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Hitting Puberty
BEING A GIRL HAS ALWAYS MEANT NAVIGATING A TIDE OF mixed signals and unexplained directives, and when I was ten, none filled me with more free-floating dread than the Movies. If you’re a woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, you know what I’m talking about: that fateful day in fifth or sixth grade when the boys and girls were separated (the boys herded, invariably, into the school gym), sat down, and told, via filmstrip, all about what makes them different.
Those of us schooled by Judy Blume’s
Are You There God? It’s Me
,
Margaret
knew, if only vaguely, that there was something called a period that happened to girls that made us older, mature, even special. Blume didn’t fully explain the mechanics of menstruation, focusing instead on its importance as a badge of maturity and the fact that it required some cryptic accessories (a belt?) to accommodate; the filmstrip we watched that day didn’t do much better. I don’t even recall a mention of blood, much less any step-by-step explanation of how the monthly process happened and why it was necessary. All information was disseminated on a need-to-know basis. And we, as girls, apparently didn’t need to know what was happening to our bodies. Nobody told us, for instance, that growing pains are actually more than a figure of speech (a fact that would have saved me, a few years later, from being convinced that I had nipple cancer). And there was no mention of the important by-products of our changing bodies, either—the fact that they
might really bum us out, cause us to be jealous of and mean to each other, or attract unwanted attention.
Are You There God? It’s Me
,
Margaret
knew, if only vaguely, that there was something called a period that happened to girls that made us older, mature, even special. Blume didn’t fully explain the mechanics of menstruation, focusing instead on its importance as a badge of maturity and the fact that it required some cryptic accessories (a belt?) to accommodate; the filmstrip we watched that day didn’t do much better. I don’t even recall a mention of blood, much less any step-by-step explanation of how the monthly process happened and why it was necessary. All information was disseminated on a need-to-know basis. And we, as girls, apparently didn’t need to know what was happening to our bodies. Nobody told us, for instance, that growing pains are actually more than a figure of speech (a fact that would have saved me, a few years later, from being convinced that I had nipple cancer). And there was no mention of the important by-products of our changing bodies, either—the fact that they
might really bum us out, cause us to be jealous of and mean to each other, or attract unwanted attention.
When the boys and girls were reunited in the afternoon, after the Movies, everything had changed. Neither side knew what had gone on with the other, but we now regarded each other warily, armed with our new (if cloudy) knowledge that though we played kickball together at recess and all trapped bugs on the sidewalks before dinner, we were now defined, irrevocably, against each other. I don’t know if the boys got a parting gift, but the girls did: a pastel pamphlet, handed out after the filmstrip, produced by Modess and directively titled “Growing Up and Liking It.”
Puberty is a time when girls by anatomy become girls by imperative, socialized into a world where we’re supposed to be more excited about a big box of maxipads than about, say, the wonders of the solar system. Tomboys are instructed to be more “ladylike.” Boys are transformed from buddies into people we’re supposed to either stay away from or develop crushes on. Instead of digging on our own unique qualities—our ability to draw or skateboard or double Dutch—we start focusing our energies on fitting in with everyone else, zooming unhappily in on our perceived shortcomings with the precision of the Hubble telescope.
Since 1992, when Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan published
Meeting at the Crossroads
, their landmark study on how girls’ self-esteem plunges at puberty, we’ve slowly become aware that the problem is a universal one, affecting girls of all places and races and classes. Mary Pipher, whose 1994 book
Reviving Ophelia
built on Brown and Gilligan’s research and prescribed ways for adults to help the girls in their lives through this time of crisis, identified female puberty in America as an update of Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name,” writing that “America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness, and leaves many of them traumatized.”
Meeting at the Crossroads
, their landmark study on how girls’ self-esteem plunges at puberty, we’ve slowly become aware that the problem is a universal one, affecting girls of all places and races and classes. Mary Pipher, whose 1994 book
Reviving Ophelia
built on Brown and Gilligan’s research and prescribed ways for adults to help the girls in their lives through this time of crisis, identified female puberty in America as an update of Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name,” writing that “America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness, and leaves many of them traumatized.”
The problem may have had no name, but in the years since Brown, Gilligan, and Pipher identified it, the subject of puberty and its discontents has yielded some amazingly lucid, bracing, and resonant pop culture. From books (Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina
, Danzy Senna’s
Caucasia,
Peggy Orenstein’s nonfiction study
Schoolgirls
) to TV (
My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks
) to movies (
Welcome to the Dollhouse, Girls Town, Thirteen
), the past decade-plus has given girls a bigger platform than ever before from which to talk about growing up and not liking it one bit.
Bastard Out of Carolina
, Danzy Senna’s
Caucasia,
Peggy Orenstein’s nonfiction study
Schoolgirls
) to TV (
My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks
) to movies (
Welcome to the Dollhouse, Girls Town, Thirteen
), the past decade-plus has given girls a bigger platform than ever before from which to talk about growing up and not liking it one bit.
But at the same time, it’s also made puberty and adolescence more visible than ever before. We’ve always been obsessed with youth, but the age of media consent appears to be dropping ever lower. Adults read books about a pubescent wizard and get obsessed with
The O.C.
Teen starlets, once confined to the pages of
Seventeen
and
YM
, are sprawled all over the covers of
Vogue
and
Elle,
which have in turn spawned their own teen versions. Journalists who wring their hands over the thirteen-year-olds who traipse the streets in hoochie-mama ensembles buy their own assenhancing pants at Forever 21. The blurring of boundaries between childhood and adulthood in pop representations is sometimes cute and poignant, as in movies like
Freaky Friday
and its remake or those wacky Gilmore Girls, but more often disturbing—as when frat-house retailer Abercrombie & Fitch began peddling tween-size thong panties printed with cutesy come-ons for the training-bra set.
The O.C.
Teen starlets, once confined to the pages of
Seventeen
and
YM
, are sprawled all over the covers of
Vogue
and
Elle,
which have in turn spawned their own teen versions. Journalists who wring their hands over the thirteen-year-olds who traipse the streets in hoochie-mama ensembles buy their own assenhancing pants at Forever 21. The blurring of boundaries between childhood and adulthood in pop representations is sometimes cute and poignant, as in movies like
Freaky Friday
and its remake or those wacky Gilmore Girls, but more often disturbing—as when frat-house retailer Abercrombie & Fitch began peddling tween-size thong panties printed with cutesy come-ons for the training-bra set.
And ever since published studies of teen girls and relational aggression—Rachel Simmons’s
Odd Girl Out
, Lyn Mikel Brown’s
Raising Their Voices
, and Rosalind Wiseman’s
Queen Bees and Wannabes
, among others—became big media news, the nuances of girls’ untamed hostility have been shorthanded to bemoan an epidemic of “mean girls.” The result is that media outlets have been quick to broadcast the most sensational examples of this girl trouble—girls who physically hurt each other (or worse, hurt or humiliate boys)—but less inclined to draw attention to the culture that does so much to foster our anger and resentment.
Odd Girl Out
, Lyn Mikel Brown’s
Raising Their Voices
, and Rosalind Wiseman’s
Queen Bees and Wannabes
, among others—became big media news, the nuances of girls’ untamed hostility have been shorthanded to bemoan an epidemic of “mean girls.” The result is that media outlets have been quick to broadcast the most sensational examples of this girl trouble—girls who physically hurt each other (or worse, hurt or humiliate boys)—but less inclined to draw attention to the culture that does so much to foster our anger and resentment.
It’s a difficult time, puberty, and maybe an acknowledgment of that was exactly what those stupid filmstrips, with their clinical, bloodless diagrams and stilted voice-overs, were trying to get across. But on the upside, puberty is often a time when girls in the process of being socialized into their gender are also politicized by it. They have questions that can’t be answered by the pink and blue playbooks we’ve been using to define girls and boys since forever. They don’t see why they should accept the status quo rules and limitations—don’t climb trees, don’t call boys, don’t show your smarts—assigned to them just because they happen to be female. They challenge the lessons of sex, race, manners, mores, and everything else about girlhood that we learn everywhere from MTV to
Tiger Beat
to Toys “R” Us. They offer clear insights on crucial intersections of feminist consciousness and pop product. If the culture at large would just listen, we all might learn something.—A.Z.
Tiger Beat
to Toys “R” Us. They offer clear insights on crucial intersections of feminist consciousness and pop product. If the culture at large would just listen, we all might learn something.—A.Z.
Remembering Femininity in the Video Age
Andi Zeisler / WINTER 1996
LIKE SOME GRIZZLED OLD-TIMER SITTING ON THE PORCH OF the homestead talking about the good old days, I think back to the first time I saw MTV and pity the prepubescents of today who didn’t have the luck to see, as I did, the wonder of MTV when it first aired. I was eight years old, alone in my living room, and somehow I knew that I was witnessing a tremendous event: a connection with something that just wasn’t accessible through after-school cartoons or
Gilligan’s Island
reruns. When I recall what I saw back then, my perception of those early videos creates the memory that resonates in my TV-addled mind as the truth. And what I remember best are the images of women I saw on MTV. I’m aware of those representations in a different way than I was in those first golden days when I sat glued to the small screen, clutching a handful of Fritos. What I say about these images now comes from filtering them through a screen of theory and history and related bullshit, but it still comes from what I saw back then. The women of MTV were not merely women; rather, they were onscreen archetypes of what a video-age woman could be, and they were indelibly printed on my young brain.
Gilligan’s Island
reruns. When I recall what I saw back then, my perception of those early videos creates the memory that resonates in my TV-addled mind as the truth. And what I remember best are the images of women I saw on MTV. I’m aware of those representations in a different way than I was in those first golden days when I sat glued to the small screen, clutching a handful of Fritos. What I say about these images now comes from filtering them through a screen of theory and history and related bullshit, but it still comes from what I saw back then. The women of MTV were not merely women; rather, they were onscreen archetypes of what a video-age woman could be, and they were indelibly printed on my young brain.
The Androgyne
By the time the first little MTV spaceman planted his flag on the screens of cable-blessed homes, androgyny in rock music was old news. This was, after all, the post-glam-rock early 1980s. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, David Bowie, and many others had been praised up and down not only for their musical achievements but also for their knack for appropriating/ mocking the styles of the opposite sex. But the legions of suburban tykes lounging in our beanbag chairs in front of the tube didn’t know about that. All we knew was that there was a huge number of girly-looking guys staring out at us from the other side of the TV screen, and we were mesmerized. Through Adam Ant and Duran Duran, I absorbed the concept of androgyny unconsciously as I giggled dreamy-eyed over these grown men with made-up faces, these boys who looked too much like girls to be the “opposite” sex.
But then there were the actual girls: Joan Jett, who wore head-to-toe black leather and reveled in crunchy cock-rock riffs in her video for “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll”; and skinny, imperious Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. These women’s physical images incorporated a litany of bad-boy references, from pre-zirconium Elvis to Marlon Brando to Keith Richards. They were aping the style of men whose blatant sexuality made them “dangerous.” Not so much rejecting femininity as cloaking it in the historical acceptibility of male rebellion, these women were insinuating themselves into the badass canon. I didn’t consciously think that they looked like boys, but when I saw the video for the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket,” I thought that Chrissie Hynde in a waitress’s uniform was all wrong. And the end of the video, when she runs out of the diner and hops on the tough guy’s motorcycle—well, that was all wrong, too. Anyone who had seen the video for “Tattooed Love Boys” knew that Chrissie would never let her ass be grabbed by a customer and then go for a ride on his hog. She’d get on her own motorcycle and peel out of the diner parking lot, spraying that loser with a mouthful of gravel.
Perhaps the most memorable androgyne of early MTV was Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. In their first video, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Annie wore a man’s black suit and held a riding crop (or maybe it was a pointer), her bright-orange flattop rising out of the ensemble over her placidly menacing, masklike face. The dangerous sexuality of Joan and
Chrissie’s leather pants was here replaced by the more dangerous sexuality of total gender unrecognizability. No real precedent for female-to-male cross-dressing had been set on television at this point, although the madcap hilarity of men impersonating women had been proved many times over, from Milton Berle to
M
*
A
*
S
*
H
. The employment of cross-dressing for noncomedic purposes, and by a woman, was jarring. The whispering among my elementary-school friends about this video yielded only one possible conclusion—that Annie Lennox must be a lesbian.
Chrissie’s leather pants was here replaced by the more dangerous sexuality of total gender unrecognizability. No real precedent for female-to-male cross-dressing had been set on television at this point, although the madcap hilarity of men impersonating women had been proved many times over, from Milton Berle to
M
*
A
*
S
*
H
. The employment of cross-dressing for noncomedic purposes, and by a woman, was jarring. The whispering among my elementary-school friends about this video yielded only one possible conclusion—that Annie Lennox must be a lesbian.
The Future Freak
The second image that appeared consistently on early MTV can best be described as the Space-Age Future Freak. The SAFF, like the Androgyne, took more than one form. There was the faraway-eyed, operatic Kate Bush, the future-Barbie frontwomen of Missing Persons and Berlin, and the space-age amazon Grace Jones, among others. But unlike the Androgyne, the SAFF had no basis in history other than the collective projection of “the future” that held 1980s media in its thrall. Computers, NASA, and ever-expanding medical and industrial technologies were spurring us on to the future, but what about humanity? The fears of future dehumanization, particularly of women, were given paranoid form in movies like
Blade Runner
and
Liquid Sky,
where futuristic females invariably took on the form of alien succubi, preying on the hapless male heroes. The sexual female, given power, mutated into something evil that had to be stopped by the likes of Harrison Ford. The message of these films? Future women are going to be scary, castrating sexual deviants. The video counterparts of these cinematic women presented an alternative to traditional notions of what constitutes femaleness. The SAFF was not soft, not yielding, and seemed entirely her own invention. Her voice was clearly that of a woman, yet it was not a “feminine” voice—it was robotic, as Grace Jones’s was, or it was the ethereal, otherworldly siren song of Kate Bush.
Blade Runner
and
Liquid Sky,
where futuristic females invariably took on the form of alien succubi, preying on the hapless male heroes. The sexual female, given power, mutated into something evil that had to be stopped by the likes of Harrison Ford. The message of these films? Future women are going to be scary, castrating sexual deviants. The video counterparts of these cinematic women presented an alternative to traditional notions of what constitutes femaleness. The SAFF was not soft, not yielding, and seemed entirely her own invention. Her voice was clearly that of a woman, yet it was not a “feminine” voice—it was robotic, as Grace Jones’s was, or it was the ethereal, otherworldly siren song of Kate Bush.
But the SAFF’s physical image was hyperfeminized, caricatured. In the video for Missing Persons’ “Destination Unknown,” lead singer Dale Bozzio sported a floor-length white mane, a Mylar-and-bubble-wrap dress, and spike heels, and she sang in a high-frequency baby-doll voice while staring at her own bizarre face in a smoky mirror. This image plays into
classic notions of woman as the infantlike, narcissistic other. But despite the contradictions inherent in the SAFF persona, she defined the future—unknowable, cloudy, and scary.
classic notions of woman as the infantlike, narcissistic other. But despite the contradictions inherent in the SAFF persona, she defined the future—unknowable, cloudy, and scary.
The Bad Girl
This MTV archetype was perhaps the most familiar one. As tough as the Androgyne but less masculine, earthier than the Future Freak, the Bad Girl was like a canny, fun older sister—smart and sexy and cut-the-shit direct. All her songs spoke directly to someone—presumably a guy—who was trying to mess with her, and she wasn’t having it. Pat Benatar, Toni Basil, the Flirts, the Waitresses, and Patti Smythe of Scandal all embodied a kind of fishnet-stockinged consciousness that allowed them to seem like slutty girls while harboring a clearheaded intelligence and the occasional subversive agenda. Toni Basil’s “Mickey” video exploited the whole good girl/bad girl cheerleader motif, with Toni cartwheeling around, pompoms in hand, while delivering the genderfuck line, “Come on and give it to me, any way you can / Any way you wanna do it, I’ll take it like a man.” Pat Benatar took the Bad Girl role one step further, using the video format to star in minimovies in which she took on the personae of other bad girls. In “Shadows of the Night,” she portrays a 1940s Rosie the Riveter type who dreams of being a ruthless, glamorous double agent. And in “Love Is a Battlefield,” probably the tour de force of her video career, Pat plays a teenage runaway whose foray into the big city leads to her working in a seedy dance parlor with other unlucky women. But Pat mobilizes the women into a line-dance uprising against their evil pimp, and liberation ensues. Go on with your bad self, Pat!
Sadly, these would turn out to be the salad days of the Bad Girl, because once MTV realized that their main audience comprised adolescent boys and their hard-ons, the marketing dynamic took over and these women all but vanished. Pat Benatar and Toni Basil were replaced by nameless inflatobreasted bimbos who writhed in videos by poufy-haired lite-metal bands like Warrant and Poison, portraying groupies, porn actresses, and girlfriends. MTV wanted you to believe that this was what a Bad Girl was, but even those of us just graduating from our training bras knew the vast difference between a player and a plaything.
Little by little, the archetypes of early MTV disappeared from the screen, displaced by the ever-increasing popularity of the channel and its ability to create and crush images and fads with heartless precision. The use of women primarily as cheese-metal video ornaments made it necessary for those women who were actual musicians to protect themselves from winding up as yet another babe spread-eagled on top of a Camaro. So women like Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, and the Indigo Girls ushered in a new era of no-frills videos—no leather pants, no bubble-wrap dresses, no Benataresque role playing. They played solid, admirable music that also happened to make boring-as-hell video viewing. Having experienced the myriad over-the-top moments of MTV’s first inception, there was no substitute. Well, there was Madonna, who aimed to amass all the aspects of the Bad Girl, the SAFF, and the Androgyne into one package, but that’s a whole other essay.
Those early images and videos were powerful. They were novelty and stereotype and affirmation. They provided young girls with ideas of rebellion, sex, and self-sufficiency that couldn’t be found in the pages of
Young Miss
. They allowed us to think critically and find fault with other images of women that we saw not only on MTV but also in other media. They inspired us to rock out. If you turn on MTV today, in between segments of
Beauty and the Beach
and
The Real World
, you might—if you’re lucky—see something that reminds you of what MTV once was: that brave new world where the women talked tough and the men looked pretty.
Young Miss
. They allowed us to think critically and find fault with other images of women that we saw not only on MTV but also in other media. They inspired us to rock out. If you turn on MTV today, in between segments of
Beauty and the Beach
and
The Real World
, you might—if you’re lucky—see something that reminds you of what MTV once was: that brave new world where the women talked tough and the men looked pretty.
BOOK: BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
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