16 The Girl-Positive Library as See Jane Hit: Why Girls Are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It by James Garbarino. Hollywood has been representing bad girls for years. In the 1988’s Heath- ers, Winona Ryder’s character Veronica Sawyer teams up with Christian Slat- er’s JD to kill the alpha Heather of a mean girl gang, all named Heather (except Veronica). Veronica and JD stage the murder as a suicide. As the film goes on, Veronica resists JD’s continued killing—­although Veronica participates in another one. While Veronica eventually commits vio­lence to stop vio­lence, she is still representative of a violent bad girl. In the 1990s Jawbreaker followed young ­ women covering up a murder. And the recent movie Spring Breakers performed a girls gone wild and committing crimes narrative. While ­these examples represent bad girls as white, generally middle/upper class (with the exception of Spring Breakers), it is more a statement of the whiteness of Holly­ wood than a statement of how media represents bad girls. Hollywood did however give us Set It Off in 1996, about a gang of black female bank robbers, which is more consistent with the ways structural racism contributes to nar- ratives of bad girls. While ­ there are examples of how we construct bad girls as physically vio- lent through news and fictional tele­vi­sion shows, real-­life repre­sen­ta­tions of the bad girl usually revolve around sex. For instance, the Kardashians are a ­ family who seemingly built an empire on a sex tape and real­ity tele­ vi ­ sion. While the Kardashians exist as icons of being famous for, well, being famous, and some girls want to be Kim or Kendall (a Jenner, not a Kardashian), the gen- eral cultural response to the Kardashians is dismissal and exasperation. While they are ­women, they are considered girls, with no “real” or obvious jobs, and an obsession with how they look. Unlike real-­life good girl activist icons, ­ these real-­life bad girl repre­sen­ ta ­ tions are focused on fashion and ­family, while gen- erally trying to look as if their lives are not work. While representing teens and sex in real­ity tele­vi­sion in the ways we treat girls and ­women in, say, The Bachelor franchise, which is not afraid of slut shaming in the least, we also have MTV’s 16 and Pregnant and Teen Moms which avoided slut shaming the girls. While MTV humanized teen ­ mothers, and displayed sympathy for the girls, ­there ­were still episodes with verbal abuse, an occasional physical altercation between the teen parents, and in one case between the girl and her ­ mother. In Teen Moms, the girls have gone through restraining ­ orders, have been jailed for drug usage, lost custody of their ­ children, and one girl launched a porn ­ career. For the most part, ­ these girls act as “what not to do/become” models of bad girls, emphasizing the importance of being a good girl. More specific bad girl narratives can be seen in the mean girls and girls gone wild narratives that are found in both popu­lar media and research agendas. Activity Good girls and bad girls are on the face of two opposing narratives, but ­ these have evolved into more nuanced girlhoods. For instance, the bad girls’ be­hav­ior can be both described as resulting from good girl trauma and low
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