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The bad side of the bad-girl image

By Hayley Kaufman, Globe Staff, 8/12/2001

When a colleague I quietly revere but don't know well handed me a stack of books containing ''Be a Bad Girl: A Journal'' and ''The Bad Girl's 2002 Calendar: Your Guide to a Fun-Filled Year of Bad Behavior,'' I wasn't sure how to take it.

Did this person view me as bad girl? A bad-behavior aficionado? A member of a mysterious bad-girl brigade that -- if advertisers are to be believed -- is right now strutting across the nation in denim minis and leather pants?

Wimp that I am, I didn't have the guts to ask. Besides, I was too busy paging through the sassy little volumes, published by Chronicle Books and penned by Brown University alumna Cameron Tuttle.

For those keeping count, these are the third and fourth books in the ''Bad Girl'' series. Now 36, Tuttle began her cheeky exploration of the bad-girl world in 1999. As she saw it, bad girls were women who excised the words ''low self-esteem'' from their vocabularies and embraced their single status, their love of red wine and chocolate cake, their whimsy. Her first book, ''The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road,'' paired rudimentary car-repair tips with hilarious road-trip commentary. It struck a power chord, selling nearly 150,000 copies. ''The Bad Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want'' followed a year later. It sold even more.

Tuttle's latest offerings are her first real how-to guides. The journal, with its shiny black vinyl cover, encourages readers to lose their ''good girl virginity,'' to date men ''bad girl style,'' and, once they've achieved a certain degree of badness themselves, to become ''a bad girl mentor.''

The 2002 daily calendar, meanwhile, offers an array of bad-girl arcana. A quirky little map illustrates wild vs. staid roads to happiness. A thumbnail guide to sexual come-ons helps readers prepare for globe-trotting adventures. (One of the bad-girl lines Tuttle proffers in French: ''Est-ce que ce vin va bien avec la sexe?'' Translation: ''Does this wine go well with sex?'')

Then there are the mini profiles of so-called bad girls in history -- birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, asp kisser Cleopatra, R-E-S-P-E-C-T diva Aretha Franklin, and Muppet Miss Piggy. Each is a quick reminder that the bravest of women have been blowing off cultural and gender stereotypes for eons, long before bad-girl handbooks, aimed at Gen-X and Gen-Y, filled bookstore shelves.

It's pretty cute and harmless stuff, a tangy mix of the girl-power mantras that put bands such as the Spice Girls on the map in the late '90s and the grittier riot-grrrl dicta that helped make ''baby dykes'' and Courtney Love part of the cultural lexicon.

Still, I must be honest. I'm starting to worry that maybe the whole bad-girl concept may be a little too cute and harmless. A little -- dare I say it? -- naive.

I'm not singling out Tuttle's books, or the dozens like them stuffed into Kate Spade bags across the country. Nor am I slapping young women on the wrist for spending the summer reveling in what Tuttle would call fun-loving ''badness'': shopping for super-sexy low-rider jeans, turning up Destiny's Child, giggling over the latest episode of ''Sex and the City.''

I just think we should note that this growing empowerment seems to have an interesting corollary: Young women suddenly have a starring role in the national conversation.

Has anyone noticed that nearly every big story of the summer involves a girl-centered scandal? A young woman who, somewhere along the line, went from being the ambitious, naughty, sort-of bad girl that Tuttle speaks of to an actual bad girl? A girl who doesn't just flout conventions but appears to dismiss them altogether?

The Bush daughters, Jenna and Barbara, are back in the news this week in the wake of a Talk magazine photo spread portraying them as a couple of out-of-control party girls. Young PR powerhouse Lizzie Grubman has dominated the New York tabloids ever since she backed her Mercedes SUV into a crowd at a Hamptons nightclub. Chandra Levy's mysterious disappearance -- and her affair with Representative Gary Condit -- has been grist for the talk-show mill for months.

And let's not forget the minor scandals. Pop diva Mariah Carey's breakdown. ''Survivor'' bad girl Jerri Manthey on the cover of Playboy. The surfacing of nude pictures from actress-turned-CNN anchor Andrea Thompson's B-movie past.

What's up? Is it just bad (girl) timing? Some sort of cosmic comeuppance aimed at high-profile, high-power, and sometimes just plain high young women? Or is all the attention a sign that young women have arrived somehow, that our growing legitimacy is bringing with it greater scrutiny -- and rightly so?

When I reach Tuttle at her San Francisco office and give her my spiel, she's quick to note that there's a big difference between being a little bad -- bad with a wink and a nudge -- and being so bad that you hurt yourself and others. But she agrees that, yes, maybe the cultural dynamic is shifting.

''In the media, there's always a temptation to look for a trend, but in this situation I'm not sure there's one thing going on,'' she said. ''There's a lot of stupid -girl behavior in the news right now. But that's not what I'm talking about [in my books] at all.

''Being bad is about being your uncensored best. Knowing what you want from life, taking risks. Yeah, the more [young women] do that, the more we will end up in the spotlight, and that's not always going to be pretty. But ultimately it's a good thing.''

And, perhaps, a good time for bad girls everywhere to get ready for their close-ups.

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001

Answers

Git is a bad girl, isn't she?

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001

baddest.

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." - Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
. When she was good, she was very, very good
And when she was bad, she was terrific.

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001

And when she was bad, she was....marvelous.

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001