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Popular Culture Review
Many good girls enter these exchange relationships, trading, at the very
least, female sexuality for the tangible reward of financial security and the
intangible reward of status. Feminists such as Pateman (1988), who describes
the “male sex-right,” would consider these exchanges as commodity purchases
akin to prostitution. Similarly, Chapkis (1997:14) summarizes pro-positive sex
feminist views on commodified sexuality when she points out the inherent
imbalances in these exchanges, stating “When love, relationship, and mutual
pleasure are the only appropriate context for sex, cash and contract cannot
substitutes as evidence of reciprocity.” From a less overtly feminist viewpoint,
Molm (1986) also finds that women have difficulty in being equal exchange
partners to men in her analysis of gendered exchange relationships. First,
women have less structural access to power than men. More importantly, Molm
suggests that women are likely to exercise interpersonal power by withholding
rewards. If sex is the reward, a woman has power only relative to a man’s
dependence on her for sex, and his access to other sexual partners. Good girls,
then, are competing in a network of relationships with baseball players.
Moreover, as a group, they also extend exchange networks that influence
individual relationships, which Roxanne reveals as she describes her exchange
of self for status:
They’re a small, special group [baseball players] and being
part of that group, it makes me feel special too. You know,
like if I marry one and have kids, I won’t be just another
soccer mom.
Playing the Field: Baseball’s “Bad Girls”
Most simply, bad girls most often cite thrills of rebellion against social
norms and seduction as reasons for their continued pursuit of baseball players.
Such simplicity belies the much more complex, sexually restrictive gender
imbalance between men and women they also reveal. Unlike the Coyotes’ good
girl groupies, bad girls perceive men as abusive of their social status and power.
Many claim that baseball players are self-aware exploiters of their desirability,
which is rooted in their physicality, their social status, and their potential as
mates. Becky concisely describes bad girls’ cynical opinions of baseball players,
stating, “These guys