Category: Cultural Commentary

Born in the late 1950s, I came of age in the mid-morning of the women’s movement. As a living, breathing, puzzling teenage conglomeration of old fashioned values, geekiness, and a passionate embrace of sexual liberation, I was alive to witness feminism’s rise to ascendancy during the assertively freedom-seeking energy of the 1970s.

But one source of so many of my life regrets is my predilection for embracing a movement a decade or more after it had peaked. You see, I can also be reactionary; I have sometimes come to embrace movements only after years of balking at them, and feminism was one of them.

My contradictory youth

In the 1980s, while I eagerly embraced ’60s Counterculture sexual liberation and the expansion of women’s rights, I shortsightedly found the feminist movement‘s emphasis on abortion off-putting. Empathy being a strong, innate part of my being, I was driven to want to protect babies, both unborn and born. For several years, I was anti-abortion.

You see, I was politically very clueless in my youth. I paid no attention to politics. Little did I know that I was about the only person who based her anti-abortion views on actual empathy for babies and not on misogynist religious dictates.

I was a feminist at heart, but one who questioned some of the approaches of the movement. If that makes sense, right?

Called to active duty for women’s rights

Fast forward to today. After decades of American society believing that women’s rights were a done deal, never to be undone again, along came the 45th presidency, and two Supreme Court appointments later, the Constitutional protections that my generation (and Generation X) had counted on were suddenly dead and gone. Almost all of our basic rights now lay unprotected against malicious, malevolent legislative attack.

Curled up in my bed with the current issue of Ms. magazine on my stalwartly pro-choice lap and a three year prepaid membership in the National Organization for Women under my garter, for perhaps the first time in my life I am entering a critical, relevant sociopolitical movement in its reinvigorated beginning rather than hitching my devotion to it after it had already run out of momentum.

And it makes me feel young again. But this time, my new youth is powered by the wisdom of age.

Those of us who came of age during the height of the Sexual Revolution, otherwise known as the Best Times in American History, Like Evah, looked upon the 1950s with disdain. The 1950s were scorned as puritanical, uptight, and repressed. Breastfeeding was frowned upon, open breastfeeding was unthinkable, and we spoke of menstrual periods in coded language like “a visit from Grandma.”

The Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s rebelled against that with vigor, and rebel, did we ever. Pushing against sexual repression together with the rising feminist movement, we propelled the United States into a realm of liberty and free personal expression that it had never seen before.

And then came the 1990s.

What Happened?

Concession by tiny concession, Democrats in legislative chambers began surrendering that newfound love of sexual and expressive liberty in a misguided effort to placate a nascent social conservative movement. In a shocking betrayal of the Sexual Revolution, President Bill Clinton fired the incomparable Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for merely stating a simple and obvious fact about masturbation. And American culture began to body-shame men who merely showed the amount of skin that the 1950s considered normal for males.

By the year 2000, any male who dared show as much skin as Lloyd Bridges in the 1960s TV series Sea Hunt suffered brutal ridicule and shaming that was heretofore never dreamed possible.

The Fifties, only Worse

But today, nearly all men wear long pants in the pool or at the beach, euphemistically called “board shorts,” and many wear shirts in the water as well. Any man wearing Lloyd Bridges’ trunks is safely assumed to be visiting from overseas. What in the hell happened to the body acceptance of the 1970s?

Today, American culture has become so Puritanical that even the 1950s appear liberated in comparison. The only demographic today that seems to be keeping body acceptance alive is … wait for it … we in the Pride community.

Liberty is like muscle; neglect it, take it for granted, and liberty will atrophy and fall into disuse. Over the course of a few decades liberty will not be valued anymore. Liberty becomes casually disposable.

And that’s where we’re at.