Look, I'm 53. I was one of those Catholic girls who started much too late, to put it in Billy Joel parlance. I can't relate to this at all. But this isn't about me or my 20s. It's about now. The time we live in. The time young sexually frank women like Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham are doing their thing in entertainment.
These women being unabashedly sexual feels like a reward. Or actually, these women being given the forum to authentically express their sexuality feels like a reward. I realize there is still progress needed here -- to put it mildly -- but attitudes are changing. Meanwhile, rape on college campuses continues to be a problem, in many cases because institutions are trying to make it go away instead of dealing with it. Two worlds colliding -- stunning progress and backward thinking. Bam.
We -- as in forward-thinking women a.k.a. feminists -- feel powerful one minute, helpless the next. It's all part of the sea change that has to happen.
I got an overwhelming sense of our attitude shift when I watched Monica Lewinsky's recent TED talk. She gives us a fuller picture of the person behind the beret. She tells us she has a soul. She fell in love with her married, leader-of-the-free-world boss, trusted a friend, and it all blew up in her face. She became the butt of jokes, was raked over the coals by Ken Starr, and was written into a crazy number of hip hop songs. She knows she made a mistake.
This more mature Lewinsky has spurred expressions of regret from feminists who vilified her back in the 1990s. Perhaps we were a little too caught up in her not taking down the closest thing we've ever had to a leader who gets it when it comes to women's causes. We were ticked at him, but we shamed her Hester Prynne style.
Our sexuality, from love-struck to recreational to everything in between, has become more individual. At the recent Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we saw near naked dresses on Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian and they provided much fodder on social media. Bold or inappropriate? I saw a myriad of answers to the question. That, right there, is where we are on so much, gliding back and forth between those mindsets. As women, as individuals, we are setting the tone and the bar for ourselves.
In a recent article in New York magazine, Broad City's Glazer shares that her favorite fan encounter was a woman in her 50s because it's not the show's demo.
-- [T]here's something that feels good about reaching someone that doesn't look like you," she tells writer Jada Yuan in the interview.
Glazer nails something even bigger here. Generational cross-over is central to our continued progress. With all of the dire things happening to females globally, it's easy for thinking people to lose sight that here in the United States we have made markedly better lives for girls in each passing generation. There's no stopping us.
Bold or inappropriate?
That's our question. And blessedly we are not of one mind. The answers are too numerous to count.
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