ABSTRACT
In Western culture, two misguided and oppositional roles women have been trained to choose for themselves are the either/or of good girl or bad girl. The good girl is a particularly pernicious role to assume. I should know; I was one. Like so many of my generation, I was determined not to be like my mother. This determination, pervasive among my peers, suggests the extent of influence of the founding fathers of culture on Western female consciousness. It seems that “good” has been understood to mean sweet, docile, agreeable, and supportive. “Good” means to corset oneself for the sake of an idea (Perera, 1990), which is to be Little Miss Muffet, daddy’s little girl, the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. As such, lying there in golden pothood, good girls become idealized, perfected objects, pedestaled for the male gaze. Schooled in passivity-devitalized and dehumanized-the good girl is all surface; and so she seeks the reflecting surface of the mirror to check her face for smoothness and, if she is White, the right amount of redness to offset her pale skin. She pats her hair and straightens her dress (always a dress) and keeps her legs crossed while sitting on her tuffet. Good girlism (Dean & Kolitch, 1998) is a copy of an idea of an ideal. If she were in the East, she would be a geisha. Being in the West, she is consumed with Venus envy (Haiken, 1997).
