Persistence of Patriachy in the Arts

I met a lot of once-upon-a-time Hippies when I was living at Venice Beach in 1987, twenty years after the Summer of Love.

There were those who had truly idealistic ideas for creating a better world. The ones who were honestly dedicated to caring for the planet and one another had gone on to open natural food stores, grocery co-ops, and neighborhood gardens.

Across the United States, spiritually oriented dreamers who had been in some way part of the Hippie movement helped usher in the New Age. 1987 was the year of the “Harmonic Convergence.” It was part of my "Happening," and many of those with whom I connected during that time truly dreamed of a better world. The Age of Aquarius, as had been predicted, would be the dawning of peace, love, and harmony.

Many of the folks I met at Venice Beach in 1987 were disillusioned — the flowers wilted, their innocence lost. One was an eternal space cadet, insisting he was Jesus, and not like “Jesus is all of us,” but the man himself. One had blown his mind so far that he sat, nodding knowingly, as another young woman told him she was not ready to go live “at Jerry’s place up north,” because she and her friend were so busy creating a new solar system, and were having trouble with one of the planets.

Some, addicted and stuck like an old vinyl of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” slept along the piers of Santa Monica, next to wounded Vietnam Vets with PTSD, spending their days begging for quarters to buy the next bottle of whatever they drank or a dime bag of smack.

I went out with one of these guys for a couple of weeks. He swore to me that he was Satan, and the vacancy in his eyes made me wonder. He disappeared one day. About a week later, his blanket washed up on the beach.

Yet like the Hippie era twenty years before, the New Age movement of the 1980s was only one aspect of a complicated time. Alongside the spiritual growth and outreach, the recognition of pluralism, and the move toward acceptance of cultural and socio-religious differences emerged new kinds of music, fashion, and art.

New names wove in with the old, eventually supplanting all but the biggest, most popular bands from the early days. Punk, Glam, New-Wave, and Heavy Metal…and that’s where I came in.

Timothy Leary’s popular 1960s mantra, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” transformed into Ian Drury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock & Roll.” Looking back over these subcultures of youth and young adulthood, certain similarities stand out to me.

These mantras mean the same thing, down under. Beneath the psychedelic tie-dye patterns, the Victorian velvet beauty of both boys and girls. Like dust bunnies under John and Yoko’s Peace bed, beneath the spandex, big hair, eyeliner, and Aqua Net® run a theme of patriarchy, power, and rape culture.

Twenty years after the Summer of Love, male musicians and artists slept with stoned underage groupies, and dated exotic dancers, and those who were married rarely shared that information. Drugs developed for medicinal purposes began to emerge as “date rape drugs.”

Pop songs by females or groups headed by females glamorized dressing for casual sex at the expense of the woman’s own identity. MTV showed the average size, regular girl that she wasn’t sexy enough. Only the tall and thin could pull off skin-tight spandex pants and a crop top with spike heels.

On the other hand, there were a number of strong female singer/songwriters who faced the challenges of relationships head on. Singers like Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, and Aimee Mann dealt with domestic abuse and independence.

Yet even in the telling of such stories, it was evident that girls' art was somehow judged as beneath that of the boys. Aimee Mann and her band ’Til Tuesday sang Voices Carry, a song that to me spoke of verbal abuse. In the video for Voices Carry, the male partner confronts the female about her time rehearsing, calling her music a “little hobby.” This smacked of my own experience. My first husband had said, “What do you think you’re going to do with that poetry, be Ernest Hemingway or something?”

Those of us who had lived in domestic abuse found solace in the songs and videos that showed us the strength of the woman who was “walking…walking out the door!” In the world of Heavy Metal, female artists were rare. Included in the handful were Maxine and Roxy Petrucci of Vixen and Lita Ford, who kept her nails short, played lead guitar, and eventually sang with Ozzy Osborne. On the lighter side, Cyndi Lauper wanted to have fun, and Madonna introduced blatant sexuality, materialism, and brilliant marketing to girls for generations to come.

From my vantage point of thirty-plus years out, I can see the blazing path that the women of the 80s rock world opened for the females of today, yet back under the belly of the beast, I recognize manipulation of the market by the powers that be, whoever they are. Heavy Metal is still dominated by males, lyrics are often hateful and patronizing, and when a female fronts the band, it’s most often symphonic rock, and she is supplementary to an all-male band.

It’s still news when a woman is the lead guitarist or the band is all female. Generally, it seems as if girls and women continue to be marketing tools, one-night stands, playthings to be used and put away or left behind when the game is done.

It is a little different in the worlds of poetry and art. There are thousands of fabulous female poets, some of whom are quite famous, yet still, the names I hear dropped as the greats are Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, now with the addition of Bukowski, all of whom have been accused of misogyny, and perhaps rightly so. While this doesn’t take away from their talents, it certainly gives me pause, particularly in a world where I have heard the words, “girl poetry is not worth reading” come from the lips of lesser writers.

We’ve come a long way since the 1960s in many ways. Yet in the area of the arts, where talent and appeal should trump gender, there are still few females who come to mind as “household names.” One would think that there has been progress when the whole country mourned the passing of poet and author Maya Angelou.

One would think…until one finds that there are some who would detract from the value of her work by debating — just days after her death — her right to call herself “Doctor” based on having received around 30 honorary degrees over her lifetime.

By the way, I am a girl poet. I have written a lot of crap that’s not worth reading. I’ve also written a few things that are worth reading. Pretty much like any other writer, even the men.

This story first appeared in Bouncin and Behavin Blogs on Medium