The New Girl Order

One of the pluses to being “wounded” (my hand is still a mess) is that I read more when I can’t knit or write or sew. Last night I was reading the Bust Magazine Guide to the New Girl Order by Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller. It is an eye-opener.

I worry a lot about many younger women today - it seems that the feminism of our generation has won them a lot of legal freedoms but they have come at the cost of a lot of societal protections. Even though girls (if Bust can call them “girls” I can call them “girls”) take for granted sexual, professional, and social freedoms that my generation had to fight hard for, they don’t necessarily have the emotional security or the mental toughness to use them wisely. For some of them this freedom is a blessing - they use it well and wisely. But for a lot there is a kind of lostness to them. They feel the need to be sexually active before they are emotionally ready for it and they have not learned the skills to protect themselves because there was no one to teach them. Even most of my generation wasn’t quite sure how to manage certain freedoms once we achieved them.

That’s why reading this Bust Guide has me fascinated. For one thing, the two writers, who founded Bust Magazine, wrote under pen names, Betty Boop and Celina Hex, for much of the magazine’s existence. They were writing in very fresh and in-your-face ways about difficult but ubiquitous subjects - menstruation, sex, masturbation, sexual identity, being a girl in sexually confusing times. They also write about solo pregnancies, abortions, fear of boys, betrayal by girlfriends, buying and using sex toys, media idols and the struggle to find role models in a confusing world. This is eye-opening reading.

What I am surprised by - and surprised that I am surprised - is how much bigger and scarier their worlds are than the one I was raised in. If it didn’t happen in my neighborhood, chances are I didn’t know much about it. Even though my parents weren’t Ward and June, they were there and they expected a certain standard of behavior from us. Boys were fascinating and usually disappointing - but most of them were at least grudgingly well-behaved and respectful. Sex was for when you were grown-up and married - or at least grown-up.

These girls grew up under the constant influence of the media - they knew there was life beyond their direct experience and what went on it. Parenting patterns were incomprehensible to me - missing parents, travelling parents, partner switching parents, same-sex parents. Boys were to be acquired, pleased and to be let down by and sex was a constant. It boggles my mind and makes me wonder if my fellow girls all those years ago were as clueless as I was. But as much as we talked I think they might have mentioned it.

Still, I love how sassy and adaptable the girls writing in this book are. They have the attitude that, if they encounter a problem, somewhere there is an answer for it. I doubt they worry what the neighbors will think. Especially interesting to me is who they chose as role models - Madonna, of course, and Courtney Love. But surprises like Yoko Ono, and Japanese B-movie diva Tura Santana, and porn star Nina Hartley. They like women who kick butt.

I like this “new girl order” - or, as they call it, “chick manifesto”. These are not our-generation feminists, they are feminists-who-had-no-choice. They are cool and funny and occasionally confused but undaunted by that. Makes me wish I was a good deal younger.

Or not.

Thanks for reading.