Internalized Misogyny 101

I never wrote about the Amanda Knox trial when it was going on, mostly because I don't really know anything about the Italian judicial system and I didn't want to seem like an asshole. But I was riveted and disturbed. My reading of what happened at that trial and in the media coverage surrounding it (and again, don't know shit about shit), was that the evidence presented against this young attractive woman was largely that she was a young attractive and possibly slutty woman and that the apparent deviance of her sex life should be read as very clearly implicating a much more dangerous potential for deviance/violence/cold-hearted sociopathic behavior. I'm sure a lot of you (and some Italian jurors) think that is a really willful reading, but, whatever, it's mine.

So I was intrigued by the headline on this Salon piece titled "I Could Have Been Amanda Knox." What I expected was a piece premised on the notion that 'I could have been Amanda Knox' because I was once a young traveling attractive woman who engaged in what is coded as "risky behavior" for women and one thing the Amanda Knox case makes clear is the extent to which we are wedded to a good girl/bad girl dichotomy for women. Thus, I could have been her in the sense that I also could have been held accountable for crimes I didn't commit on the grounds that I like to fuck, maybe in weird ways.' Instead, the piece was more of a ' I could have been Amanda Knox insofar as i traveled as a young attractive woman and was sort of turned on by being a 'bad girl' and was a cock tease here and there and one time skinny dipped with some wackadoo Brazilians and such deviance, well, it's a slippery slope to stabbing one's roommate, that.'

Lest you think I exaggerate:

On my high school senior trip to Orlando, Fla., I snuck into a bar and flirted with a 23-year-old blond professional golfer. When he invited me back to his room, I went without pause. A virgin, it never occurred to me that this might be a bad idea. I'd broken up with my high school boyfriend the summer before, and since then had kissed plenty of boys on beaches and in convertibles, behind the shopping mall and in basement rec rooms. The golfer had more than kissing in mind, however. I drank the Michelob he offered me. I kissed with abandon. But when he took my hand and pressed it against his hard-on, I headed out the door.

"Cockteaser!" he yelled. "Bitch!"

I did not learn my lesson.

and

For most of the time, I was a good girl. But spirited. Straight A student. Yearbook editor. Student body treasurer. A sorority girl who often had a handsome boyfriend from a good family who dreamed of being a lawyer or a politician. [...] I also found myself drawn to sexy guys with something dark lurking behind their eyes. Looking back, I see that those guys and my attraction to them were fueled by being far from home, where I knew no one. There, I could do things, try things, unnoticed. I was a good girl with enough of a wild streak to make foolish decisions.

and

In the past, I had shown only passing interest in sensational murder cases, but none had felt so strangely personal. Unlike Natalee Halloway, I was not a girl who would vacation in Aruba. Unlike Chandra Levy, I was never a striver on Capitol Hill. But to live in Italy? To date foreign, exotic men? To be both a good girl and a reckless one? The beautiful young faces of Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher haunted me.

ohmygod, really? Salon, you are publishing this? Virgin/whore dichotomy much?

What if it had been us? We were foolish and naive and young. We had close calls and bad drugs and roommates who disappeared for a night with dubious strangers. But nothing bad really ever happened to young pretty girls who were basically good girls, did it? For us, that door always eventually opened and that roommate always returned, a little hung over or weary or in love. But just as we shaped the story we might have to tell the police or her unaware mother, she came home.

What if it had been us is the right question. It is us, is the answer. I don't know what Amanda Knox did, but I know the conviction of her guilt was based primarily on the exposition of her as a sexually active/aggressive woman. And I know this entire Salon piece is predicated on the idea the because the author has also been a sexually active/aggressive woman, but for the grace of god did she not commit heinous acts of depravity. 'I touched that guy's hard on once, it could've been ME crushing my roommate's windpipe!" Christ this article pissed me off. I may start using it in classes as an exercise in identifying internalized misogyny.