Ya know older men are forever grousing about the way things are–rail against the status quo! So, I ask you what’s wrong with a nice laissez-faire status quo? I’ll tell you what!
In the 1960s we did the same rail against just about everything, expecting to change the world. Well, we ONE thing as the fruit of our labor.
The start of women’s’ lib was exciting–how I miss those gatherings. I remember my first and only bra burning on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, just about two blocks from U.C. Hundreds of us girls took off our shirts and burned our bras. I was diagnosed just after this event as being ADD and that explains why I missed the instruction about taking off my bra before igniting it. Well, suddenly I was on fire and let me tell you when your tits are on fire you just don’t remember if the clasp is in the front or back. Several of the other girls pushed me to the ground and rolled me around like a soccer ball until the fire went out.
About an hour later, at the hospital and after a good shot of Demerol (great shit) the doctors examined them and said the injury was about the same as mild sunburn. They sent me home and the Demerol wore off; bummer. I swear my nipples moved from their original position, but all my boyfriends said no and insisted on performing a tactile inspection to be sure.
Those were the days when LSD was not yet illegal, a lid was twenty bucks and actually weighed an ounce, a kilo was one hundred bucks, mushrooms were illegal but we never found a shortfall in the supply chain. To this day I still have flashbacks and if, during one, I look at a sprayed acoustic ceiling I swear I see Beaver Cleaver. There’s video, too; Mom Cleaver is tearing off the top of her pristine dress and burning her bra just as Ward comes in and says, ‘Dear is there something I should know?’ Far out man.
The 60s was the era of ‘free love’ that essentially boiled down to thousands of consensual one-night stands. This went on and on until I ended up with a guy I liked for his thrusting manner, er- ah- I mean trusting manner. We started with a tidy entanglement and ended up married for twenty really gruesome years. We divorced, put the kids in the paisley V.W. Van and drove them up into the redwood forest around Eureka, let them out and told them, ‘fly, be free.’ I haven’t heard from them since so I assume they did.
Now we have to practice, ’safe sex’ which from a woman’s point of view has never been or ever will be safe. What situation would I rather be in, up to my ass in children for a twenty year joyless ride called marriage, or die of AIDS? In retrospect, I’ll have a serving of AIDS, please.
I digress so often these days. Back to the braless look, I think guys loved it and enjoyed it. Hey, when your tits are perky it’s fun not to wear underarmor. I know guys loved it when it got cold in Berkeley as the girls’ temperature indicators showed the effects (sort of similar to the frozen food section of Safeway). Today, owing to age and the effects of gravity, as described mathematically by Newton, I have to wear a bra unless I want to bruise the shit out of my tits as they bang on my kneecaps.
Then came the ugliness of militant feminism (just translate that as: ‘Angry Women’) as it reared its ugly head. This whole movement started with Gloria and her henchwoman Jane working feverishly to enlighten women of their plight (when she wasn’t in North Vietnam looking through the sight of an anti-aircraft gun and berating POWs for crimes against the North Vietnamese people). These two (who later sold out) convinced an entire generation of young women to piss on men for being chauvinististic; it was every girl for her self, and down with men. Women followed this nonsensical ideology in droves, put their bras back on, and on the NYSE chastity belt futures soared through the roof.
We bought business suits and made out for the workforce where women, to this day, moan and groan about unequal compensation and hitting their head on the glass ceiling.
For my money, they should all quit, go home and go back to moaning and groaning in the bedroom. Some of my fondest memories from the 60s are the bumps and bruises I got from banging into the headboard or wall in the absence of one. Hey either bang your head on the headboard where you can have some fun or keep banging it on the glass ceiling where there is no payoff at all.
Get this; there was nothing new about militant feminism. Every woman ever born in the United States is genetically predisposed to some degree of militancy; how it shows up is as varied as the colors of the rainbow. This was the deep hidden meaning behind the song popularized by Judy Garland, may she rest in braless peace, ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’; Sort of like playing the Rolling Stones (before Mick had to start traveling with heart paddles) backwards and hearing satanic messages. Right-wing Christians could hear these things–maybe some other time I’ll take them on. I don’t really get the meaning of right wing anything–who coined that term?
Right has always been associated with good, at least Biblically. The good souls will, it is said, sit on the right hand of God. Those on the left must take a number and wait for their taxi to the below.
I prefer the Arab way of dealing with right and left. Arabs eat only with their right hand; the left hand is considered unclean. Why? Well, it’s because the invention of toilet paper on a roll and took a while to infiltrate their culture as Arabs did not for some time have sufficient revenues from oil to buy any. These tribal folks wiped their asses with their left hand. As washing was difficult in the desert, due to lack of water they cleaned up as best they could by rubbing sand all over their hands, they ate with the right hand to keep from eating their own remnantal excrement on the left hand. Doesn’t matter that today they can sanitize their hands with all manner of soaps, disinfectants and so on–eat with the right hand.
Now I should speak about what my generation accomplished; here is the list of the ONE accomplishment:
Every day is now business casual. The suit and tie have died. Women are also free from whatever our style of business dress was–it changed every season (following the fashion trends out of France, how liberated was that?).
How I would love to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, free love, an ever-flowing river of mind numbing drugs. At my age the mind is mostly numb anyway–not really from age rather from the endless amounts of bureaucratic bullshit we’ve all put up with since the 60s).
A couple of weeks ago some guy, also from the 60s generation asked me, ‘hey, lady, wanna go back to my place and ball?’ I thought it was a great idea so we headed off to his place. Unfortunately we had what was essentially vertical coitus interruptus as in the elevator when our walkers became impossibly entangled. The fire department came to rescue us.
Guess what? One of the young firemen looked at me for some time and said, ‘hey, aren’t you the one who burned her bra in the 60s without taking it off?’ ‘Why yes,’ I said, ‘how did you know that?’ He replied, ‘My grandfather was the paramedic on the ambulance’. Go figure. Then he said, ‘How are your tits?’ ‘Longer,’ I replied.
