you so baaad

This either good girl or bad girl identity situation made me laugh today because reading the Merskin article finally gave light of what a bad girl can be. For some reason, I always thought bad girls were BADASSES! To me, the bad girl was always someone who ditched boring classes, stole from the mall, wore heavy eyeliner and was never afraid of boys-in fact, she’d kick his ass if need be. It never occurred to me that bad actually meant a girl of lesser quality despite the fact that I’m pretty interested in what it was like to be female generations before me, where being good was a much more serious affair. I mean, one of my favorite movies is Splendor in the Gras-which is ALL about trying to maintain the pureness of being good. My brain is just funny like that sometimes. (Trailer for Splendor in the Grass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMs6eC0ZBQE).

Anyway…it’s just insane to me to that this hierarchy exists between humans and especially women because we are still very much considered to belong to a class lower than men. You’d think we’d ban together because of this shared branding. Perhaps this distinction of good and bad derives amongst women because 1. This social organizational construction serves as a facilitator for both the creator and acceptor or receiver and 2. It provides women with the power that they are starving for, yet cannot gain elsewhere in their lives. Well, Brown says it perfectly I think: “It's a story about containment and dismissal that gets acted out by girls on each other because this is the safest and easiest outlet for girls' outrage and frustration. Simply put, girls' treatment of other girls is too often a reflection of and a reaction to the way society sees and treats them.”

And Merskin’s right too. These two options for identity aren’t so black and white. So we have the Jammer Girl, which serves as the happy and healthy direction for those who don’t want to fall into the abyss of such rigidness. But it goes beyond these three choices too. Even Mean Girls had more groups to choose from. While both the good (Cady’s first friends), bad (Plastics) and Jammer (Cady), there are also the Sexually Active Band Geeks, Sexy Black Girls, Cool Asians yada yada yada.

Unfortunately, identities are often believed to be two dimensional because girls and women are mostly advertised as such. Go through any Publix check out line (at least in Florida), and you will be bombarded with magazines that are still trying to prepare women like a thanksgiving turkey: hot and tender on the outside-but stuffed with last night’s left overs on the inside (this lame becomes funnier if you imagine Palin using that joke). But I agree with what Merksin is saying about the internet providing both a safe personal and private environment for people, and believe that it has the power to empower girls on a much larger scale than any other resource. We just have to encourage our girls and each other to keep a balance between the social and educational sites. And to of course “live your life in the real world first before editing it on myspace”-some paraphrased quote off of a menu I saw recently.