I posed topless for a female photographer who specializes in boudoir. I'm lying on the bed in a man's velvet smoking jacket, hair blown across my face. I look at the camera. It's a beautiful portrait (the photographer is very talented) and I'm proud of it. It reminds me slightly of Manet's Olympia. That painting caused a scandal at the time (1863) -- not because the subject was nude -- but because of how she stares at the viewer instead of looking away demurely.
It's that act of shameless eye contact that makes her - according to the moral dictates of the era -- truly "bad".
I once said to someone, "I don't know if I'm a good girl with a bad streak, or a bad girl with a good streak." But I was being ironic. My real point was that, like any other woman (or man), I am both and neither.
In fact, it's kind of amazing to me that the good girl/bad girl dichotomy still exists. It came up again when movie star Reese Witherspoon accepted an award on television and took her speech as an opportunity to slam other, younger women for being "bad".
"I understand that it's cool to be bad, I get it," she said, in that tone of false camaraderie women sometimes use before they slip in the knife. "But it's possible to make it in Hollywood without being on a reality show.And when I was coming up, a sex tape was something you hid under your bedAnd when you take naked pictures of yourself, you hide your face! Hide your face!" She finished off by declaring that she was going to try to make it "cool" to be a "good girl".
But imagine this:
Instead of criticizing the same young women for the same things that everybody else is already criticizing them for, she could have slammed reality shows for their misogynist (and monotonous) depiction of women.
She could have criticized the kind of media that turns a girl like Paris Hilton into a celebrity in the first place.
She could have pointed out how advertising - which is so very "everywhere" that we no longer notice it as we're breathing it in - co-opts rebellion and sells it back to girls in the "you've come a long way, baby" pseudo-liberation supposedly found in a package of cigarettes.
She could have criticized a culture that trains girls to define themselves by their sexual appeal only to punish them for it.
She could have echoed Laurel Ulrich's famous comment that "well-behaved women seldom make history" and pointed out that 'bad' doesn't have to mean shallow and self-destructive. It can mean cutting against the traditional good-girl dictates of passive and pretty and pleasing and quiet. It can mean speaking up against the status quo, the double standard, the beauty myth. It can mean rejecting the idea that your moral nature depends not on what you "do", but on what you "don't" do (have sex).
It can mean "revolution not rebellion. "
She could have said: "If you're going to be 'bad', make it MEAN SOMETHINGother than self-sabotage." read more at TW
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