see: out of the four bad girls I’ve named, we have two whom we know have been treated for substance abuse, one who probably should be, and one who most likely has been but doesn’t say anything about it. Why, then, the derision? Why do we love to hate them so much? And what does our vitriol say about us?

I have to guess that these women make us feel deeply uncomfortable and profoundly jealous. With their in-our-face antics, their upskirt shots and vials of blood and knife play, these girls push the envelope of comfortable femininity. We can accept that girls fuck like rabid muskrats and do shots and hate themselves enough to cut themselves as long as we don’t actually know about it. We can’t forgive them. though, when we do. All we can do is watch, read, and listen. And, then, immobile in our ire, lash out and look for more.


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