There are some “men” who simply can’t get “it” (it being their painted cherub of the Renaissance-sized dick) up without a girl spinning him some yarn about how she’s bad…naughty. These two vocab words in particular, which saw their emergence around the time of the Mae West era, when bad girls as a concept first became a source of mainstream titillation, have always been staples in assuring a “man’s” arousal. Particularly because so many of them continue to suffer from the Madonna/whore complex, even in these times touted as those of feminism. The inability to separate bad from good–that the two must be compartmentalized–is, indeed, often what prompts “men” to cheat with the so-called bad girls who can get them off more easily than their “virtuous” girlfriends. But as Mae West said, “There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.”

And with “men” being so predictable as they are about what trigger sentences and words will prompt them to get what is becoming that evermore elusive thing called an erection, the faux good girls know just what to say to unravel the layers seductively to their “badness,” which of course was already there considering “men” think any woman who admits to having a period is bad–but if she rehashes a lesbian camp story from junior high, well, that kind of bad is acceptable. What it all amounts to is that “men” are, if nothing else, at least useful in their manipulability. That’s why Mata Hari, former exotic dancer extraordinaire was so successful before being painted as a conniving seductress of a spy, though proof of her crimes in carrying out espionage for the Germans was largely unsubstantiated. But that didn’t matter. Any woman who would take her clothes off in public had to be a bad girl–and that’s when manipulation of “men” can backfire, for they can always wield their ultimate no frills power when they’ve been “wronged” (a.k.a. shamed and exposed for the fools they are), whereas a bad girl only has her subtle and undercutting control until it’s ripped from her with the single wave of a hand and sanction of an execution. The most modern example, perhaps, being Pussy Riot’s near two year jail sentence for speaking negatively about Putin while singing a punk prayer in front of Moscow’s main cathedral. Or, one could argue, even Stormy Daniels, another bad girl who was at first enjoyed for her “badness” and is now being defamed by a deranged white “man” who still somehow has more clout despite being objectively unhinged.