The latest false woman-dividing dichotomy
There has long been a primary divider of women. Although it has different names, at its root, it boils down to “good girl/bad girl”. Virgin/whore, Sister/ho, stay at home all self sacrificing mother/selfish ball busting career bitch, and a million others.
It is important to lay out at the beginning here that these are categories that are all about men, not about the women themselves. Men create the categories. Men define women by their relationships with their own manly selves and not by who the women are or what they do. What is a whore, a mother, a virgin, a wife, a sister, when these terms are used by men, other than a definition of the relationship between any particular woman and a man or many men?
Women have and still do scramble to be on the “good” side of that line, whichever side that is, and no wonder. This is because women are not, as a group, somehow stupid and ignorant of the ways of the world. Why do women scramble to be on the right side of the line in order to win male approval? Because male approval carries weight the way approval by women does not. Male approval means you get a better chance at regular meals, a roof over your head, some money in your pocket, and a chance at a life with less violence.
So women rush to present themselves as being on the “good” side of the line, and if it means throwing other women to the wolves (men) in order to be seen as being on the magical side that confers privilege and benefits, then so be it.
But the trouble with doing this, as a woman, is that it is fundamentally a man’s game. Being on the “bad” side of the dichotomy comes with obvious punishments – prison, poverty, public mockery, and being marked by men as an essentially legal target for their violence (what did she expect, acting/dressing that way?). But women who struggled their entire lives to stay on the good side of the line end up finding themselves mocked by men even when they win. Women who succeed in sticking to the good girl definitions of the earlier parts of the 1900s by repressing their sinful sexual desires, waiting till marriage, never straying, never saying naughty things, being appropriately shocked when hearing naughty things said, keeping a spotlessly clean house, not getting a job and devoting their lives to their children in the end were mocked for being frigid, ignorant, fearful, intolerant, religiously fundamentalist, obsessive compulsive to the point of having given their children “complexes”, cold-hearted, domineering, and are used as the symbol of repressiveness that must be overthrown to enable the young (men) to properly express themselves. “Blue haired old ladies” and “Church ladies” are somehow reframed as the primary agents of anti-free speech oppression and the creators of all onerous and ridiculous laws, despite their lack of political or religious representation – old dried up bitches who never had an orgasm and do nothing but complain and ruin everything for everyone else. When competing under men’s terms, women always lose. Even when you win, you lose.
The sexual revolution purported to have fixed this but all it did was create a subculture where the rules are reversed and bad girls became good girls – until/unless they became pregnant and wanted to have the baby and get child support. Then the approved of sexually liberated girl became a vindictive selfish gold digger. I can also say pretty firmly, after living around many many hippies who espouse the “free love” garbage that women who do actually openly have sex with more than one man are condemned by the community as tramps, sluts, bitches, lying two-timers, and the like. “Free love” only applies to men, as it has always only applied to men. “Free love” only meant a woman wasn’t supposed to “chain” a man down with marriage before giving up the pussy. She was, however, still supposed to remain faithful to him until he tired of her, take the responsibility for taking birth control, and have an abortion if he wasn’t ready for a child. If she didn’t play by all of men’s rules for good girls in the subculture she was then shunned for being a bad girl by both the rules of the subculture AND the dominant culture. THIS SYSTEM IS STILL IN PLACE TODAY. All those “Suicide Girls”? They are praised by the men in their subcultural group for defying the oppressive chains of society today, even as they rush to uphold the patriarchal ideal that what matters most about women and a woman’s character is her attractiveness and sexual relationship to men. All they have really done is add a few tattoos and piercings and changed the color of their makeup.
A more subtle definition I’ve seen being talked about lately is “survivor/victim”. Although it was originally invented by female counselors to try to help rape victims regain a sense of self, it has been co-opted by the pop culture to fit the good girl/bad girl dichotomy. Good girls who “get raped” (with passive voice used to hide the fact that nearly all rapists are male) become “survivors” of rape. Built into this term is an older rape myth, no longer explicitly stated but still believed, that in order to be a “good victim” of rape one must have been beaten to within an inch of one’s life resisting the rape or you “actually wanted it”. Thus a “survivor” must have thought at some point during the rape, that she was going to be killed. I have even seen some people claim that’s the real trauma of rape, that the women thought they would be killed, not that they were having their bodies and selves cruelly violated. How does this fit into the modern definition of a “good girl” as being one who is sexually liberated? Why, because a good girl now isn’t horrified by sex, not being frigid and hung up and naive. In fact, she’s cool and tough and likes it rough. But the real problem is she thought he was going to kill her! The fact of a man forcing his penis into a woman’s body and treating her as an object is not seen as criminal in and of itself – no, there must be additional violence or it “doesn’t count”. So all rape victims are “survivors” now, and must define themselves as such, in order to have their experiences taken seriously.
The fact is that most rapists do not kill or attempt to kill their victims. In fact, as most rapists rape their wives/girlfriends/sisters/daughters, they explicitly do NOT want to kill them. They would prefer they still be around to keep house for them. And even with the less commonly occurring stranger rape the preferred method of rape is simply to immobilize the victim through alcohol or drugs. While violent rape with murderous intent is certainly the most horrible manifestation of the crime, it is not what the majority of rape “survivors” have been through.
Yet the term “survivor” persists and has become the new standard term (outside of law enforcement, which is oddly more honest in this). Whenever a term for women is so lovingly embraced by the patriarchy it demands closer attention by observant feminists.
What is the difference between a rape survivor and a victim?
A Survivor (good girl!) has Moved On from her experience. She has gone through the Magical Five Stages of Mourning (when, we don’t know, because she’s never allowed to publicly mourn). She has Made Peace with what happened to her, she Sought Justice through the appropriate patriarchal channels (i.e. useless police and court systems which let almost every rapist walk free) and now she publicly Forgives her Assailant because she knows she’s A Better Person Than Him. And now she warns other young women Not To Do What She Did and to Be Careful because There Are Bad People Out There and You Need To Protect Yourself, but if something bad mysteriously happens to them anyway it is important to uphold patriarchy by Going To The Police. (Why women are even told to go to the police to be revictimized after rape I don’t even know anymore.)
But a rape victim is now a bad girl. Every feminist blogger who has ever opened comments knows that a frequent slur thrown against us is “You are trying to make all women into victims! You are playing the victim card! Stop pretending to be a victim!” “Victim” is apparently a dirty word, and somehow feminists are the ones victimizing women now, simply by pointing out unpleasant truths people would rather ignore.
A bad girl victim is one now who can’t quit crying. Her life has been forever changed. She is afraid to leave her house. She no longer trusts men. And this makes her angry. She feels betrayed by the man she knew who did this to her, by his friends who stood by him. She is still in therapy, is still on Prozac, she bothers her friends when her PTSD being triggered at inconvenient times. She is angry, at him, at the system, at the patriarchy. She hasn’t forgiven him, or the police who wouldn’t listen to her, or her friends who say “maybe you shouldn’t have had a drink or worn that or been out at night by yourself or trusted that guy in the first place” or “well he was just one asshole and you can’t judge all men by what one asshole did”. In fact she may indulge revenge fantasies (although women rarely carry those fantasies out). She needs attention, comfort, care. She is a living reminder that rape is a violation of someone’s personhood – that, in fact, women have a personhood to be violated. She is not a chipper feel-good girl that we can watch on a talk show on television and then say “Well see, rape is bad but it just happens sometimes and anyway it can be overcome so I don’t have to think about it.” She is a bad girl, inconvenient, no longer in the place of happy helpful girl who is just there to make everything wonderful for men. She refuses the term survivor because she doesn’t feel like the same person – she feels like part of her has been destroyed. She doesn’t feel strong and able to publicly talk on tv about how she “was raped”. And for this, society victimizes her further by mocking her pain.
Yet again, in the grand tradition of “Women can’t Win for Losing” even “survivors” get shredded in popular opinion. They are forced to wear the happy calm mask even while people openly criticize everything they did prior to being raped, as if the drink they had somehow FORCED a man to violently abuse her, as if she didn’t have a right as a human being in her own town who has committed no crime to be allowed out unescorted after dark, she is told she didn’t “listen to her own instincts” well enough and thus her lack of attentiveness is partly to blame, and in most cases she smiles and nods and admits “she could have handled things differently”.
Even the women on the pedestal are held up as an example. For the relative privileges they are given over other women they must balance precariously, barely daring to move lest they fall.
As a feminist, one must always be wary of playing the good girl/bad girl game under any of its names. It’s a sneaky thing and easy to fall into. Men even play this game with feminism itself, having decided for us there are “good feminists” (the ones who like sex and porn just fine and still shave their legs and crotch and certainly don’t hate men) and “bad feminists” (the ones who are angry and fat and hairy unattractive and lesbians and not even the cool kind of lesbians who will pose naked with their girlfriends in a magazine for their sexual gratification while wearing lipstick). Men punish all women for simply being female, but they reserve the harshest punishments for women who don’t even try to be “good”. It’s not surprising that women, even feminist women, try to in some way win male approval. What you need to understand, as a feminist, is that trying to win male approval is ALWAYS counterproductive.
