came when the personal experience of injustice converged with popular culture, such as the new Ms. magazine and the television sitcom That Girl , which illustrated another way.
Initially, I experienced my indignation alone. Then other young wives timidly whispered similar thoughts. When I saw emerging feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Florynce Kennedy on the evening news protesting the status quo, I felt they were giving political voice to our inchoate personal desires to break free of the old molds. Women began shedding more than girdles in our quest to live less constricted lives. I searched out the five other at-large members of the new National Organization for Women who lived within a
one-hundred-mile radius of my Odessa, Texas, home. And I became fueled with a passion to make sure my daughters would have more options and more opportunities than my peers and I had.
Sex and sexual power played a central role in my newfound activism, too. First of all, the average age of marriage for women then was nineteen. Like me, most women married young, either so we could have sex “legitimately” or because we’d already had sex. We realized en masse —and a little late—that this wasn’t the healthiest way to start a lifelong relationship. The divorce rate shot up. Though my ex-husband and I made a brave eighteen-year try, we simply didn’t have the emotional maturity to sustain a marriage during those times of roiling social change; we split in 1976.
I was like many other women who joined the 1970s sexual revolution after a divorce. We were chafing against the long-held cultural archetypes—still in place today—that viewed women only along a sex-saturated continuum that incorporated:
• The whore , who needs no definition. Like Mary Magdalene, she sometimes has a heart of gold despite her morally fallen state. Hers is the most straightforward power transaction, and if she’s a smart businesswoman, she makes sure to get paid before delivering the goods.
• The evil temptress, like the iconic character Matty, as played by a sultry-voiced Kathleen Turner in the 1981 film Body Heat . Her lover Ned, played by William Hurt, says that Matty “shouldn’t wear that body,” by which he excuses the intensity of his desire (he smashes windows to get to her and murders her unwanted husband at her behest).
• The eyelash-batting manipulator, who might even be noble if her manipulations were in the service of others, such as the Biblical Esther who saved her people through her feminine wiles. Another example is Scheherazade, who kept her king
mesmerized night after night to save other women’s lives and end his brutal practice of getting a fresh wife every night and then killing her the next morning.
• The clueless incompetent, personified as the dumb blonde hyper-sexualized Marilyn Monroe model that seemed to define most of womanhood in most men’s eyes most of the time. “In men’s eyes” are the operative words. The Barbie doll was born in 1959, a year after Madonna; her tiny waist, big boobs, and long shapely legs represented the objectified feminine ideal—sexy but not too overtly sexual.
• The virgin , a.k.a., Mary, the original Madonna, morally pure because she is sexually untouched. The paradox of the very concept of virginity, as authors like Hanne Blank ( Virgin ) and Jessica Valenti ( The Purity Myth ) have demonstrated convincingly in their books, is that the idea of virginity itself is socially constructed, with no objective meaning of its own. If you think about it, the belief that a woman’s hymen is what gives her value to a man is among the most ridiculous in human history. I think that’s why I have always loved how the ironic humor in Madonna’s lyrics: “Like a virgin . . . touched for the very first time” punctures such ancient notions.
Madonna challenged every one of those female archetypes, complete with shocking costumes. She did it by taking on elements of each character at
Initially, I experienced my indignation alone. Then other young wives timidly whispered similar thoughts. When I saw emerging feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Florynce Kennedy on the evening news protesting the status quo, I felt they were giving political voice to our inchoate personal desires to break free of the old molds. Women began shedding more than girdles in our quest to live less constricted lives. I searched out the five other at-large members of the new National Organization for Women who lived within a
one-hundred-mile radius of my Odessa, Texas, home. And I became fueled with a passion to make sure my daughters would have more options and more opportunities than my peers and I had.
Sex and sexual power played a central role in my newfound activism, too. First of all, the average age of marriage for women then was nineteen. Like me, most women married young, either so we could have sex “legitimately” or because we’d already had sex. We realized en masse —and a little late—that this wasn’t the healthiest way to start a lifelong relationship. The divorce rate shot up. Though my ex-husband and I made a brave eighteen-year try, we simply didn’t have the emotional maturity to sustain a marriage during those times of roiling social change; we split in 1976.
I was like many other women who joined the 1970s sexual revolution after a divorce. We were chafing against the long-held cultural archetypes—still in place today—that viewed women only along a sex-saturated continuum that incorporated:
• The whore , who needs no definition. Like Mary Magdalene, she sometimes has a heart of gold despite her morally fallen state. Hers is the most straightforward power transaction, and if she’s a smart businesswoman, she makes sure to get paid before delivering the goods.
• The evil temptress, like the iconic character Matty, as played by a sultry-voiced Kathleen Turner in the 1981 film Body Heat . Her lover Ned, played by William Hurt, says that Matty “shouldn’t wear that body,” by which he excuses the intensity of his desire (he smashes windows to get to her and murders her unwanted husband at her behest).
• The eyelash-batting manipulator, who might even be noble if her manipulations were in the service of others, such as the Biblical Esther who saved her people through her feminine wiles. Another example is Scheherazade, who kept her king
mesmerized night after night to save other women’s lives and end his brutal practice of getting a fresh wife every night and then killing her the next morning.
• The clueless incompetent, personified as the dumb blonde hyper-sexualized Marilyn Monroe model that seemed to define most of womanhood in most men’s eyes most of the time. “In men’s eyes” are the operative words. The Barbie doll was born in 1959, a year after Madonna; her tiny waist, big boobs, and long shapely legs represented the objectified feminine ideal—sexy but not too overtly sexual.
• The virgin , a.k.a., Mary, the original Madonna, morally pure because she is sexually untouched. The paradox of the very concept of virginity, as authors like Hanne Blank ( Virgin ) and Jessica Valenti ( The Purity Myth ) have demonstrated convincingly in their books, is that the idea of virginity itself is socially constructed, with no objective meaning of its own. If you think about it, the belief that a woman’s hymen is what gives her value to a man is among the most ridiculous in human history. I think that’s why I have always loved how the ironic humor in Madonna’s lyrics: “Like a virgin . . . touched for the very first time” punctures such ancient notions.
Madonna challenged every one of those female archetypes, complete with shocking costumes. She did it by taking on elements of each character at
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