The final version of ‘Bad Girls’ still refers to bad girls as sad girls, but Summer and Moroder dispensed with the demo’s explicit critique of prostitution. Instead of calling into question the psychic price of sex work, this version accepts sex work on its own terms, with girls picking up strangers ‘if the price is right.’ But if the final version pulled its punches in many respects, it also positioned Summer not as a judgmental outsider but as one of the girls. Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution, even if the track’s lusty arrangement suggests otherwise. Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers, which is why she declares that she and the girls ‘are just the same.’ If Summer sounds unusually exuberant, especially as she yells out to a john, ‘Hey, mista, have you got a dime,’ it may be because Summer knows something about the experience of being made into a commodity, of being reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later Summer said that ‘Bad Girls’ marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject.
— Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.


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