From
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female in the Mass Media, by Susan J. Douglas (the current read for my History of American Pop Culture class):
"None of our teen girl culture, none of what we did, apparently had any redeeming value at all. According to the prevailing cultural history of our times, the impact of the boys was serious, lasting, and authentic. The impact of the girls was fleeting, superficial, trivial. The supposedly serious cultural documents of teenage rebellion, like Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, or Blackboard Jungle, emphasized male alienation and malaise. Histories of the sixties still focus on the boys, their music and their politics, while we appear as nothing more than mindless, hysterical, out-of-control bimbos who shrieked and fainted while watching the Beatles or jiggled our bare breasts at Woodstock. Idiots, hysterics, bimbos--empty vessels.
Just think about it. Male rock n' rollers, no matter how lewd, drug-besotted, paunchy, or short-lived, have become canonized. Elvis is a saint, a legend, immortalized now on a stamp, while Jerry Lewis, who had a habit of marrying his thirteen-year-old cousins and having wives who died mysteriously, was portrayed by box-office star Dennis Quaid in Great Balls of Fire! ...Pledge drives for PBS are built around documentaries celebrating the genius of Paul Simon, Elton John, and James Taylor. I'm a fan of all these guys, but I can't help noticing that no comparable celebratory tributes have been made to Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell,or Aretha Franklin. Must a female singer have the crap beaten out of her--as Tina Turner did--to merit a film? Where's the movie about the Shirelles, or Grace Slick? Apparently they didn't matter, and had no impact on social change in America."
Maybe the excerpt doesn't speak to you the way it did to me, but I marked it in my book with an
A-Fucking-Men. Since high school, I've had to deal with male friends and their alterna-schtick characterized by its theme song, "
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright."*
Nothing against Bob Dylan, I guess
, but why is someone who can't even spell "all right" worshipped while a poetess like Patti Smith is largely ignored? Like Douglas says, we turn Elvis--a man with musical talent and what could be perceived as self-esteem problems--into a deity, while a beautiful, confident woman like Aretha Franklin is just a paragraph in music's history. Jack Kerouac is idolized by many, yet it takes something of an expert to name a female Beat writer. (try
Diane di Prima or
Ann Waldman)
I think it's ridiculous how so many people still consider feminism worthless, a silly institution belonging to silly girls. Women shouldn't be seen as ridiculous and worthless, and what people don't understand is how many ways we empower ourselves, sometimes unknown to others.
You're looking at one way. What I love about the kind of fashion this blog and others like it perpetuate is the level playing field aspect, even having the advantage--the fact that fashion isn't silly or frivolous, it's art, it's personal expression, it's giving ourselves and our images back to
us. We don't dress for men, we dress for us.
We're walking, talking, thinking proof that maybe people should think twice (it's all right!).
Think about the values perpetuated by this kind of fashion: sexual equality. Creative assertion. Anti-consumerism, even--the mentality that we shouldn't give the Man our money when we can create our own looks combined with what we like about theirs with our own imagination. That we can apply their ideas in a
better way
, even.
You should think about that every time you walk outside in an amazing outfit; post a picture on
Wardrobe Remix--a collective of beautiful, creative women (and some boys) from all walks of life, ethnicities, shapes, and sizes, free from oppressive stereotypical imagery; or criticize people who buy into these silly mindsets (subconsciously or not) just by being
you. Fuck patriarchal Bob Dylan worship. Fashion is not frivolous unless you make it. And I know I never will.
*I find this song completely mysogynistic, I don't know about you.
