I watched a few minutes of “Rocky” one night last week. I’ve seen “Rocky” many times, and although I haven’t seen it start to finish in many years, I will always watch it for a little while when I come across it. I picked it up right at the scene in which Rocky tries to instruct young Marie, the street-corner-hanging, tight-jeans-wearing, tough little South Philly kid, on how to be a “nice” girl.
Rocky’s heart is in the right place. Even with everything I know and believe now, which includes the firm conviction that a random neighborhood dude has absolutely no right to tell a young girl who is not his daughter how to dress or speak or behave, I know that he’s honestly concerned about Marie. In 1970s Philadelphia, foul-mouthed, late-night-wandering, careless young girls end up with a bad reputation, at the very least.
When Rocky tells young Marie to watch her mouth, to try to act less trampy and more ladylike, and to avoid being seen with the neighborhood hooligans, he’s trying to protect her. He knows that a bad reputation, once earned, is almost impossible for a young girl to shed. He knows that a girl who wants a nice boyfriend and eventually a nice husband cannot be the type of girl who puts out, or who is even thought to put out, or who is thought to even think about putting out. He knows these things because he’s a man and he knows how he himself treats women of the right sort and women of the wrong sort.
So yes, I suppose that Rocky’s heart is in the right place, and I love him for walking Marie home and making sure she gets safely inside. But I love Marie even more for telling Rocky to go fuck himself, just as she shuts the door in his face. At that age, I didn’t know how to handle the many men and boys in my neighborhood who all felt that it was their duty and their right to tell every girl how much or how sincerely we should smile, or how much or little makeup we should wear, or how we should walk or speak or laugh so as to be attractive to men but not too-attractive-if-you-know-what-I-mean and we did, thank you very much. I wish I’d known then that a polite but firm “fuck off” or variation thereof was the only reasonable response to such unsolicited instruction.
*****
Did you think that this post was going to be about a movie? No, it’s actually about a book; Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, a collection of essays about mid-20th century American girlhood
I first read Caitlin Flanagan in 2006 or so. One of her Atlantic essays went viral (which at that time meant that people emailed it around to all of their friends, who emailed it to other friends). I read the essay, and then immediately went and bought the hardcover edition of To Hell With All That, Flanagan’s collection of essays on women and housekeeping and motherhood.
The essay, of course, was the infamous “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” which earned Caitlin Flanagan a shit-ton of grief from working women and feminists. I just re-read that essay and I have to believe that most of the people who blasted it as a mean-spirited polemic against women in the workforce didn’t actually read it. Instead, they read the most inflammatory out-of-context quotes that circulated on the internet until everyone was sure that Caitlin Flanagan was a woman-hating Phyllis Schlafly wannabe.
Having actually read “Serfdom,” I know that it is not at all an attack against women who work. Rather, it’s a criticism of women who take advantage of other women who work, by paying them low hourly under-the-table wages to serve as nannies and housekeepers. This is still a problem. Housekeepers and nannies, sometimes undocumented, sometimes legal, but almost always poor, are often underpaid, deprived of paid time off and medical benefits, and hired and paid without the paperwork that would make them eligible for Social Security and other government benefits. If they are hurt on the job, they’re not eligible for Worker’s Compensation. They don’t get paid holidays or voting leave or jury duty leave. If they’re undocumented, then they don’t even have any recourse if their employers fail to pay them. Caitlin Flanagan wasn’t attacking women who work in highly paid professions; she was pleading for fairness and equity for the women who do the work that makes it possible for professional and executive women to succeed. Things have changed since 2006, and I suspect that readers today would react differently to this essay than they did 15 years ago. Caitlin Flanagan was right.
*****
A few years after I read To Hell with All That, another old Flanagan essay also made its rounds on the internet. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica” examined an apparent panic about an apparent oral sex craze among very young adolescents. I say “apparent” because Flanagan begins the essay by admitting that she had initially scoffed at rumors about middle school blow job parties, and because I had young children at the time so I wasn’t tuned in to teen and tween culture. The online discussion of this essay in 2010 or so, when I first heard about it, suggested that Flanagan herself was part of an hysterical pearl-clutching mob of middle-aged suburban ladies, aghast at the behavior of these young trollops.
I kept meaning to read the essay for myself, but I never got around to it until just last week, when I read Girl Land, which includes a chapter based on “Are You There God?” And what do you know? Just as with “Serfdom,” the online haters had completely misrepresented the essay, and Flanagan’s point. That’s what you get when you read about what an author has written, rather than reading the author’s actual words.
*****
But didn’t I say that I was going to write about a book? I think I did. Girl Land is about girlhood of a very different sort than Rocky’s young friend Marie and I lived through in inner-city Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. Caitlin Flanagan’s girls are nicely brought-up upper middle class American girls, girls who are “cosseted,” “cherished,” “treasured,” “protected,” “sheltered,” “tended,” and “watched over” by their families. Flanagan and I are rough contemporaries. A Google search tells me that she was born in 1961, so she’s four years older than I am. And I get all of her cultural references, from Judy Blume to Patty Hearst. But I grew up in a working-class family, and so my experience of girlhood was very different from Caitlin Flanagan's.
Working-class girls in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s were definitely protected and watched very closely, but we were not cosseted, treasured, cherished, or indulged in any way. Nor were we sheltered. We knew exactly what could happen to girls who stepped out of line. Everyone we came in contact with all day long, from our teachers to our parents to our aunts and uncles to the random dude on the street took special pains to tell us, frequently, what could happen to bad girls, and we were expected to listen patiently to their well-meaning advice. And we had to accept, without complaining, that boys--even our younger brothers--could do what they wanted, go where they wanted, without fear.
For the boys in our blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, things were pretty straightforward (definitely not easy, but straightforward). Life was more complicated for the girls. We had to watch ourselves, to make sure that boys understood the limits. But we weren’t to come across as standoffish or snooty. We had to act like ladies, but not like stuck-up prigs, because what did we think this was, the Main Line? We had to dress in a way that was feminine, but not prissy, but also definitely not slutty. We had to smile, but in exactly the right way. Too broad and open a smile might be taken as an invitation, and you don’t want to look like you’re asking for it, do you? Too stiff and formal a smile, and you might come across as prudish or stuck-up, and who do you think you are, Grace Kelly? (I grew up two miles and a million light years from Grace Kelly’s childhood home.) There was only one way for us to dress, speak, and act that would meet with adult approval.
Here’s the easiest way to explain it. Picture if you will a big Venn diagram. The slutty girls occupied the circle on the left; and the girls who acted like nuns (or librarians, or old ladies, or lesbians), belonged on the right. The very, very small intersection between the two circles was where you needed to be. It wasn’t that hard to get into that little intersection. It wasn’t hard at all, in fact. The hard part was staying there. And once you were out, there was no getting back in.
But that’s neither here nor there. I don’t fault Caitlin Flanagan for focusing on her own segment of upper middle-class white American girlhood. That’s her world; or at least, it was. Writers are supposed to write about what they know. I couldn’t have written Girl Land just as Caitlin Flanagan wrote it, but I understood and related to every word. The transition from girlhood to womanhood is universal.
*****
In the essay “Dating,” Flanagan writes about her high school near-rape experience. I say “her” high school near-rape experience, not “a” high school near-rape experience, because everyone I know had at least one.
A few days ago, I was in the grocery store shopping for my old lady, and I heard Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” I hadn’t heard that song in a long time. I wondered how many other women my age (Class of 1983) hear that song and think of it as I do, as music to be held down to while a boy gropes you against your will. I don’t have hard data or anything, but I feel confident in my assertion that just about every girl who graduated from high school in the 1980s had at least one near-rape experience, with or without a soundtrack. Some women have a hard time getting over these experiences. Maybe they suffer in silence for years until their attacker is nominated to the Supreme Court, and then they speak out, upending their lives in the process. But most of us are completely cavalier, even lighthearted, about what we euphemistically describe as “bad experiences.” “Oh yeah,” we say, “I had a bad experience, too. I was at the movies/in a car/at the prom/at an after-prom party/on a beach trip/at an amusement park/going bowling/going rollerskating with my boyfriend/friend/friend’s older brother/older brother’s friend and he tried to attack me. And then we watched the rest of the movie, and we went home.” We didn’t talk about these things at the time. No one would have believed us; or if they did, it would have been our fault. It was always the girl’s fault.
And as Girl Land makes clear, it wasn’t only working class girls who had “bad experiences.” Cosseted and treasured upper middle class girls had bad experiences, too. After I read “Dating,” I thought about how I don’t know a single woman of any social class who wouldn’t recognize Flanagan’s wide-eyed naivete, going off for an afternoon at a secluded beach with a sweet, handsome, funny teenage boy; and then her growing panic as she realized that this adorable boy was about to try to rape her. We’re all women, and we all know that none of us, not even well brought-up upper middle class girls, cosseted and treasured and cherished and protected, are immune.
*****
Girl Land, as Flanagan writes, is a place that girls must pass through on their way to womanhood. The journey is fraught and often perilous, and none of us, no matter where we’re from or what our families are like, gets out unscathed. And in some ways, it’s even harder now. My childhood was nothing like Caitlin Flanagan’s, but we had something in common, a great blessing that made adolescence much easier than it is for today’s girls.
I didn’t spend my afternoons dreaming and reading and diary-writing in a pink and white bedroom filled with floral comforters and stuffed animals and posters, but I could still escape from the world and be myself for a few minutes without worrying about what the popular girls thought about my clothes and hair or about what the opinionated men and boys of the neighborhood thought about my deportment and my proper place on the Venn diagram. Girls today, immersed in social media for 24 hours a day, have no such respite. Girl Land was never an easy place to be, but it’s a minefield now. It’s a fucking minefield.
I am the mother of boys, but reading Girl Land made me want to take care of girls; to tell them that everything will be OK one day. And to let them know that sometimes, you need to close the front door on the judgers and the haters and the well-meaning neighborhood prize fighters. Sometimes, you need to tell them all to just fuck off.
