Darkest Hour Came After The Dawn

They were noisy, indignant days. Bras burning like shackles broken, voices lifted to shrill and demanding heights. And in the process, the fear of God injected like penicillin into us boys and men who’d never had cause to question the prerogatives of testosterone before.

So we learned to watch our steps and police our language because we didn’t want to tick her off. God, I mean.

I think of those days sometimes when I talk to my feminist female friends who are dazed and confused about the legacy of their movement. I think about it when I survey a generation of young people raised by rap to think “bitch” an acceptable synonym for “woman.” I thought about it, too, as I read the cover story in the current issue of People about the pressure men, media and mavens of high fashion heap on women to achieve the “perfect” (read: scrawny) body.

Los Angeles social psychologist Debbie Then told the magazine, “We’re evolving toward an unnatural view of beauty; thin women with huge breasts and stick legs like those of a 12-year-old. What real women’s bodies look like is labeled wrong and unattractive.”

Reading quotes like that - analytical and matter of fact - I felt an absence of something. Indignation.

Not that People brought a news flash with this story. Its infamous Hollywood Blackout cover of a few months back was no bulletin either. But that didn’t stop protesters from protesting, talk radio from talking, Jesse Jackson from manning the barricades. The issue was in your face, which is a place the feminist movement has not been in some years.

The women I knew in the years of awakening would have torn into that story like steak. But those voices are silent now, muted by the compromises of a touchy age, quieted by the need to get kids up for school and then get off to work oneself.

Reading that story, I wanted some woman to yell. Or for that matter, some man. After all, it’s not as if People is reporting an aberration. Not as if the things feminism was created to solve just folded up and went away.

But with the exception of Rush Limbaugh excoriating his “Feminazis,” the women’s rights movement doesn’t make it to the national stage much anymore.

What happened? Was it undermined by shrill extremists who equated consensual intercourse with rape? Was it killed by its own children in retaliation for the lie that it was possible and necessary for every woman to be a superwoman? Or did we just become impatient with the whole thing?

If you say to me, well, it is natural for movements to grow and change and even retreat from time to time, you’re right. If you say feminism wove itself into the fabric of our lives, fine. But there is value in confrontation on the 6 o’clock news as well. In the absence of that high profile, there is false comfort. And it becomes easy to mistake silence for contentment.

Once upon a day, feminism challenged me. It forced me to grow and learn and to justify things I thought I knew. If it was all that for me, then what was it for girls of my generation?

I can only imagine. It must have been a revelation. An undiscovered place. It must have been dawn.

But things are different in these quieter times.

A few years ago, while speaking at a community college, I ripped into pop music’s misogynistic attitudes and told the young women in the audience they should be outraged. They didn’t understand why.

At the schools my youngest sons attend, there is a thriving black market in boys’ phone numbers. Little girls buy the precious digits and then call boys they’ve never met to sell themselves and stake their claims. The whole transaction carries an air of tawdry desperation. As if absent a boy, a girl is nothing.

My boys don’t fully understand what’s wrong with this. And my explanation is not reinforced by a broader national debate that provides context for my concerns. The same, in reverse, goes for my little girl.

She is rambunctious and fearless now. Has a quick mind, a strong will and an unwillingness to defer. But she is only 5, and I find myself wondering how long before that all changes. More accurately, before it is changed for her by a nation and a media that - despite the progress we have made - so often resent those traits in women.

She will always be what she is, I hope. But I would feel more certain in that hope if feminism were loud and proud and out there to help secure it. If we had not grown silent after the dawn.

xxxx