Growing Up In The 70s/80sWhen Feminism Was A Dirty Word
The “entertainment” of that era was hardly liberated … except for 9-to-5.
Fear of fat. Fear of being called a “slut.” Fear of rejection. Just plain fear.
I tell Bruce that back in the day, “I got plenty of jobs based on the way I looked.” It was the only way I knew to defend myself.
I did get jobs. I had to work. I had to pay for school. Later, I had to pay for rent, food, my car, and utilities.
But raised on 70s and 80s TV, movies, and media, since I looked like neither Farrah Fawcett in her famous poster nor Heather Locklear …
Even my favorite cousin Jeff, who protected me and cared about me, often talked about the benefits of thigh gaps for girls.
I routinely went three and four days existing only on black coffee and cigarettes. I am pretty sure that Heather and Farrah, my elders, did too.
My cousins, raised in a healthier and better-adjusted Midwest lifestyle than me, didn’t wear makeup. They mostly teased me for my big head of Cali blond hair and my “war paint.” They went on two-week canoe and camping trips through remote Canadian wilderness. My cousin Hilary went two weeks without shaving her legs, laughing maniacally when showing off her hairy appendages.
I’m not gonna lie, I have shaved everywhere, every day, since I was 13 years old. Deodorant, tooth whitening, skin care, hair care: you name it.
I still do it and I am 61 years old.
Aside from that, I can’t believe the journey that I’ve been on since I thought my best career option was to go to community college and become a secretary for a good boss (not a horrible one like Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5).
I’m guessing that I instinctively encouraged students to learn the stories of badass women like Rani Lakshmi Bai, Stephanie Kwolek, and Tomoe Gozen because I was raised on Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the unfortunate Little Match Girl. And no matter what our culture told me or what I had to do to get by, I knew I wasn’t like these weeping, weak, willowy characters.
Willowy, weak, and weeping like Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder. They may call Hitchcock one of the greatest filmmakers and he did have his appalling TV show for years, but — just watch this film. Kelly is as helpless as an 18-month old baby. She does nothing but faint, wear 50s classic fashion, and be victimized by a gross, nasty parasite played by Ray Milland (20 years too old for her). She was sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t do because she had an affair with homely, dumb Robert Cummings. She’s rescued by a London detective who brags he “isn’t a flatfoot.”
It’s awful.
Looking back, I realized that I liked Star Trek so much because — at least there was Uhura!
So, by the time I was an older teen and young adult, first-wave feminism, exemplified by Gloria Steinem’s stint as a Playboy bunny (I was a ‘budget bunny’ i.e. Camel cigarette girl), had come and gone.
When I was in college, Ronald Reagan was President, the ideal color was Reagan red, and feminism was a dirty word.
It truly didn’t matter how smart I was, how capable I was, or what my career aims or personal desires were. Eleven days after my 21st birthday, my youthful ideas of what I wanted to do (“Creative Writing/Creative Writing” choices 1 and 2 on my ‘career form’ in Junior High and High School) were blasted out of me.
Everywhere I looked, everything I saw, everything I did: it was only about my looks. Only about my demeanor. Only about what I could do for men, based on what they told me, how they told me, when they told me, where they told me.
And woe be to any woman — myself included — who stepped outside of that box.
My best play, I decided, was to “play dumb” — like a fox. The same play we women have made for so many generations of history.
It worked for me. It worked for decades. In some cases now, even though I feel horrible when I do it, it still works.
The culture was so male-dominated even in the 80s that in order to succeed, movies like 9 to 5 had to couch their story in buckets of charm and humor.
This is the storytelling era I grew up in. I grew up indoctrinated by hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers who only talked to me because I have, in the words of my 2nd fiance’s anti-Semitic mother, “fine features” and 34-D breasts.
By literary writers a thousand times worse than the sci-fi guys.
When I finally went back to graduate school, I realized there were only a few types of writers (in addition to hairy-knuckled or low-minded commercial hacks):
Lunatics like Poe who died in the gutter
Monomaniac egotists like Hemingway (shotgun)
Heirs to land and major fortunes like Tolstoy
Servants to a deservedly dead past like Margaret Mitchell
Whatever the f Joyce Carol Oates is
But Now My Life Is Amazing
Things aren’t easy right now.
But driving the other day to get food for Bruce, I said aloud, “Lord, thank you for all the blessings you have given us. Thank you for our good friends, our happy life, our safe home, and our good life.”
This is all any person could ever ask or all that I think, the overwhelming majority of people really want.
For me, my recovery and path to happiness (and ability to tell honest stories that others may enjoy) has been through my body.
Just like the TV shows, movies, and ads I grew up with showed me false images that didn’t even show the truth about the stars that were portrayed: Heather Locklear never weighed 99 pounds. Beautiful Farrah Fawcett saw her son suffer from substance abuse and died of a terrible and agonizing form of cancer.
“My body can’t lie,” I told Bruce (and have told many others). It doesn’t know how.
We cover up who we are with clothing. With makeup. Some change their face and bodies with extreme cosmetic surgery.
Those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s have been fed toxic and untruthful stories and images for nearly our entire lives. We have been fed toxic and unhealthful food packaged as “natural” and “healthy”.
We have been fed absolute lies like war and violence are the natural state of humanity. We have been fed the concept that the bizarre, ultraviolent tales that Hollywood spins are the way life is for everyone — an aspiration, a fascination, an obsession.
These stories have told us that primitive aggression and rage is the only way any man can “be a man” and that subservient weepy, passive weakness is a woman’s only way to act.
We have been fed lies by the weakest, most disturbed, and unhealthy among us: people who are so driven to look a certain way or present a certain image to others that they are willing to undergo the most extreme cosmetic procedures — all in an effort to sell you something that you not only do not need, but which will do your soul a kind of harm that’s very difficult to overcome.
I did write a story about that.
It’s all like an end-stage alcoholic who at last, reaches rock bottom and is able to release their egotism and give up the deadly substance.
I even think, or suspect, that the AI craze is part of the addiction, and part of another path to recovery.
I was never any of those film or TV or fairy tale characters.
And neither are you. It’s time for the myths to end and life to begin.
"Whatever the f Joyce Carol Oates is"
Had me howling. I never understood why she's A Great Literary Force, either.
US/Western culture is toxicity all the way down. We are ruled by sociopaths who ensure the system works for them. As bad as it is, it's worse for women. The message you aren't smart or pretty enough, that you are fundamentally inadequate and broken, is relentless.