Good Girls Don’t Improvise: You should smile.

This last Saturday I gave my GOOD GIRLS AREN’T FUNNY talk to a great group of women at The Barrow Group School in Midtown Manhattan. It was a lively discussion and we went about an hour over the published time, but no one seemed to mind.  (Least of all me!) I appreciated how open the women were to recognizing the GOOD WOMAN in ourselves and how it isn’t our authentic voice, and it isn’t going to get us where we want to go.

One question or comment that always seems to pop up at some point is that is being GOOD isn’t helping us, is being BAD the answer? And it most definitely isn’t the point of my talk or the answer, I feel.  But a fair enough question. I think when we start to learn where this GOOD WOMAN came from in culture (read more here from my first post), and how it’s a construct with very specific goals in mind, we can often begin to get upset about her and want to chuck her out the window. And a “screw that!” attitude can come up…one that wants to fly in the face of anyone that tells a woman that she has to be nice, pretty, good, and selfless.

I remembered during this last talk of when I was a teenager, walking through town in St Louis, Missouri where I’m from, and an older man passed me and said, “You should smile.”  He said it with such a confusing mix of politeness, flirtation, superiority, condemnation, and…something else…almost threatening?  Hard to remember…but I just remember feeling both ‘bad’ like I SHOULD smile because girls smile and men like that…AND complete rage and wanting to kick his teeth in, with a powerful comeback line like, “…and you should mind your own business and not tell women what to do old man!!!”  However, I did neither…but it obviously has stayed with me all these years.  What WAS the right thing???

And I think about what a lot of younger women are expressing these days…and what I expressed in my early 20′s, tasting the freedoms that I had…and it definitely had a twinge of “no one tells ME what to do!”…I felt completely justified in pursuing whatever I wanted and doing whatever I cared to and hey, watch out if you tried to tell me I couldn’t or look at me funny if you didn’t approve.  And I look at the “role models” for young women today…Britney, Paris, Lindsay, and the other train wrecks out there. And they all seem to have a mantra in there that  says “I won’t be a good girl – in fact, I’m going to be BAD!” Is it explicit?…for some yes.  Look at magazine covers, listen to lyrics or watch music videos. It’s everywhere. For other women, not as explicit…but it seems to be there.

What I have been discovering in the work of EnlightenNext’s Evolving Women Project, is that postmodernity was a total rejection of the modern and traditional woman.  It said, “we will no longer accept the confining roles you place on us and we want to create our lives the way WE want them, not by your definitions, thank you very much.”  And so, as with any reactive movement, it seemed that women were defined by NOT being what came before.  But is that where the story ends? Is that how we’re going to define the new woman? But NOT being like the old version?  So is rejecting the GOOD GIRL end up meaning that we can be as bad as we want?  I surely hope not.  I want to co-create with my sisters a new woman who has moved on from that…because THAT motive is still not free…not any more free than being IN the structure that confines you. Whether you’re in it or proving that you’re not in it, you’re still relating to it to define you.

So what would happen if we take our attention off of it all together and start thinking, more importantly, who do we WANT WOMAN TO BECOME?  I start thinking of words and phrases like: dignified, respected, women as leaders, supportive, non-dramatic/overly emotional, not merely sexual beings, valued for more than our ability to attract, new…the list starts to look less and less good girl vs. bad girl to me, and more and more what I want to create and be an exemplar of for the younger women that I see every day, looking desperately for the right direction to go. If we aren’t the ones showing them, who will? Britney? Paris? If so, that will be such a loss and such a crime, especially since so many women fought so, so, so hard for so long to win us the freedoms we all take for granted.  Did they really fight that hard so we could be just be bad girls and have a lot of fun? I don’t think so. And I want to make good on the promise they brought to the table…we can be FREE WOMEN for the first time in the history of women.  So let’s do THAT.

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