Problem

"If you’re having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son.  I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one."  - Jay Z, 99 Problems

Beyonce is one of the most powerful, successful women in the world.  She could arguably wear the pants in any household.  Except for one problem.

She hasn’t got any.

Seriously.  Who took Beyonce’s pants?  Her hubby Jay Z, maybe?

A couple of months ago, I saw this video, in which a thoughtful young woman named Madiha Bhatti calls out Jay Z and others in the music industry for their dehumanization of women.

Sure, the objectification of women in the entertainment industry is certainly nothing new, but I couldn’t help but think recently that it seems to be getting worse - and some female artists seem compelled to participate in their own degradation.  Queen Bey and her ever-missing pants is actually a mild example.  And though Miley Cyrus seems to have taken a wrecking ball to her life (you see what I did there?  clever, huh?), I kinda feel grateful for the awesome Steve Kardynal parody that resulted.  But then there was the recent video for the song Booty, featuring Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea.  They abandon all pretense of being serious artists and simply grind, slap, twerk and rub up against each other like porn stars.  (No, I won’t link to it here.  I still want to bleach my eyeballs.)

Look, I’m no prude.  You may recall my recent defense of nude pics.  I think sex is one of the coolest things about life on this planet, and I understand sexual expression invariably gets messy.  But there’s nothing sexy about objectifying or degrading women.

And lest it seem this is a racial, cultural or genre issue, check out this video by country music duo Maddie & Tae.  It seems these country girls grew tired of Daisy Dukes, bare feet and bikini tops.  A little bit of role reversal goes a long way toward making a point, hilariously.

I’m not condemning anyone.  I like Beyonce.  (Really - who doesn't like Beyonce?)  I myself have been known, on occasion, to be foul-mouthed, sexually inappropriate, and lacking pants.  My own son jokes that my novels are porn.  I’m sure I’ve rubbed a person or two the wrong way - if you’ll pardon the pun.  But as women gain more power and prominence in society, I’d like to see more discussion about the backlash.  And that’s exactly what I think is going on in some corners of the music industry.  It’s not about sex.  It’s about taking women down a peg.

That’s not OK.

We all begin forming our opinion about gender and our place in the world from Day One.  I wonder how Jay Z and Beyonce would like their daughter to see the world and understand her place in it.  I wonder if they would like to see Blue Ivy with a man who raps, “I’ve got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one?”

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Good Girls, Bad Girls, and the F-Word

If you’ve read my novel Fifty Ways to Leave Your Husband, you know that (1) there’s a fair amount of sex in it (it’s not for nothing that my mother refers to it as “Karen’s sex book”), and (2) the sidekick steals the show.  Tamara is the BFF we all want: fun, vivacious, loyal, nuttier than squirrel shit, and with a MOUTH.  She drops F-bombs like Margaret Cho on speed.

Tamara brings to mind one of my favorite freedoms:

Freedom of the sort of expression that would have earned you a bar of soap in the mouth as a kid.

Confession time: I love to say, “Fuck.”  I think, properly used, it’s one of the very best words in the English language.  And I use it - properly, of course - quite a bit.

To be clear, I’m not tossing the F-word around during work hours or in the presence of small children.  I don’t break it out at cocktail parties or Christmas dinner.  Everything has its place.  I get it.

I also get that I’m maybe not quite the sort of girl you’d expect to be so fond of the F-word.  Take a look at my promo pics.  I look like a Good Girl, don’t I?  

But here and now, I’d like to divest myself of the Good Girl label.  I’d like to do what my protagonist Eve does and ditch the Good Girl suit of armor - and all the heavy fucking baggage that comes with it.

I’d like you to do the same.

Because here’s the thing…

Being a Good Girl has no real value.  In fact, I think the label does a whole lot of harm.  Because if there are Good Girls, there are Bad Girls, too.  And heaven knows, we’ve got a whole slew of words for that kind of girl.

A couple of days ago I was reading a great article by Melissa Gira Grant entitled, There Is No Such Thing as a Slut.  “Sluts take up more space in our imagination than in anyone’s bed,” she writes.  More fully to the point, she illustrates the ways sluttiness is a myth - a “form of sexual privilege” - and perhaps worst of all, the way we women use the term/concept to leverage our power against one another, all the while foolishly undermining our own goals.

Someone like me, for example - white, middle class, able to determine on the basis of a lifetime of social schooling how to dress and when to bite one’s tongue - might come across as a Good Girl, while someone from a lower-class background or an unestablished ethnic minority might lack the social grooming to dress and speak so as to avoid unwanted labels.  Yet there may be absolutely no correlation between our public presentation and our sexual promiscuity.

In fact, statistics indicate otherwise.  Statistically, Good Girls know they can get away with more - and therefore, they do.

(I’ve got you all thinking naughty thoughts about me now, haven’t I?  Oh, go on…)

In the fictional world of my novel, Eve appears to be the Good Girl, while Tamara seems the foul-mouthed hussy.  But when one examines the situation more fully - (spoiler alert!) - Eve is out on the beach fucking a stranger while Tamara is home with her husband and kids - we get a better picture of how irrelevant labels truly are.

In my recent body-issues post, The Size of It, I suggested that we women could literally change the world for our daughters and granddaughters if we just were more careful about how we speak about our self-image.

I think the same is true here.    

My favorite blogs, books, films and Netflix fare celebrate and explore female experience with humor, an unflinching eye, and often a foul, foul tongue.  These writers and artists are not your stereotypical Good Girls.

They’re much better than that.  

That said, join me in bidding farewell to those polarizing, useless myths: the Slut and the Good Girl.  I’ll leave you with a few fun links from ladies who kick ass, talk and write sex, and yes, drop the occasional F-bomb.

I fucking love them.

Aussa Lorens redefines talking dirty in bed.

Shannon Bradley-Colleary talks about hot married sex (no, it’s not an oxymoron…or a misprint).

And Wanda Sykes’ Detachable Pussy routine remains my very favorite, funny-as-hell way to unload all that female baggage.

www.kcwilder50ways.com