Julie Burchill

Where have all the Bad Girls gone?

  • From Spectator Life
Kate Moss, 2010 (Photo: Getty)

Where have all the Bad Girls gone? They used to rock up regularly at the Love Island villa – now in its eighth and rather underwhelming season – only to find themselves on the EasyJet back to Blighty after having full sex on prime time TV. (One of them, Zara Holland, being stripped of her Miss Great Britain title.) They brawled, boozed and bonked with gusto; now it’s two drinks a night and a cheeky snog on the terrace before an early – and chaste – bedtime.

They used to be all over the soaps but now the women of EastEnders and Corrie suffer wall-to-wall ‘challenges’ like bulimia and infertility instead. There were songs about them (‘Bad Girl’ by Madonna, ‘Bad Girls’ by Donna Summer) films about them (from The Women to The Bitch) and books about them (Rebecca to Ambition).

They brawled, boozed and bonked with gusto; now it’s two drinks a night and a cheeky snog on the terrace

There are still a few in the US; Christine from Selling Sunset cuts a stylish swathe through her well behaved colleagues. But generally they tend to be older; the Real Housewives gangs from all over the globe never tire of kicking off. It’s hard to imagine a show like Bad Girls Club – ‘A Bad Girl knows what she wants and how to get it. She makes her own way, makes her own rules and she makes no apologies’ – being commissioned nowadays.

It’s somewhat creepy the way Bad Girls are now either pathologised (she’s ‘hurting’ and thus ‘acting out’) or lectured by the #BeKind mob. A friend of mine shopping for clothes for her children noted that this kindness slogan was always on the girls’ T-shirts but never on the boys – and it’s not like boys don’t need reminding more than girls.

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