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CHAPTER THREE

The Bad Girl

Jayanthi

One of the apparent advantages of being a bad girl is that it’s supposed to be fun. Being a bad girl may be a bad deal in other respects—it gains a woman social condemnation and ostracism, and leads to others’ assumptions of limitless availability for sex; the list goes on. But at least it should be fun. There can be pleasure in defying others’ expectations, breaking the rules, and upsetting tradition. And there can be pleasure in having no messy emotional consequences, no attachments, no settling down, and no guilt about sex. There is also appeal in the drama and excitement of having crazy stories to tell and creating a history for oneself, especially if one’s history previously has been defined by others’ expectations of what a woman should be and do.

However, I found that the real-life experience of being the bad girl was often not so much fun. Instead, this approach sometimes left the women I studied feeling unhappy and numb. Particularly for women with fragile senses of self, the bad-girl strategy seemed to provide a strong identity. At the same time, it ostensibly protected women from losing track of their identities in a relationship by never investing in one emotionally. But rather than feeling strong and protected, some bad girls were left feeling alone and vulnerable.

Jayanthi, a twenty-nine-year-old second-generation Indian American woman born in 1974, spent her early twenties rebelling against her upper-middle-class, traditional but moderately religious Hindu family, doing everything she could to be “bad” in their eyes.¹ Jayanthi spent years casually hooking up with men, and she enjoyed some of it, but often felt “played” and used by them. She would then retreat from men and sex and be a “goody-goody girl” who toyed with her parents’ offers of an arranged marriage. But eventually she’d swing back to being bad.

Having lots of sex felt like both a way to rebel against her parents and a way to assert her sense of herself as a strong woman. But while the sex helped Jayanthi to define herself in opposition to a stereotypical good girl, she didn’t get much pleasure or a solid sense of herself out of it. She felt more confused than ever about whether she was good or bad, Indian or American. And even as she eventually figured some things out about how to have an orgasm, Jayanthi confided anxiously that she worried about losing herself in relationships with men. She imagined that in a relationship, she’d get swept up into her partner’s world and lose track of her identity and things that mattered to her.

I heard this fear of losing track of their identities again and again from women in their twenties. Self-help books call out to them to “focus on yourself,” “make yourself happy,” and not to “lose yourself in a relationship.” But without a solid and reliable identity, these intonations rang hollow for women such as Jayanthi. This chapter explores why Jayanthi so feared that she would be subsumed in a relationship with a man. Why did a woman with such passionate interests of her own fear that she would lose track of herself and her desires in a relationship?

TENTATIVE IDENTITY

Jayanthi, a dancer and teacher who was tiny in stature, spoke very quickly and seemed to have boundless energy. Her enthusiasm for life, for dance, and for political causes was palpable, and she expressed strong opinions about the things in life that mattered to her. I was surprised, then, when Jayanthi confessed that she worried about being overwhelmed by a relationship, concerned that she’d quickly lose her own identity in the other person. It was difficult to square her fear of disappearing into someone else with the forceful personality before me. I came to learn that Jayanthi’s strength felt very tentative to her, and was not something that she could count on when faced with the prospect of close emotional and physical ties with a man.

Jayanthi’s early sexual experiences profoundly shaped her expectations of men and their trustworthiness. She had her first kiss and sexual experience in college at eighteen, and it was passionate and fun. They didn’t have intercourse, but experimented with almost everything else. It turned out, however, that Jayanthi had greater expectations of a relationship than the man did. She later felt the man had “played” her—he was dating other women, and she was disgusted and put off by that. In that first experience, she felt devastated and too emotionally involved. She vowed not to be played by a man again. So to avoid being either played or too involved, Jayanthi spent the next decade bouncing back and forth between being good and being bad. In both cases, she distanced herself from the men she was involved with, either physically or emotionally. While being a good girl, Jayanthi remained both physically and emotionally removed from men. And while being a bad girl, Jayanthi was physically close to but emotionally distant from men.

When employing the good-girl strategy, Jayanthi entertained her parents’ offers to find a suitable Indian partner for her. On a few occasions, she met men whose families her parents knew as a way to anchor herself amid the “craziness.” Or she would troll listings on Indian matchmaking websites, consoling herself that she might find some clarity and certainty about the entirety of her life if she had a secure partner who met her parents’ and community’s expectations of her. “When I got confused, I would freak out and feel, ‘I need to settle down. I need to find a partner, and I’m not seeing anybody now, so I better do it my parents’ way, through family friends or meeting people online.’ . . . It was like, you marry somebody and that problem of what you’re gonna do with your life disappears.” Being a good girl gave Jayanthi some clarity and purpose, but it didn’t feel like an identity of her own.

THE BAD-GIRL STRATEGY

Being a bad girl, on the other hand, gave Jayanthi a strong sense of identity. Particularly for women from families with traditional ideas and teachings about sex (for example, some immigrant families and conservative religious families), being a bad girl can enable them to feel independent and “bad-ass,” and to separate from the parents and traditions that may have felt restrictive to them while they were growing up. Tired of being a good girl who met all her parents’ and community’s expectations, Jayanthi began casually hooking up with men after college, often meeting several in one night.

I was twenty-one and hadn’t had that many experiences in intimacy, didn’t know what it’s about, really. I was still a virgin, I went to a women’s college. I’m my mom and dad’s ideal child—what is that? Fuck the standards, fuck the expectations of what I’m supposed to be. I’m just gonna break them. So I just broke them. So I ended up really going crazy. . . . I was just like, “I don’t want to be the poster child, so the other extreme is this.” It was like the Virgin Mary or the ho. And I was going to the other side. And I just didn’t like that. And I was like, “Okay, I’m not gonna do this anymore.” I’d try not to do it and then it’d be the other extreme. I wouldn’t find anybody meaningful. I’d try not to associate with that group of people, and then I’d be having a really, really sheltered life again and I’d be like, “Fuck this, I don’t want to do this,” and I’d go and freak out again.

She was aware now that she had been feeling insecure at the time, and that she had been seeking out attention and affection. She reflected that she loved part of it, but also felt lucky for not having gotten STDs and not having been raped or killed (although, as we learn later in this chapter, she was in the process of redefining a specific encounter as rape, one in which she “kind of gave my body without giving my mind; I didn’t really want it to happen”). At the time she had longed for a sexual history, for stories that would make her feel real and alive.

[At the time I was] in one box or another box, and in both ways I had censorship. I was censored on this really sheltered side ’cause it was limiting what I wanted to do. And when I was doing everything, I was censoring myself, ’cause I didn’t know what . . . I wanted. I kind of knew what I wanted, but I wasn’t able to really express that. I wasn’t able to really say no. I wasn’t able to be honest to myself, [to say,] “Jay, what are you doing to yourself ?” . . . I would just give in. So both sides had censorship. Both sides had limitations, and [on] both sides I felt I was being trapped in some way. So I felt like, “God, this is shit, this is terrible.” So basically what happened was . . . by the beginning of ’98 I realized I was being played by a lot of different guys. I was being manipulated. I was given fake affection. I was silencing myself. I was putting myself in hard situations, dangerous ones, risky ones, not even pleasurable situations at times. But it wasn’t all bad. Otherwise I wouldn’t have continued on with it. I also liked the drama, I liked the excitement, I liked the fact I was having stories, I liked being bad. And then there were some people I actually loved having sex with and I loved the intimacy with. So it all came in a package. I don’t want it to come across as all negative. Otherwise it makes no sense as to why I stayed there and did it, okay?

When I asked how she made sense of it at the time, she replied:

What I was thinking at the time was, “I’m liberating myself, this is liberation, I’m getting myself out. I’ve been repressed for so long, and I’m just gonna let it out. I don’t care.” So that’s what it was. . . . I look back and I’m like, “Damn, I should have cared a little more about protection.” But at the time I was like, “I don’t care, I’ve been so repressed, this is all about letting it out.” That’s what was going on at the time. . . . “I want to party, I want to meet people, I want to hook up, I want to have stories, I want to have a history.” I didn’t have a history, so I wanted to create a history. I don’t want to be naïve.²

Jayanthi worked hard to give herself a history that differed from her family’s expectations—she needed sexual experiences and crazy stories about sexual exploits to create that history. Prior to her crazy time, she felt herself to be meeting all her parents’ expectations of a good Indian girl. She went to a women’s college, was not sexually promiscuous, did traditional Indian dance, and cooked Indian food. Releasing herself from the repression she felt as her parents’ daughter allowed her to feel more her own woman.

The bad-girl strategy also appealed to Jayanthi because prior to college, she hadn’t felt attractive. Growing up in a predominantly white town in the Southwest, she found that the attractive and popular girls were always white, and Jayanthi felt that boys didn’t find her pretty. On top of not feeling desirable because she was Indian American, Jayanthi felt sheltered by her parents, who would not allow her to date. Embracing the bad-girl strategy highlighted for Jayanthi the degree to which she actually was considered desirable and attractive.

Being a bad girl allowed Jayanthi to control her identity, rather than having it controlled by either her family or the men she encountered. With American men, Jayanthi had felt stereotyped as naïve, passive, innocent, shy, submissive, and virginal because she was an Indian woman. Indian men also expected her to be a nice, virginal girl whom they could bring home to their families. By having extensive sexual experiences, Jayanthi could feel herself to be different from these stereotypes.

Being her own woman in charge of her identity, however, didn’t automatically translate into her enjoying sex. Jayanthi never had orgasms during the “sexual frenzy” time: “I didn’t really express much desire, I just took whatever was given. It wasn’t about how I liked it. No one had any interest in making me come, and I had no interest in coming ’cause it wasn’t even about me.” She also says that 30 percent of the time, she had sex because she felt obligated to do so.

A turning point in Jayanthi’s bad-girl era came one night in India. It was only recently that she was able to recount fully this experience.

I used to go and dance at this one club a lot. There was this one African person there, ’cause a lot of West Africans, East Africans come do some studies in India ’cause it’s cheaper for them. So there was this one; I think he was from Sudan. He—I forget his name. He was kind of cute. I was like, “I don’t mind fooling around with him.” And I didn’t have a car, so had to depend on these guys to take me home. I wouldn’t sleep at my place ’cause my mom was so mad at me at the time for doing all this. She was just like, “If you’re gonna do it, you have to come back in the morning. I’m not gonna open up the gate for you.” So I’d have to sleep at other people’s places. So I decided one night, he asked me to come home with him. I was like, “Sure, I’ll come home with you.” But he stayed with three other African roommates. So we get home around five in the morning after dancing at the club. Me and him are fooling around, then we start talking, and we have sex, and I’m okay with it. Not that I really want to have sex with him, but whatever, I’ll do it. Then we went to take a shower. He stepped out for a minute, and then his friend came in and took a shower with me, finished up with me. And I didn’t know what to do. ’Cause, again, I’m in this unknown place. I don’t want to be like, “What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out!” I didn’t know what to do. I was like, “I guess I’ll have to be cool with it, have to pretend like I’m cool with having a shower with his friend.” After the shower with his friend, his friend wanted to have sex with me. And I think I had sex with him too. And then he was lying down with me for ten minutes and then he got up. I was lying there [thinking], “Oh, my God, I need to get home.” I didn’t know what to do. Then his other roommate came in, and he wanted me to have sex with him. I didn’t have sex with him. I just kind of gave him oral sex, which I didn’t really want to do. By this time, I was like, “This is so crazy.” And then the fourth guy came in. By then I was like, “I’m not doing anything.” I just got up and was like, “I’m just gonna go home. Can one of you help me get a taxi or something to get home?” I still had to be nice to them ’cause I needed their help to get a taxi. That’s the powerlessness I felt. . . . It was only recently, literally recently, Leslie, that I thought back on it, and I was like, “Oh, my God, that actually happened to me. Oh, my God, what was that about?”

She had now come to understand and describe this experience as a disturbing version of sexual exploitation. Earlier it had felt like another in a series of crazy antics—something that was annoying, but not exploitative and devastating. Jayanthi now felt saddened and disturbed by the experience, angry at the men who pressured her to have sex with them, shocked that they could be such “assholes,” and sad that she felt so starved for attention that she allowed herself to be in such a vulnerable position. Over the course of the interviews, she reflected that perhaps she reacted against such experiences of exploitation by later using men as sex objects and playing them.

After this experience, Jayanthi’s strategy shifted from being a bad girl who was “up for anything” to being a bad girl who was in control. She began to use men for sex and became the player herself, by which she meant being a smooth talker, acting and talking as though she cared about the men with whom she was involved. But when playing men, she was just after sex and had no intention of becoming emotionally involved. She felt that she had been played by men earlier, but from those experiences she herself learned how to play, so she began juggling people and having sex with multiple partners without becoming emotionally involved. She used men for sex and dumped them when they became too serious or emotionally engaged. And she successfully avoided being hurt herself by steering clear of any emotional connection to the men she slept with. One of the ways in which she remained untouched emotionally was by hooking up primarily with African American men. These men became a solution and a part of her strategy—they weren’t white men, who oversexualized her, and they weren’t Indian American men, who undersexualized her. But they also weren’t “relationship material,” according to her family or herself, so this strategy “protected” her from the possibility of developing an emotional connection with the men.

When doing the playing herself, Jayanthi began to feel more desire and pleasure, and more able to say no to things she did not want. Being a player allowed her to be the subject in sex, the one calling the shots instead of the object responding to another’s desires. When she shifted to being the player herself, she began masturbating and discovering what she liked sexually, and she felt free to pursue her desires when she wanted or did not want to have sex. She would tell partners to stop if she did not enjoy an activity. And she began having orgasms, both through masturbation and with partners. At first she worried about what would happen during an orgasm—would she be scared; would she be loud? She challenged herself to masturbate in as many places as she could without being noticed: in an airplane seated next to people, while driving, or while in bed at relatives’ houses. She felt “bad-ass” about being able to do it, and it excited her at the same time that it relaxed her.

Being a bad girl did open space for Jayanthi to experiment sexually and to be with many sexual partners, despite her conservative upbringing. And it helped her to establish an identity independent of her parents and community. But with some distance, she reflected that those experiences were not driven by desire, and did not give her much sexual pleasure. Later, when she was doing the playing and felt more in control, Jayanthi began to figure out what she wanted sexually, when, and with whom. And she protected herself from harm by remaining emotionally distant. She later worried that her sense of independence and her knowledge of her own desires, so hard won during her “crazy time,” could be endangered by emotional attachment to a man.

STRONG IDENTITY VERSUS RELATIONSHIPS

Jayanthi found it difficult to be in an emotional and physical relationship with a man without losing her identity. In relation to men, she sometimes felt overwhelmingly emotionally connected to them and almost overtaken by that connection. Or she had dissociated experiences of sex in which she was not present. Or she had experiences of sex in which she was physically present and enjoying herself, but the personhood of the man was irrelevant or disregarded. The idea of both herself and a man maintaining strong identities³ seemed impossible—either they merged into one, or only one of them was a subject and the other the object.⁴ In order to be sexually active, Jayanthi managed this difficulty by alternately being a goody-goody girl who didn’t have sex but considered arranged marriage proposals from her parents, and being a very bad girl who had lots of casual and risky sex.