Far worse than this public image, however, is the negative self-image that results when women are forced to choose between "good" and "bad". For, society just can't conjure a woman good and bad at once. Although women have both the desire and ability to create a peaceful coexistence between the two (for "bad" and "good" to show a unified front), society isn't ready for it. No, society just can't conjure a woman who is both good and bad at once. This contradiction, this complexity of character, this reality, OUR reality, baffles an unsuspecting world that would prefer to reduce us, categorize us, and label us.
Since society cannot accept our reality, we are forced to operate within the rigid constraints of society's reality. Society forces us to choose, and choosing equals losing...losing a part of who we are. The definition/ image we pick is irrelevant - both are wrong. Inherent in the choice itself is the inevitability of denying a part of who we are in the process. When we choose "good" or "bad", we forgo the complex reality of our character in an attempt to fit society's rigid definitions.
We are all, in fact, both good and bad. Choice between the two forces women to deny a part of who they are. This self-denial leads to grave results, both for the individual and society as a whole. However, much of society has yet to understand that good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity. Even good old-fashioned Christianity seems to recognize the slippery slope of sin and saintliness. In Mary Magdalene, we see a whore who becomes a devotee of Christ; in the Virgin Mary, an out-of-wedlock birth becomes an immaculate conception, and so on.
Until society accepts this dichotomy, women will continue to be labeled and categorized. Even if we refuse to make a choice, one will be made for us regardless. Might as well own our label as much as possible. Like all other women, I'm both. However, forced to choose, I went with "bad" a long time ago, and I'd do it all over again. Here's why: Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar. We Still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of thirty-five had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married. We still have to endure The Rules and learn never to accept a Saturday-night date if it's after Wednesday. And we're still stuck with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. So why be good?
Women seem to be the repository of eons of ages of bad blood beginning with Eve, ending our stay in Eden with her curiosity and lust for strange fruit, and it has started to seem that even if we act like good girls, the world is still quite likely to find us bad.
If fascination with fabulous women of great mischief were not a real phenomenon, the media probably would have invented it. In 1993, People, put Sharon Stone on its cover next to the caption "HOLLYWOOD'S SEXY REBELS: SHARON STONE, SHANNEN DOHERTY, KIM BASINGER and a new breed of actress are playing by their own rules and making no apologies for taking charge of their lives." A Village Voice "Female Trouble" column titles "Season of the Bitch" mused that Sharon Stone gets to play characters who kill men and say, "I wasn't dating him; I was fucking him." Novelist Katherine Dunn weighed in on bad girls in Vogue in 1995, pointing out, "It isn't the 'Fuck me' pump anymore. Now it's the 'Fuck you' shoe," and also noted that "women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice."
In april 1996 Esquire gave the subject of dangerous women perhaps the most thoughtful and serious attention when it put Nadja Auermann, sharply and coldly blonde, looking every inch the pinup girl for the Third Reich, on a black-and-white cover with the headline "I'M SORRY I RUINED YOUR LIFE." The accompanying essay by Ron Rosenbaum, "In Praise of Difficult women," seemed a triumph for her kind because it viewed those manipulative, heartbreaking wonders of wile precisely as they would like to see themselves: as trouble, trouble and more trouble - but worth every minute of hell.
Glamour published "22 occasions when you shouldn't hesitate to be a bitch," including the all-encompassing "When reason, negotiation and fury have failed." A 'zine called Bitch with the tag line "Feminist Response to Pop Culture" appeared in 1996, and Bust, one of the more glossy house organs o female trouble, devoted a whole issue to bad girls, including an essay by Courtney Love called "Bad Like Me," a manifesto that explained, "Bad girls fuck your boyfriends, yeah, but we feel shitty about it, sort of." The issue's focus was not on bitches per se, but it is safe to argue that anytime a woman projects the kind of intense personality that all the above mentioned women do, she is somebody's idea of a bitch.
