by Meghan Daum
The same cannot be said for the relationship between my generation and those that are coming up behind us. Young people don’t want to be us because they’re not even the same species as us. Even if they did want to be us, the proposition would be absurd, like a human trying to emulate an orangutan. The world has changed so much between my time and theirs that someone just ten years younger might as well belong to a different geological epoch. In this epoch, there are no pay phones for calling friends at the spur of the moment. The contact highs from walking down the street have been replaced by dopamine hits from Instagram likes. To a young person, someone like me is not so much an elder as an extinction. Is it any wonder, then, that older generations’ contributions to the conversation are, at best, a kind of verbal meteor shower, the flickering, nattering remains of planets that haven’t existed for eons?
So this is where I find myself. In my dizziness and confusion, in my exhaustion and exasperation and pathetic, aphasic lust, I have wandered into a devastating but oddly beautiful revelation: my generation will be the last to have known the world in its analog form. As a result, we’ve grown old before actually getting old. We’ve become dinosaurs before we’re even fifty. We’ve felt the pace of evolution shift suddenly into hyper-speed, leaving us lumbering along like primitive creatures as these sleeker humans glide past us.
And it’s here, from this primitive-creature vantage point, that I find myself pressed up against yet another revelation: the questions we face now when it comes to men and women are questions that arose a split second ago. Modern humans have been around for some two hundred thousand years. Civilization as we know it has been churning away for perhaps six thousand years. Until the birth control pill came along in 1960, we were all essentially prisoners of nature, with women’s conditions being markedly worse, sometimes obscenely so. Until 1960, the idea that women could compete with men in the job market, that men should do housework, that women had any purpose in life higher than having babies and men had any purpose higher than financially supporting those babies or going to war to protect them, was something close to unthinkable. That we have come so far in so little time is a marvel. That we should expect all the kinks to have been worked out by now is insane.
In the scheme of things, the fifty-nine years that have elapsed between 1960 and today is a nanosecond, a flash of time so imperceptible that it has passed in increments of billions by the time you have read this sentence. It was already nearly thirty years ago that the feral woman was out there with her folding table yelling “Sign the petition.” It was already nearly thirty years ago that, as far as I was concerned, I owned the world. It feels like yesterday. Then again, every day feels like yesterday. Every day becomes yesterday before you know it.
CHAPTER 2 Growing Up Zooming: A 1970s Childhood
I was not a good girl. By which I mean I was not good at being a girl. I hated dolls. I hated playing dress up. I had no interest in toy baby carriages or toy ovens or carrying around a little purse. I wasn’t all that keen on most other girls, especially the primping, preening kind who were always in some state of hair brushing or lip glossing. Part of this had to do with my innate temperament, which has always erred on the side of a certain tomboyishness. Part of it had to do with my mother’s innate temperament, which I could never really put my finger on but which she projected onto me as though I were not only her daughter but also her personal side mirror. My mother adamantly did not want me to be a “girly girl.” This was a term she used frequently and whose reach included just about any of my female peers who giggled, wore nail polish, or carried purses in elementary school. She seemed, in fact, afraid of my being a girly girl, so much so that she never once dressed me in pink, put a bow in my hair, or pointed anywhere near the direction of makeup.
My mother was born in 1942. This timing made her a member of that unenviable cohort of women for whom second-wave feminism had come just slightly too late to make full use of. By the time women were shouting about equal division of housework, my mother had two kids and a husband, who, though hardly in the Don Draper mold, would never have given a passing thought to cooking a meal or mopping the floor. Though she aligned herself with the women’s movement as fervently as any of her liberal friends in her quasi-academic circles (one of my favorite photographs shows my mother and a friend standing in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1969), feminism for her was something that was grafted onto her identity as a wife and mother.
For her, at least in those years, being a feminist meant raising a daughter in accordance with the feminist standards of the moment. It meant buying Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be . . . You and Me record and singing along with celebrities like Alan Alda and Rosey Grier on songs about how boys can have dolls and how it’s all right to cry. It meant making fruitless attempts to teach your children to say “firefighter” instead of “fireman.” It meant pointing out chauvinism when the occasion called for it—“That man at the car repair shop was a chauvinist!”—and eschewing displays of chivalry: one afternoon at a swimming pool when I was about eight, I was so bewildered when a young boy gestured for me to jump off the diving board before taking his turn that I skulked away in confusion and shame. It was one of those childhood moments that by all rights should be utterly forgettable, yet for some reason has never left the surface of my memory. For nearly forty years, the moment has floated there like algae, which is apt because it took place at a rather dank indoor pool contaminated with who knows what. This was probably around 1978, at a Holiday Inn in some southern or midwestern town off the interstate. No doubt my family was making the drive to see relatives in Southern Illinois, and no doubt the peak experience of the trip for me was getting the chance to swim in a motel pool.
As a kid, I loved pools of all kinds but took a particular delight in motel pools, especially the indoor ones, where the colliding odors of chlorine and mold must have set off some kind of dopamine explosion in my brain. Just walking into those places, towel in hand, Mickey Mouse flip-flops on my feet, caused me to nearly combust from excitement. I can still remember the architecture of the pool complex at this particular Holiday Inn—“the Holidome,” it was called. I remember the vaulted ceilings, the fluorescent lights, the grimy green tint of everything. I remember approaching the diving board and waiting while a boy around my age began to mount the short ladder.
Though he was clearly ahead of me in line, the boy stepped back when he saw me and motioned for me to go first. The way I remember it, he had a military-style haircut and his military-looking parents sat in nearby lounge chairs. At the other end of the pool sat my mother in her own lounge chair, probably tending to my younger brother with one hand while trying to balance a Judith Guest novel in the other. Catching her eye, I could see that she could see what was happening, though her reaction was such a jumble of signals that I had no idea what to make of them. She appeared to be shaking her head and nodding it at the same time. Go. Don’t go. Say thank you. Say no thank you. Finally, I just walked away, avoiding eye contact with the boy as I shuffled alongside the pool back to my mother. The look on her face registered both disappointment and exasperation, though with whom I wasn’t sure.
“That’s something boys are taught to do with girls sometimes,” she explained. “They’re taught to let girls go first. He was being polite, but it’s a form of chauvinism.”
Mortified, I insisted that we leave the pool immediately. Which is really saying something, considering how totally awesome that Holidome was and how amazing the chlorine and mold smelled.
* * *
I was born in 1970. For the first few years of my life I was dressed almost entirely in yellow, which was also the color scheme of my nursery, such as it was (it was in fact a closet in my parents’ student-housing apartment). My mother’s opposition to the gender-coded colors of pink and blue meant she had to search hard to find alternative colors, and somehow yellow was the one that was most available. Thirty years later, when my friends were having babi
es, I would attend showers that were practically tributes to either pink or blue. Everyone found out their baby’s sex ahead of time, which gave them months to conjure a fantasy version of their child based solely on that information. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that it became common to learn the sex of your child before birth, and I wonder sometimes if the advent of this development didn’t play some sort of subtle role in the almost cartoonish manifestations of gender we saw in the late nineties through the mid-aughts. Are newborn baby girls who come home to nurseries tricked out in lace and taffeta naturally set up for toddlerhoods of tiaras and fairy wings? Do those fairy wings later carry those girls to the sands of spring break in Cancún, where they strut about in thong bikinis and flash their breasts into live cams? In other words, is fetal ultrasound technology responsible for the hyper-aestheticization of the gender binary? (Paging all sociology and gender-theory scholars in search of research-paper topics: You’re welcome!)
In any case, here’s the thing about being raised in the 1970s. A more androgynous time has probably never existed in modern American history. In the 1975 Sears catalog (the Amazon.com of its time) less than 2 percent of toys were marketed specifically to boys or girls. Television ads showed children of both sexes playing with a range of toys in colors like green and yellow. The PBS kids show Zoom, which came out of WGBH in Boston and aired originally from 1972 to 1978, was a pageant of gender neutrality. Its cast of seven kids wore identical shirts, most memorably the blue-and-maroon-striped rugby shirts of the early years. They performed skits that had to do with jokes or made-up languages or science experiments. Zoom’s conceit was that young viewers were supposed to write in and suggest ideas for the show. Each week, the Zoom kids sang a little rap song that gave out the mailing address, and the song became such an earworm that I suspect a good portion of Generation X knows that Boston zip code—02134—as readily as we know the pledge of allegiance.
When Zoom was revived in 1999, it’s worth noting that the rugby shirts were traded for more colorful fare and occasionally a girl or two could be spotted in pink. The show still had the same DIY bent, but it felt slicker, more focus-grouped. The hallmark of the show in both incarnations was the opening sequence, a choreographed song-and-dance number in which the kids introduced themselves one by one. “I’m Shona!,” “I’m John!” they’d shout while momentarily displaying some talent or interest that the show’s producers had decided to highlight. These talents involved a lot of running and tumbling and musical-instrument playing. Racial diversity was clearly a priority from the beginning; black, Asian, and Latino kids are all duly represented alongside the white kids. But to watch the 1970s sequences is to notice something subtle yet unmistakable about the cast: they are not boys and girls. They are kids. Obviously you can tell the boys from the girls, but as a collective they seem stripped of gender. There’s a pure, unburnished quality to them that seems as raw and muted as the film stock.
Granted, it might in fact be the grainy, muted 1970s film stock that’s creating this effect. But if you watch the opening sequence of a 1970s Zoom and compare it with the one from nearly thirty years later, you see more than a historical timeline of set design and special effects. You see girlness morph into girliness. You see magic wands replaced with pompoms. You see Carolyn with her tennis racket in 1976 (the idea being she loves tennis!) become Rachel with her hats and sparkly crown in 2001. You see Shona with her toy piano in 1976 become Kaleigh with a magically appearing rack of T-shirts (she’s a clotheshorse!) in 2001.
In fairness, these are some of the most glaring examples. The Zoom brand being what it is (or was), it’s not like the new version was ever going to look like a Disney movie. Moreover, while the Zoom aesthetic may have epitomized 1970s androgyny, there was still plenty of hyper-sexualizing of women going on in other corners of the culture. There was the Farrah Fawcett poster and Charlie’s Angels and a cultural obsession with the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. There was the birth of the porn industry. On another bandwidth entirely, Phyllis Schlafly was fighting the ERA on the grounds that women are essentially a protected class and shouldn’t give up a good thing.
You almost have to hand it to Schlafly. She went around decrying feminism by being the most in-your-face unapologetic power broad we’d seen since Ayn Rand. She had six kids and hated the Equal Rights Amendment, yet had a law degree and an enormous career that was about as “lean in” as it gets. If she wasn’t some kind of twisted, primordial specimen of ideological contradiction, then I don’t know who is. That was the thing about the 1970s; for every Farrah Fawcett poster, it seemed there was a no-nonsense woman leading by austere and sincere example. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever elected to Congress, ran for president. In 1973, ninety million television viewers tuned in to watch Billie Jean King beat card-carrying chauvinist Bobby Riggs in the historic “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match. In 1981, King left her husband and became the first mainstream public figure to come out as a lesbian (though the reveal was largely because her longtime girlfriend had come forward and sued her for money earned over the seven years of their relationship). The press, of course, feigned shock, but in reality it was hardly surprising. King had always looked like a lesbian. That is to say, she looked like a certain kind of woman of the 1970s.
I was only three years old in 1973, but I was already old enough to internalize certain aesthetic signifiers and unconsciously categorize them as aspirational versus non-
aspirational. Aviator glasses, such as those worn by Billie Jean King and Gloria Steinem, were aspirational (I imagined my future self wearing these). Rugby shirts like those worn by the kids on Zoom were aspirational (not to mention easily attainable in the here and now). Phyllis Schlafly and Farrah Fawcett were non-aspirational figures, albeit it in totally different ways. My idols were serious types like Nadia Comaneci and Jodie Foster. I downright worshipped Jodie. I saw her Disney movies like Freaky Friday and Candleshoe. When the original Freaky Friday came out in 1976, I begged to see it over and over again. I longed to be Jodie’s character, Annabel Andrews. I wanted to wear a red-and-white-striped boatneck sweater (what was it with the seventies and stripes?) and play field hockey the way she did.
What does it say that the biggest child movie star of the 1970s, Jodie Foster, later came out as a lesbian? What does it say that one of the biggest child television stars, Kristy McNichol, was, too? Those actresses mapped proto-queerness over every Disney film and ABC drama they appeared in. Except it didn’t read as androgyny at the time. As with the kids on Zoom, it read like standard kidhood. In the gender-neutral zone of this kidhood, girls didn’t watch Disney princess movies. We watched The Bad News Bears right alongside the boys. We were allowed to identify with our personhood before our girlhood or boyhood. I believe this is one of the great gifts of being a member of Generation X. I also believe it’s a big part of the reason many feminists my age have a hard time relating to younger feminists. We got to be girls on our own terms. We got to be kids, not just girls.
In 1975, I sat on the steps of the Texas Capitol with my mother, rallying with thousands of others on behalf of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Women in bell-bottom pants and bandanna head scarves carried signs reading “Safe Legal Abortions for All Women” and “My Body My Choice.” Surely a few of them wore the T-shirt, made famous by Gloria Steinem, that read “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like.” I was five years old, wearing a smock-like peasant blouse over pants. I know this was my outfit because a woman sitting nearby with a sketchpad made a charcoal drawing of me that day. For as long as I can remember, that drawing, which my mother mounted behind frameless glass, was hung on the wall of her bedroom. The ERA never passed, of course. It was ratified by thirty-five of the thirty-eight states needed in order for it to become a constitutional amendment and even supported by President Nixon. But after nearly a decade of bouncing around various legislative houses, it never got there. Seven years later, the lack of ratifications led the Supreme Court to effectively
kill the amendment by declaring it moot.
I remember hearing the news on National Public Radio while sitting in the kitchen doing homework as my mother cooked dinner. I remember asking who would be opposed to something as obvious as equal rights for women, and I remember my mother saying something about Phyllis Schlafly.
“But why would a woman be against equal rights for women?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” my mother said.
It was 1982. I’d spent my early childhood in Austin, Texas, surrounded by hippies and academics, but we now lived in a Republican-leaning New Jersey suburb, one whose bland affluence would become blander and more affluent as the Reagan years trotted along. Just about every woman who lived in that town was a mom, and I think it’s fair to say that very few worked full-time outside of the home. Still, 1982 was the year the phrase “having it all” entered the public lexicon. That was the title of Helen Gurley Brown’s best-selling guide to all-around female fulfillment. And even though her advice ran along the lines of sleeping with your boss and subsisting on diet Jell-O in order to stay thin, “having it all” would serve as the operative catchphrase for white middle-class female ambition for the next decade at least.
By now we had entered the era of the Jane Fonda workout, the “coffee achiever” ad campaign (in which luminaries ranging from David Bowie to Kurt Vonnegut to Cicely Tyson were enlisted by the National Coffee Association to make coffee seem cool to young people), and, of course, “power dressing” for women. The last one, a sartorial project that sought to lend masculine traits to the female presentation in the workplace, was responsible for some of the worst looks in fashion history. (As for the former, go to YouTube, search for “coffee achiever,” and be prepared to gasp at how long ago the 1980s look to be, not to mention the strangeness of Kurt Vonnegut appearing in a television ad.)