Where the Girls Are by Susan J. Douglas

Baby boomer Susan Douglas takes us on a nostalgic journey through the 60's, 70's and 80's with a feminist look at pop culture. Why was Jeannie's bottle shaped like a penis? Why were male pop stars--"no matter now lewd, drug-besotted, paunchy or short-lived" (think Elvis. think James Dean)--sainted, canonized, worshipped, celebrated, while the impact of female entertainers was fleeting, superficial and trivial? As the author notes: "Must a female singer have the crap beat out of her--as Tina Turner did--to merit a film?" Where are the moveis about Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Stevie Nicks? We all love Elvis, but do we really need to see his sad life immortalized in 47 made-for-TV-movies? The message was (and is) the girls don't matter as much.

Where the Girls Are examines how we, the adolescent female, became a Demographic when the baby boomers reached their teens. Suddenly we weren't ignored, we were advertised to endlessly: zit cream, hair products, music, movies, clothes--we had power, we were important!

Douglas examines this contradiction: how girls-becoming-women were ignored and trivialized at the same time they were raised to supreme status as consumers. More importantly, she examines how this affected the typical American girl. This is how we became schizophrenic.

In the 70's we can "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan--and never let you forget you're a man!" (I bet everyone reading this can hum along with that outrgeous little Enjolie commercial, though you haven't seen it for 30 years). We discovered that sometimes we can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, or we can never let you forget you're a man, but we can't do all three at once all the time! What's a girl to do? Which do we choose?

Thanks to the media's fondness for controversy, feminism became an unnatural state for women. Nobody wanted to call themselves that. It would be like admitting you have hair growing in your armpits or something.

Media coverage turned feminists into "bra burners" though no bras were ever actually burned. Reporters covered the "cat fight" angle, pitting traditional apple-pie homemaker type women against strident outspoken bitches with an agenda. After interviewing a few wild-eyed feminists at an emotionally-charged rally, showing them whooping and chanting and generally looking rather unruly, the news would then offer a balanced view by interviewing a serene, calm mother at a supermarket smiling warmly at the camera with a toddler on her hip saying "I don't know what these feminists are all about. I'm perfectly happy with things the way they are. I enjoy my traditional role."

What a balanced presentation! The message: feminists are crazed, emotional wrecks trying to change things that "normal" women don't even want changed.

I enjoyed the little trip through TV memory-land: Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman, Bewithced, I Love Lucy. It made me want to watch some of those old TV shows again. From a feminist perspective, it's possible to trace our progress through those shows. Even the most sexist shows (Gilligan's Island) allowed little baby steps on the road to female empowerment. Even the most progressive female characters (Mary Tyler Moore Show) demonstrated curious sexist traits as well. (Why was Mary the only character on that show to refer to "Lou" as "Mr. Grant" when he took the liberty of calling her by her first name?)

Feminist backlash in the 1980's came in the form of Fatal Attraction and that curiously ubiquitous statistic that said a woman over 35 is more likely to be struck by lightening than to receive a marriage proposal (remember that? I do!).

The feminist struggle, and all its many facets and faces, displays itself in our media for half a century. I found the study of it fascinating. My thanks to Susan Douglas for putting it all together in a book I look forward to reading more than once.