“Good Girls Gone Bad” Syndrome
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
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)
Posted in Misogyny | 3 Comments »
Katha Pollitt puts into words my frustrations with the (book) world in a way I haven’t managed yet with her review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers. I need to smirk for a moment that the New York Times recruited a self identified feminist to review it who then subsequently dismissed it as something for the age of “bellbottoms” and “conscious-raising” for using such tired words as patriarchy.
Showalter sees women’s writing as a story of progress toward self-definition: from feminine (imitation of prevailing modes) to feminist (protest) to female (self-discovery), and, finally, free. “American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” We have indeed come a long way, but I’m not so sure we’ve reached nirvana yet. The marketplace, with its many gendered strictures and codes, has not disappeared. Thus, it matters that girls and women will buy fiction by and about both sexes, but boys and men—the relative few who buy fiction at all—stick to their own gender. (There was a reason that J.K. Rowling used her initials instead of her name, and that her student magician hero was not Harriet Potter.) It matters that the Great American Novel for which critics are always hunting is imagined as a modern Moby-Dick, not The House of Mirth. It means there’s a certain kind of critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women, no matter how wonderful they are. Moreover, in literature as in life, men have much more license to display their whole unlovely selves and be admired for it, as the career of Norman Mailer shows.
Many women writers have complained that fiction by women is undervalued because we undervalue the domestic and the personal as opposed to big manly subjects like war and whaling. It’s an important point, but I think there’s something deeper going on. In fact, there are men who write about intimate life and women who take on big public subjects. More different than the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn’t quite come off? If the most prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction? Perhaps we emphasize different elements in similar books and only notice the evidence that confirms our gender biases—and give men more benefits of more doubts, too. Gertrude Stein is a difficult and frustrating writer, but so is the Ezra Pound of The Cantos and the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and nobody serious calls them (as Showalter does Stein) basically frauds.
Try it yourself with the novels and poems on your bookshelf. Jane Updike? John Smiley? And while you’re at it, picture a literary America in which women were not just the major purchasers and readers of imaginative writing but also controlled the world of reviewing, prizes, awards, fellowships, relevant academic jobs, important panels, readings, international festivals, and those infernal best-book-of-the-year/decade/century lists. That this would be a highly speculative exercise suggests that Showalter is a bit overoptimistic. Women writers have come a very long way since Anne Bradstreet, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Austin, but the jury of their peers has yet to be empaneled.
For those who don’t know, Norman Mailer (man, masculine, strong, innovative, thinker, honest) nearly murdered his wife at a party by stabbing her. I have heard his works are towering displays of misogyny, just what’s wrong with women but you know, he’s one of literature’s greats. I’d like to see Valerie Solanas (woman, feminine, crazy, emotional, pmsing, psychotic, man hater) honored in the same fashion! It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we’re taught to think and the subtle shadings that occur based on all the different social cues we pick up. I just wish I had the words to describe it.
As for the book I’m reading now, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty I barely have the words to describe that either. I just feel like I need to hand every single person a copy and say READ IT, because I can’t even begin to ponder how to contain all of the important things in a single blog post. (Perhaps this is one of my biggest problems with writing. Who knows.) Yeah, “lazy black welfare queens” my ASS! They work(ed) harder than any of us so the next time you want to parrot that myth, STFU, sit back and really think if you have any sort of clue or just picked that up in our racist/sexist cultural milieu by OSMOSIS. (And oh my goodness, I guess the new one in vogue is the lazy Mexicans. Yeah, out picking crops you wouldn’t ever deign to touch for cents a day. MMMHMMM. Gotta love the fucked up mythologies we create so we can be ok with the way both we as a society and we as individuals subjugate people.)
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I really need to remember when I visit web sites that are liberal but not expressly feminist that I’m going to see the same heaping misogyny and sexism I do everywhere else. It’s kind of like one of the great mysteries of life – who to hold more in contempt. Conservative men, for saying outright sexist things and supporting anti-woman policies but are at least honest about it? Or liberal men, who may pretend to have some sort of grasp on women’s rights/the issues/feminism but then say and do outright sexist things – defending themselves with “That wasn’t sexist! I love women, I have a mother! AND ROE V. WADE IS IN DANGER, LOOK! (Despite the fact I just used it as a bargaining chip in an effort to endear me to conservative voters everywhere!)”
Most of the time, liberal men win the day. And they sure did when I came across this a few days ago! Huffington Post columnist Michael Seitzman wrote a “humor” column on Sarah Palin awhile back. In it he states:
And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to “first wipe off Palin’s tranny makeup.” I married well.)
Note the “tranny makeup” slur too!
Apparently, some people expressed their ire over his sexism so the next day he writes a column “Sexist? Not so fast.” The typical non-apology after a man makes a sexist remark and is confronted about it. His main argument is – I didn’t mention her gender!!! And that means I wasn’t sexist!! (Because there isn’t a consistent pattern in our culture, a continuum, that reduces women to objects solely for sexual gratification or anything.)
Oh goodness. I could only blink in awe at this utterly simplistic line of reasoning. I’m sorry, and we were talking about Sarah Palin….? I can almost forgive her for “you can see Russia from Alaska” after reading this. He has the nerve to say HE feels insulted that he’s expected to take her seriously and apparently this is justification for being a sexist pig. Not only does the media expect me to vote for Sarah Palin because she has a vagina, but I’m supposed to agree that he wasn’t spouting sexist tripe. I’m supposed to take his pat on the head and the entreaty to remember that there are “real” issues at stake here and “real” sexism to pay attention to.
And one of those things is a padlock on your uterus. Now let’s talk about sexism.
HE feels insulted?? Oh, the absurdity.
But hey, someone has a post on it way better than mine, and with awesome comments! I went over to Shakesville to report this to the “Sarah Palin Sexism Watch” series only to see with relief they had covered it already.
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Watching the most recent Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin makes me sad. I do believe she is woefully unqualified, and it makes me cringe to see her doing badly. As much as I felt I could not fully support a Clinton candidacy (But then, will there ever be a candidate I can fully support? It was naive of me to think Obama would be any different on the issues I’m concerned about, or any Democrat for that matter.), I was never cheering for her loss as others were. The LAST thing I wanted to see was Clinton’s downfall due to how many were gleefully waiting for it. I feel like that’s gradually where my opinion is going in terms of Palin despite feeling that many of her policies are abhorrent and indeed a step back for women.
It seems that with the economic crisis, the Republican use of sexism as a tool to shut people up when talking about Sarah Palin has abated. And while I outlined the sexism I saw being leveled at Palin in a previous post and see more everyday (more to come, trust me) I was incredibly frustrated with the men and some women who began to use it in some cynical bid to women. The “gender and victim cards” of the Clinton campaign were all of a sudden welcomed talks of the sexism towards Palin! My stars! There are many issues that aren’t partisan. This is one.
So.. here is a run down I began in the midst of the furor after the Palin pick. It’s not great, but it’s been bugging me so I’m just going to post it already. It’s been holding up a backlog of other posts.
(more…)
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…as it was to justify the Iraq war. Sadly we had some of the more prominent women’s organizations advocating the war along with male politicians who all of a sudden got this yen for freeing oppressed women from evil brown men! Yeah, ok. Iraqi women thank you for skyrocketing rates of rape, trafficking and prostitution and the destabilization of their families as you sit bandying about the idea of women’s rights being in the Iraqi constitution.
Now we get to see the hypocrisy in action all over again. I think I’ve been in a state of mild shock since Palin was announced as McCain’s VP pick. I admit that I was a little resentful about Carly Fiorina and other Republican women jumping to defend Palin off the bat, but I figured, at least SOMEONE is speaking up about sexism. At the same time, defending a woman from sexism isn’t about whether she’s part of the same political party as you are. I figured Fiorina’s statements would fade off and be forgotten in an “isn’t that quaint” way.
Not so. The Republicans have picked up the idea of sexism and RUN with it. People who were pegging Clinton with using “the gender card” a few weeks ago are discussing sexism on the evening news as if it’s SOMETHING THAT MATTERS TO THEM. I’m angry at this cynical ploy to draw in those of us who ACTUALLY CARE. Sean Hannity is now apparently an expert on what feminism is and declared Palin a feminist the other day. Why? Well, because she’s part of the group “Feminists for Life”! I mean, duh.
So, let’s get a few things out of the way. I think the “gender card/race card” stuff is UTTER BULLSHIT. It prevents actual dialog and REAL conversation about sexism and racism because people are so ready to pounce on anyone who points out injustice. It’s a way to maintain the status quo.
Now – what HAVE I seen sexist towards Sarah Palin? This idea runs rampant that as a mother of five children she could not handle the Vice Presidential position. If Todd Palin were the one up for VP, no one would be asking this question because children are never considered an integral part of a man’s identity. Yet she would be under scrutiny as his wife and would be expected to ACCOMMODATE his bid for VP in whatever way necessary – as a wife, she is considered to have no agency of her own but exists to prop up her husband’s ambitions. Todd Palin the husband and father is not someone who ever enters these conversations of whether as a mother of five, she can do it.
I’ve seen the typical sexism and misogyny coming from liberal men towards any woman they don’t like, a continuation of the hateful diatribe that was leveled towards Clinton and her supporters.
I see the misogyny in the blogs that have appeared to concentrate on her fuckability, because a woman can never be honored solely for her accomplishments and who she is as a person. She is first and foremost a semen receptacle, NEVER a human being. Really boys, I’m sure she’d be flattered you find her worthy. Perhaps the story isn’t WOMEN WILL VOTE FOR ANYONE WITH A VAGINA but rather MEN WILL VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE THEY THINK IS HOT. And let’s not forget they’ll slam a woman who has the nerve to be in the public eye when in their estimation, she’s NOT attractive – how dare she!
Sarah Palin HAS had to endure sexist attacks, and I’m not going to withdraw my support in that arena based on party lines DESPITE her firm belief in policies that will be detrimental to women if they go into effect. AND YET, the Republicans have used the idea of sexism to shut down ANY criticism of Palin, when two weeks ago they were crucifying Clinton for using THE GENDER CARD. This is utter nonsense. A month ago all these men standing up to valiantly defend Palin from “sexist” attacks weren’t batting an eye at the daily stream of misogyny.
Posted in Feminism | No Comments »
I’ve been in the process of writing a new post for the past few days, but I’m so overwhelmed with all I’m reading that I’ve having a bit of trouble focusing. This post will be deleted and replaced with something a little more extensive, but in the meantime, this is why I am so beyond disgusted with Republicans:
Posted in Feminism | 2 Comments »
