This morning, I discussed feminism with my parents over hotcakes at Bob Evans. Interesting things come out when we are all a bit groggy at 9 a.m. on a Sunday and we haven’t seen each other in two months, except for the play we saw together the night before.So, since I had gone through the perfunctory account of how my classes are and if I still love my roommate, this morning’s discussion started out about the previous night’s play. It called itself a “Frantic Romp Through 37 Plays,” a sort of reinterpretation of the works of an old master. Yet, interestingly enough, this frantic romp found plenty of time for sexist comments, boys slapping girls on the behind for no artistic reason, and girls’ only roles being puking bitches and Spice Girls. Good old mom and dad noticed this, too (I’m not their daughter for nothing), and we started to talk about the difficulty of tastefully reinterpreting old works which were appropriately misogynistic for their time. “How,” my dad asked, “do you give women new roles, or at least eliminate the sexism, while staying true to the author’s intent?”Excellent question, pops.But then my mom jumped in and changed the subject. “You know,” she said, “whenever I saw them slapping a girl’s bottom or making fun of women’s problems (there was one part of the play which crudely parodied the plight of the professional woman), my blood ran cold. It was a visceral reaction. I just stopped paying attention for a few moments, I felt like they were trying to put me in my place.” I told her I knew exactly what she meant. We then yelled at my dad for a few minutes because he never had to experience this feeling. But, we forgave him, for he is what we call “enlightened.” So then my mom asked me why I was so unhappy. I told her I was tired of that freezing-up she so accurately described, tired of feeling it every day in response to the sexism I see in every movie, every TV show, and half of my daily interactions. And, worst of all, I feel like my mother and I are perhaps the only ones who feel it. It is interesting that out of the hundreds of girls my age I know, my mother is the first one to articulate this pain to me. I know that there are women out there, maybe even reading this article, who feel the same way when someone remarks on their appearance instead of their intelligence, when someone grabs their butt when they are out dancing trying to have a good time, when someone gets mad when they dare suggest that they want to keep their own name when they get married.I tried to tell my mother this, and I think she understood me better than anyone. My mother, who didn’t participate in the women’s movement, who gave up her job to have kids, who married my father and took his name, somehow managed to stay a bad-ass feminist. But there are many things I still do not understand about my mother and her generation. As my father so beautifully put it, in the book “Brave New World” they raise street-sweepers to love being street-sweepers, to have the intelligence perfect for a street-sweeper, and to think that the only thing they would ever want to be is a street-sweeper. But in our society, women grow up longing to be doctors and professors and mothers, too, and then they figure out it doesn’t work the way they were told, and what you end up with is street-sweepers with the brains and desires of rocket scientists. Figuratively speaking, of course.We puzzled over this topic for a while, and then my mother said something that really bothered me: “You can’t worry about it every day. You can’t change everything. If you do, you will burn out. You can’t be angry all the time. You have to make your own little world and be happy.”I turned on her and roared, “No! You need to make your own big world! I don’t want your little world!”She started to cry.
Jessica Weeks is a regular Lantern columnist. Her column appears on Mondays.
