In one of her books of essays, Steinem wrote about the conservatism of young women. Women is about one group, says she, that becomes more radical as they age.
Ewew. How so?
Her argument is, it’s thanks to the radicalizing experience of marriage a.k.a. direct contact with hell. Exaggerating? No. Marriage is contact with inescapable reality, ask your Mom or, if you don’t believe me, ask Amy B and her friend Liv, and they’d tell you, My my, those years of servitude!
Easy guys, I’m not about to repeat myself here for the umpteenth time and start yakking about evil men bred like maggots by patriarchy, I leave that task to women who have the heart for it, maybe to these younger feminists here who like discussing feminism in classrooms, seminar houses and coffee tables. I would flee such huddles of muddle and would rather play rugby or maybe have a beer with Liv and Amy.
What I recollect as I reread Steinem is a conversation I recently had with two women one evening of post-morteming movements and liberation projects we believe we helped spawn but could not get enough credit for. Anna Leah was describing the young lesbians she met in Sydney and Manila and she was dismayed because oh my God, said she, they’re into this butch-femme pairings, one playing boy the other playing girl?! She went kind of, What is this!!! when they’re supposed to be the young here!!!
That got us laughing because we were the three of us over 40 and further up, but thanks to feminism we are way over such stupid role-playings. Anna Leah’s explanation was it’s because these young people are raised in a very conservative environment, never gone to a rally denouncing US imperialism and the Vatican, instead they go to Church every Sunday and are with the Charismatic and go home to very Catholic homes. Which we again found rather sad: by comparison, we are unmarried and uncompromised to one man or another and are rather enjoying the slighter pleasures of our slaveries.
Steinem’s contention is around what she perceived then (in 1978, by God, does that date me?!) as young women’s relatively clean years and supple flesh giving them a kind of “home advantage” in a game where youth and obedience or at least congeniality is commercially valued and rewarded. Steinem drew her observations from her own young years which to her, was laughably conservative. Young women, she says, have this hope of excelling at the existing game, playing good girls, observing rules they can break without getting punished.
In other words, we old cows say, young women like to set themselves apart in the belief that they can do better than their aunts, can make better public approval ratings without having to look like ugly frogs in a bog. And public approval, if you ask them, is thanks to themselves and their own resources, not to patriarchal policy, maybe thanks to the breadth of their minds and embracing hearts which others don’t have.
My, does that sound like a declaration of war on the yiffies (young interesting freedom-loving fucks)? Not at all. If these girls feel equal to the boys they grew up with, and feel equal to the boys and girls you grew up with, surely they must be. What else do they need feminism for? Why make them sweat, why problematize the world they inherited from you, why impose an unnecessary gender war on them when they themselves are not touched by it? Leave Gioconda Belli alone. If Gioconda Belli feels the holier one beside all of New York she met on their way to the bank just because Nicaraguans, unlike tuxedoed and pointy-shoed Americans do not pass through life in this world without scratchmarks on their brains, let her. Who needs brains, anyway, if you’ve got a credit card. And if they’ve got dreadlocks and you haven’t, don’t get envious get one.
And that’s exactly the point: Most women way over 40s, if they’re lucky enough not to get mastectomy, hysterectomy or cervical ca on top of getting a marriage annulment after having been declared insane by the judge their husbands hired (what intelligent woman wouldn’t, under conditions of servitude) usually end up with neither a credit card nor a dreadlock, just pounds and pounds of stress-induced slabs and a tow of children to be properly dispose of. That is also the reason why they're the ones who have a good ear and a good eye for liberative texts, whether they’re shouted across the street and brawly market stalls, or written in slutty formal English.
Will gray-haired women one day take over the world like 80ish Gloria Steinem once imagined? I don’t think so. Most likely they will stay underground, rumbling in their kitchens, toppling dishes, making history by breaking a glass.
With an eye, or a foot, to the door.
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