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All my life, I’ve been the “good girl.” That’s not to say I’m perfect or I’ve never done anything foul in my life. Being a good girl has more to do with the conventions you follow and the perceptions you fulfill. And after playing this role almost my entire life, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not something I want to model for my daughter. I’ve decided I don’t want to teach her to be a good girl.
What could be so bad about being a “good girl?” It’s got the word “good” in it, right? I liken it to the nice guy syndrome. Most guys will firmly agree “nice guys finish last” and bad boys get all the girls. When I have asked some nice guys I know who are happily married, with children, whether they believe they finished last, they can never tell me. It’s complicated, they say.
I agree, it is complicated.
I sometimes wonder what my adolescence would have been like if I didn’t have the classification of “good girl” to live up to. Girls learn early how to classify themselves, so boys and men will know which ones of us are “okay” to abuse. Much of our early education on being a proper “lady” started with, “Good girls don’t…”
But half the time, good girls actually do: have sex and enjoy it. Good girls do have children out of wedlock. Good girls do have tattoos and become mothers and ride Harleys. Good girls do let a cuss word slip, hallelujah. Good girls do make the same “mistakes” as bad girls and are no less valuable. The line of demarcation is not as straight as we would think.
Without the threat of the bad girl, “good girls” have no leverage. There has to be That girl you consider yourself better than because she does X and you don’t do that (because you’re a “good girl.”) We rattle off all the consequences bad girls will reap. You wear short clothes, so you deserve to get raped / catcalled / knocked up 50-leven times / beaten up by your lover. We are taught that “bad girls” deserve/earn mistreatment. And that conditioning follows us through adulthood. I hear it when grown women talk about “them h**s” as if “hoes” are a third gender class.
And there is also the resentful “these h**s stay winning” saying to affirm that belief.
Underlying the designation of “good girl” is the expectation “good” things will come to you. We believe we’ll be spared heartbreak because we are “good girls.” That’s not how it works. But “good girls” do get taken advantage of by men. There is no magic separation between “good” and “bad” that saves you from scumbags. And that whole setup, the promise that if we are good enough girls, we’ll find that one guy to treat us right because we aren’t bad… isn’t a surefire formula.
In this way, it’s similar to the belief being a nice guy will get automatically get you a nice girl. When that doesn’t exactly happen, people are confused, bitter. I can cook. I can clean. I keep myself nice. I have a job. I’m smart. I’m attractive. I don’t sleep around. Why isn’t anyone noticing me? When we add up our qualifications like a bill, we expect someone to pay us the reward for our obedience to social norms.
I don’t want to teach my daughter to buy into this behavior-reward system rife with disappointments and misconceptions.
However, I can truthfully say making good decisions in my life has gotten me a lot farther than being a “good girl” has. They are not the same thing. I had to stop holding myself up against other people and believing I deserved better in life than them. I just had to believe I deserved good in life, period, not because I followed all the rules.
I want to teach my daughter to be good regardless of the people around her, because that’s who she wants to be, who God wants her to be. She will never have the silent insult of “bad girl” hanging over her head from me like an anvil. She will have enough labels to navigate anyway.
Originally published at TrulyTafakari.com.
For more from wife, mama and word ninja Dara Tafakari, check out trulytafakari.com where you can find Dara’s writing on the crazy collisions of life, race, popular culture, and the occasional nerd activity–with an offbeat dose of humor and clarity.
