The Making of the Good Girl
The Making of the Good Girl
Name one good girl who has changed the world.
You can’t. Because she can’t.
Name one good girl who shines in the face of adversity, turning any circumstance – no matter how difficult – to her advantage.
Name one good girl who is paving the way for others to follow their desires, by living her own life in alignment to her epic imagination.
Kind of hard, isn’t it?
That’s because Good Girls don’t change the world. In fact, they rarely change their own lives – at least not in the ways they want to.
It is the Good Girl’s job to maintain the status quo.
But when we're living in a time when so much of the status quo no longer works for us as individuals or as communities, creating change means breaking out of Good Girl Jail.
Are you ready for The Good Girl Jailbreak?
Making the invisible visible: The prison of Good Girl Conditioning
The first, essential step for a successful Good Girl jailbreak is to bring what has deliberately been kept invisible, opaque and unspoken to light.
Good Girl conditioning is so universal and sneaky that it may lie dormant for weeks and months, or only show up in certain relationships, or under duress.
The high-achieving business woman’s heart pounds as she knocks on her boss’s office door to make her case for a raise. She decides at the last minute to lower her ask.
The passionate activist finds herself unable to confront her own family members’ backward views over Sunday dinner.
In these decisive moments, we don’t ask for what we need. We don’t tell him how to make it right. We don’t show them how to make us come.
Instead of stating what we want or speaking our piece, we shut down, sacrifice our needs, make do with less. We agree to work the extra hours, we cover up someone else’s screwup, we allow ourselves to be insulted or shortchanged – then brush it off, because “other people have it worse”.
Worst of all, many of us are left feeling like it’s all our fault. We believe we said yes to the thing that’s not ours to do because we’re cowardly. We self-attack for not being “liberated” enough. One of the most insidious by-products of the Patriarchy is the isolation that makes women see systemic and sociological problems as personal and psychological ones. This pattern of perpetual self-assessment and punishment for never being good enough can become toxic and maddening.
The most effective prison, after all, is the one without walls – the one you don’t even know you’re in.
Where did this norm of “goodness” come from? Why does the Good Girl make it so difficult to advocate for ourselves? Why does she block us in the very moment we’re preparing to go after our dreams, secure our everyday needs, or defend what we love? Most importantly, how do we help her break out of jail, so we can get on with living from a place of true alignment, true passion and true vitality?
To get a better sense of how to free her, let’s trace the Good Girl back to her origins.
Name one good girl who has changed the world.
You can’t. Because she can’t.
It is the Good Girl’s job to maintain the status quo.
How to recognize your inner Good Girl
Consider this for a moment. What is the greatest achievement that an ambitious woman – a woman with fire in her heart – could hope to reach for most of history? What was the best way she could fulfill even an iota of her personal dreams?
To marry well.
Women have only recently made the transition from being property, to being able to own property. For nearly the entire span of human history, a woman’s best and only hope for a decent life has been to marry well and bring harmony to her family.
So when it came to securing a good husband, what kind of candidate had the best chances of being perceived as a Good Wife?
Let’s marvel at all the incredible qualities the perfect Good Girl brings to the table: she’s desirable but chaste, modest, accommodating, a virgin — until she finds a sanctioned partner, at which point she becomes sexually available, but only to that one person. She doesn’t have deep needs, nagging wants, or personal passions, because that would be deeply inconvenient. Her time is not her own. Her job is to keep the ship running as smoothly as possible, which means performing immense amounts of invisible mental, emotional, and physical labor. She’s so very resourceful, she can collect whatever crumbs are left once everyone else’s needs are met, and bake them into a beautiful pie.
The Good Girl doesn’t wield power openly, rather, she exerts a sort of indirect influence over the people who love her. She doesn’t give commands; instead, she attempts to get her way through disapproving glances, disappointed sighs. It’s entirely possible that the Good Girl invented passive aggression.
She is lovely to others—polite, solicitous, forgiving, and generous to a fault. But she tends to be fucking vicious with herself. She's never a burden. She's upbeat, she's cheerful, she has a positive attitude! She does not use her emotions as a source of power, out of fear of making someone else uncomfortable , so she tamps them down for as long she can until she finally explodes, then apologizes, then starts the process over.
The truth is that very, very few of us escape the clutches of Good Girl Jail.
Break Up with Your Good Girl, Break Out of Good Girl Jail
The Good Girl stereotype has played her role beautifully. She’s endured through the ages because she’s been a valuable asset to society: she’s kept women safe, she’s kept men powerful, and ensured the conditioning was passed on through the way she raised her children.
She’s even had the cunning to evolve to modern tastes: the Independent Woman, after all, is simply the Good Girl 2.0. And most important of all, she’s diligently adhered to the prescribed norm of goodness, never questioning whether she herself has any say in how a ‘Good Woman’ might be defined. Thousands of years of conditioning echoes inside us. The problem is that now, the circumstances and goals of our lives have changed and this basic conditioning has not.
Good Girl Jail is the socio-psychological (and sometimes very real) prison in which many women find themselves today: trapped, stifled, bound by the limiting norms of “Good” in a patriarchal society. Approved Good Girl behaviors have been so well learned, rewarded and perpetuated amongst both men and women for millennia, that Good Girl conditioning is so normalized you’d be forgiven for thinking it was innate, even biological. In Good Girl Jail the prisoners are so adept at self-policing, that they have become their own jail-keepers: walls are no longer needed.
The Good Girl vs. Bad Girl Paradox
Before you think, “Well, good girls do change the world” and come at me with Mother Teresa and Jane Goodall, I’m not talking about women who have done good deeds. Women who change the status quo and achieve lasting greatness don’t get there by being “good”. Whether we’re talking about Cleopatra, Joan of Arc or RBG, all history’s most impactful women have had to break out of their own metaphorical Good Girl Jail to push beyond the world’s perceptions of the roles women should play in the world. It’s a kind of paradox: to do good on a massive scale, we have to be free from the constrictions of being good–at least in the sense that “good” is a shorthand for conventional, accommodating, unwilling to rock the boat.
So let me be clear about something very, very important. This isn’t about being GOOD or BAD. It's about the antiquated patterns that have us behave in ways that dishonor our truth. Breaking out of Good Girl Jail isn’t about doing bad deeds, but it does require some bad-assery.
Because Good Girl jailbreak is not violent or forceful. It's more like slipping through the bars like a Zen Houdini. Good Girl Jailbreak is collaborative: it requires breaking the conditioned isolation that pits women against each other, and instead enlisting allies – pooling their imaginations and power in the moment it matters most.
‘Bad Girls’ – the ones who break out of Good Girl Jail to follow their desires and live in alignment to their epic imaginations – are the ones who change the world, then pave the way for others to do so too. We’ve understood this for a very long time (remember “well-behaved women seldom make history”?). But for some reason, even for seasoned badasses, jailbreak can be so much harder than we bargained for.
Good Girl jailbreak is about breaking allegiance to the norm of female “goodness” as defined by the Patriarchy…hundreds of years ago.
From Good Girl to Powerful Woman
Breaking out of Good Girl Jail isn’t about flat-out rejecting Good Girl qualities: knowing to harmonize groups of people, prioritize sweetness and evoke delight are incredibly valuable skills. Skills the world is sorely lacking at the moment. Accommodate all you want in times of peace—The problem comes when our Good Girl autoresponder is set in motion before we even notice the moment of choice.
Accommodation and sweetness aren’t appropriate when a doctor is dismissing your chest pains as indigestion, or when your boss is strongly implying that your promotion is tied to your willingness to date his nephew.
In those moments, we have to be able to say no, and to not be thrown off course when we hear it from others. We have to be able to ask difficult questions. We have to be able to stay on message until our words land. We can’t shrink down, freeze, or allow a louder or higher-status voice to hijack the conversation and leave our needs unmet.
If our movement as women is limited to only the well-trodden paths of Good Girl territory, and not the entirety of the wild and precious human experience, our lives become so limited. Our options dwindle precipitously. And we will frequently face the danger that is endemic within the confines of Good Girl Jail: loss of power, autonomy and agency.
When we can see the world anew, and make invisible walls visible, it is clear to see that Good Girl conditioning will not equip women to meet the needs of this particular moment in history. Not for ourselves, nor for the greater good.
Good Girl jailbreak is about breaking allegiance to the norm of female “goodness” as defined by the Patriarchy hundreds of years ago, and refusing to perpetuate it through patterns of self-attack and self-limitation. We are the women of the Pivot. We can draw a line in the sand and say: it stops with us.
Right now, the world is crying out for women who can break free of Good Girl Jail to access their full imagination and agency and lead from a place of ferocious love.
Women who have the freedom to redefine what it means to be “a good woman” on their own terms, and update that definition at any time.
Women who will radically reimagine and reconstruct our families, workplaces, societies, and world: speaking their truth, envisioning bold solutions, and redefining what it means to be in power.
We cannot wait for the world to change in order to finally give women everything they need and want. We need to break out of Good Girl Jail now, and then go back in to free the others.
Are you with us?
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