“Good Girls Gone Bad” Syndrome

She used to be the sweetest girl ever
Now she like sour amoretta
She used to run track back in high school
Now she tricks off the track right by school

- The Sweetest Girl – Wyclef Jean featuring Akon

I make them good girls go bad
I make them good girls go
Good girls go bad

- (I Make) Good Girls Go Bad – Cobra Starship

Lights is blinding,
girls need blinders
so they can step out of bounds quick,
the side lines is blind with casualties,
who sip the lite casually, then gradually become worse,
don’t bite the apple Eve,
caught up in the in crowd,
now you’re in-style,
and in the winter gets cold en vogue with your skin out,
the city of sin is a pity on a whim.
good girls gone bad, the city’s filled with them,
Mommy took a bus trip and now she got her bust out,
everybody ride her, just like a bus route

- Empire State of Mind – Jay Z

Yes, I love pop music. Having been a dancer for a number of years, anything that makes me want to move is labeled good in my book. Now that I have that admission out of the way, my love of pop music results in encountering a stratosphere of jaw dropping messages that pop culture continuously pushes. One theme which has made me particularly chagrined over time is the “good girls gone bad” theme.

This theme is one of those that makes me grit my teeth more than others. Finally upon downloading Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind and discovering it was retread yet again (The Sweetest Girl had me yelling at the radio for awhile.) I sort of boiled over. This ridiculously pervasive attitude springs in part from the idea that men have a biological need for sex and must do what they can to procure it while women are supposed to withhold, do not need sex and should not want it. That the “promiscuous” woman, or the stripper and prostitute are “good girls gone bad” is a double standard that serves to prevent men from being held accountable for what we are all supposed to believe is just business as usual, aka “biologically sanctioned” degradation.

In the same way that the actions of abusers and rapists are erased through the language we use and the victim subsequently gets blamed, the same occurs with this “good girls gone bad” meme. While the “fall” of a woman in particular ways is an event to pay attention to and police, that a man is never held accountable for his side of the equation creates a continuum of behavior that is at best tolerated and at worst encouraged. It’s the promiscuous woman, or the stripper and the prostitute who cause the blemish on society rather than the man that creates the demand. (I’ll hold off on the crazy concept that women also want and like sex for another day.) Same justification Islamic fundamentalists use for the Burqa. We’ve even gone so far as to label places where men traffic in women “gentleman’s clubs” – business as usual when a gentleman participates in le doux commerce – women are just something else to be bought and sold.

Oh, but hey, silly me…. how could I forget that a man’s role isn’t completely erased in this equation……. Life for a pimp is tough! (Life Out There is Hard for a Pimp – Three Six Mafia)

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