Talking Point #9: "Good Girls/Bad Girls" by Tolman and Higgins

In Tolman and Higgisn article, "How Being a Good Girl Can Be Bad for You", the authors discuss how the male position of power, over recorded history, have left the female, especially the young adolescent female with the schizophrenic persona holding a natural sexual desire as part of her humaness and the cultural lesson that teach desire, lust and sexual pleasure, including the inital lstages of courting found in all species, threatening to human society, even  today, with our sophisticated mature mores.
The authors are saying that it breaks down to male aggression and female responsibility. The males in our society have "natural" rights to sexual acts and it is the females who must regulate the activity. Girls who express their own sexuality are protrayed as threatening, deviant and bad. This produces cultural anxiety.
The story "Atalanta" is based an a mythological story of a king attempting to marry off his daughter, as was the custom. The new Feminism of the '70s took this old story and put a spin on it that ALLOWED and even EXPECTED resistance to this action. The resonsibility was to her own happiness, and she took action to ensure she got what she wanted. This story reflected the power shift that was felt very strongly by society (some for, some against) during the '70s, and nothing was ever the same.
In "Alice in Wonderland", Alice challenges her society's expectations of being a "good girls' when she rejects the idea of marrying someone she doesn't like and who doesn't like her. It does not matter what each of them felt for each other, it is her family duty to follow through. She rejects this norm and has an adventure that gives her a chance to be the heroine in her own life.
"Bad Girls Good Girls" points out  that sociey operates to discourage women's sexual urges and men's sexual responsibility, and this creates less communication and more violence.
Atalanta from the 70's and Alice In Wonderland from 2010 showed responsibility to one's self is necessary "to live happily ever after".