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The Enduring Appeal of Slutty Girls

Back in high school, we girls looked down on the slutty girls. But we also envied them. They weren’t lonely, like many of the good girls were.

We women don’t appear to have grown out of that combination of disgust and envy. Case in point, our current obsession with the outgoing and incoming girlfriends of world-renowned lech, Hugh Hefner. We speculate about whether that was a hicky on Holly Madison’s neck after she spent a weekend with Criss Angel. We salivate over stories of Kendra Wilkinson’s engagement to that football player no one has ever heard of. We speculate that maybe the other one, Bridget Marquardt, is still a girlfriend. And we spend an inordinate amount of time researching the new twins.

Is the draw of these silicone-enhanced hotties really just the obvious? Or is there something else we find appealing? Do we wish we were that sexually available? Do we wish we had access to the Hollywood lifestyle without having to do anything other than strip and get it on with an old dude. (There are worse jobs, I guess.) At least these girls only had to prostitute themselves for a few years, unlike the women involved in the much less glamorous elements of the sex trade.

I am drawn back to Michel Foucault’s notion of the “gaze.” The lens of modern pop culture is one of the voyeur, the male voyeur. This voyeur views women without detection, projecting his fantasies on them. The Girls Next Door are the personification of these fantasies. They are eternally sexually available, willing to share their man, possibly at the same time. Thus, we women view the sluttly women as if we were also straight men. We take pleasure in their perfect bodies and sexuality, as if they are there for us, too.

The one thing I never really was able to reconcile in my studies of feminism and media theory is how to move beyond the male gaze. Some women have internalized the gaze. Others have turned the gaze around, objectifying men instead of women. My hope is that we can move beyond the need to objectify anyone and all gaze upon each other equally. (Maybe I’m just bouyed on a new wave of idealism since the election.)