I was home yesterday and there was a peculiar little marathon of films on some channel from the 80s regarding women in the workplace. I caught the end: 9 to 5 and Diane Keaton looking flustered for 2 hours in Baby Boom.
The crazy thing? Both of these films are actually so feminist I don’t think they’d get greenlit today. The idea of Lily Tomlin’s lament of a “Pink Collar Ghetto” or Diane Keaton’s CEO turned small business owner would bounce right off the shiny faux-tanned foreheads of just about any Hollywood exec today. I actually can’t imagine anything as progressive as either of these films getting onto a screen today. First: middle-aged women and funny women are about as common on the Silver Screen today as wheat pennies, and women who express any power unaccompanied with sexual power simply don’t exist in American film. Even if they remade Baby Boom today, the main character would be an impossibly sexy mid-career starlet, not a dowdy chick in tweed and shoulder pads.
It has taken me a long time to realize this, especially given the environment I grew up in, but the truth is, we are not becoming more progressive as a nation, especially in regards to our portrayals of women.
Let me back that up. We are not becoming more progressive in the ways I always thought we would. There are some ways in which progress, as I see it (as a child raised on NPR, PBS and Sunday mornings watching James Carville carve his wife up like a Christmas ham) have occurred. Gay marriage is in the dialogue, the gay community is becoming a more accepted part of American life (at least in most communities, and, I think even if someone is a bigot in the abstract, they often make exceptions in the concrete, day-to-day social maneuvers they perform). Racial discrimination is a social taboo, and all but the most backwards among us accept the idea that outward manifestations of racial prejudice are unacceptable (although the internal beliefs held by many are still very much alive and a much trickier, stubborn facet of racism to remove from a society. Racism may be thought of as backwards and ignorant, but we disagree a lot over what exactly comprises a racist). We accept women in very powerful positions in this country, to a degree and not without a heapin’ helpin’ of sexist comments and degradation. Yes, some progress has been made and I do think that the social climate that is expressed in those 1980s flicks where women tried to “have it all” is part of that progress. But I don’t think my liberal parents thought that we would still be debating the scientific merit of evolutionary biology in 2011. I don’t think my parents thought that their daughters would still be fighting to be taken seriously in the workplace in 2011, and I am sure they would have been as dismayed as I was while watching a member of the next generation of girls open pink package after heteronormative pink package on Christmas day.
It was actually after watching our niece on Christmas that I had a pretty awful breakdown with my husband. What hope is there? I asked him. I begged him to give me a reason to believe that this world would be a world worth living in during the lifetime of any child born today. As if the big stuff isn’t enough: Christian dominionism, global warming, peak oil, garbage gyre, the diminishing importance of science and technology in the most developed nation in the world… There is the little stuff. Our niece didn’t get a single book for Christmas. Just a slew of plastic crap meant to help her fulfill her more important role as a pretty thing, a pink-clad, oversexualized object. She’s eight. She’s smart. But she’s cute, and she is being hammered with the idea that this is what is most important. And yes, I know that if we had a girl in our lives, we’d do what we could to counteract these kinds of social pressures. And if we had a boy, we’d do what we could to teach him that girls have more to offer in life than to be tiny Barbies or, even worse, passive, faceless Bellas (from Twilight). But nevertheless, there are always going to be kids all around them that feed off of this social narrative, and those will be their peers.
The things we teach girls are not just a feminist issue, or a women’s issue. We all are either women or people who interact daily with women. Women are half of our society. If we continue to go backwards with what we teach our girls, the rest of society will go backwards as well.
It is really easy for me to get morose about this kind of thing, and when I was discussing it with my sister yesterday. She was talking about having children, I was talking about all of these reasons why I wouldn’t want to force someone to have to live through this shitshow of fundamentalism, short-sightedness, greed, oppression, war and self-destruction. She made me feel somewhat better in that she’s much smarter than I am regarding things like human nature and public policy. She said she thinks that things can only get so much worse before something amazing happens, and that while negative changes may be occurring on some levels, in other ways, fantastic advances and changes are happening that have immensely positive implications down the road. Focusing on just one part of the changes and developments in this world is a myopic view. And that maybe this experiment called America will eventually fail, something else will necessarily take its place. Things go on. We don’t know how this story will go. I still don’t think I’ll ever feel confident enough about what happens next to make the conscious decision to try and have a child. But for all of the things that go worse, there are ways in which things can possibly get better.
