A recent essay in Time (posted to Time’s online magazine a week ago) entitled “The Myth about Girls Going Wild “ criticizes the prevalence of the “girls gone wild” stereotype, and particularly its association with Spring Break bacchanalia. Cox argues that an overly conservative attitude toward women’s behavior makes drunken revelry one of the few appropriate ways in which certain kinds of libidinal urges can be expressed: “Maybe it would be progress if we had a definition of femininity expansive enough to include shaking one's thing without raising one's top — so that girls could go a little wild without having to rely on what we used to refer to as the "sorority girl's mating call": "I am soooo drunk.”
This argument is undoubtedly basically correct, but what is perhaps even more intriguing is the essay’s by-line: Ana Marie Cox—an independent journalist who is, of course, best-known by her former alter-ego in the blogosphere: Wonkette (though it was announced in January that Cox was stepping down from the blog to be a full-time author). Wonkette (whose blogs would frequently celebrate their drunken origins, and reveled their unabashedly prurient fascination with the sexual underside the American politics), ironically, shared far more in common with the “girls gone wild” stereotype than she does with narrative voice of the Time essay.
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