I have undoubtedly never been a “good girl.” This does not automatically mean that I never wanted to be one or was never jealous, as a teenager, of the girls who oozed wholesome naïveté and as such were instantaneously loved by teachers and friends’ parents. But I got over that jealously by the time I got to undergrad. Now don’t get the wrong impression – it’s not like I was screwing around at a terribly young age or had some kind of skewed vision of how I should handle my sexuality – if anything it was too much the opposite. My single hippie mother made damn sure I knew everything there was to know about sex and the human body and its normal functions and desires. She was the mother who encouraged masturbation and made sure I knew the ins and outs of condom usage, much to my mortification at the time (but it sure came in handy later…). I was the girl in school who told all the other girls about sex (not because I was having any but because I was the only one who’d been remotely educated about it outside the sex ed classroom); my upbringing made me the only authority in an otherwise relatively conservative neighborhood. This prized information came at the price of not being invited to others girls’ homes and birthday parties because their mothers considered me to be a “bad influence,” and my mother’s single status made my presence all the more awkward for others who were from more conventional, if not functional, families. That is, until they found out I was also the smart kid, and then my association and influence were suddenly prized by bitchy neighborhood mothers.

I remember feeling bored throughout high school. I had friends in almost every group (though the stoners were always my favorite) and I floated a lot from clique to clique. I got good grades but never really had to try that hard, which is an obnoxious thing to say, I know, but it’s true. I had more drug-related experiences than sexual ones, which was reversed when I left for college (especially when I started dating one of my professors…big giant oops on that one.) I think most people assumed that I lived a wilder, more sexually-explicit/porn-like existence than I did. I’m not entirely sure why this is - apparently I emanate some kind of “fuck me now” or “I’m a nymphomaniac” energy that invites these assumptions. Regardless of what it is or how it’s interpreted, it has resulted in a definitive “bad girl” reputation.

I don’t know my dad – I met him once when I took a road trip out to California to look at colleges during high school. Then he lived somewhere around Humboldt in northern California and was not excited to see me arrive on his doorstep (sounds like a movie, I know, but there was no saccharin ending). The last I heard was that he’d moved to Los Angeles with his family and makes a shit-ton of money as some kind of doctor. It would be fitting if he were some slimy plastic surgeon featured on E! but he’s actually a pediatrician. When my mom met him he was trying to make it as an artist – I’d like to know where that ambition ran off to. Like most kids with one parent I dreamed of meeting the other and winning him over, but thankfully that faded somewhere in high school. My mom never openly (or otherwise, as far as I know) regretted the circumstances of my birth (a brief tryst while she was vacationing on the west coast in the last hey-days of free love and unprotected sex) and has never referred to Karl as my father – he was the sperm donor and that’s about it.

So obviously we could do some kind of Freudian analysis on how my lack of relationship with my father/absence of male role model and/or authority figure has negatively impacted my interactions with men and is perhaps directly correlated to my “bad girl” status. But I think that’s bullshit. If anything, my “bad girl” status is a result of not having a repressed sense of self or sexual identity – and if it’s necessary to label that as “bad” then I’ll accept the title with pride. I’ve had lots of sex but that doesn’t mean I’ve been indiscriminate or that my sexual behavior is a negative reflection of who I am as a person. I won’t say that sex is a celebration of the body because that sounds trite and, once again, too much like my mother. It feels good. It’s fun. And there’s nothing wrong in indulging these senses. Not even indulging, because that implies that it shouldn’t be done with any kind of frequency. Gratifying would be more appropriate. Satisfying, perhaps or fulfilling would be more accurate. It all just boils down to the simple fact that bad girls have more fun.