Filed under: age, feminism, Leadership, resistance | Tags: #MeToo, #TimesUp, Alyssa Milano, Brian Lehrer, Feminist, Generation X, Tarana Burke, women
Y’all. You guys. I was done. I was totally done with this piece. I was not going to write another word about Generation X but I’ve just realized, in the midst of the current river of men being called to account for their years of harassment and abuse, that the majority of the women who kicked this off were Gen X women. Harvey Weinstein harassed, abused, raped or assaulted women in their twenties when they were young and no one cared what they thought then but those women are in their 40s and 50s now and I don’t think that’s insignificant. I would also like to point out that Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the two women who broke the Weinstein story that jumpstarted this moment, are both Gen X, as well.
Gen X women have stepped out of our victim years and are stepping into our power. We thought were the Only Ones but have woken up to the fact that we are not alone.
These aren’t our middle aged years – these are our power years – our witch years. We’re not going to take it. We are sisters who twisted ourselves into knots for too long and no, we’re not going to take it anymore.
Look at who is at the forefront of this movement – Tarana Burke, Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Mira Sorvino, Salma Hayek, even Gwennyth Paltrow. These are all Generation X women. And now, with the Time’s Up initiative, Gen X-ers Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston have picked up the baton.
This watershed moment was kicked off by Gen X women. But I have heard nary a peep about that. In fact, on the Brian Lehrer show, there was a segment called The Generational Divide in the #MeToo Movement. It was a conversation between a Baby Boomer and a Millennial – how differently those two generations see this moment. Gen X barely got a mention throughout the hour long discussion. That’s when I knew I had to come back to this Generation X opus.
I do not think it was an accident that there was a twenty year gap between the crime and the reckoning. In part, it’s the changing of the times, sure – but it is also that women stepping into our 40s and 50s are stepping into a new power. I suspect that young women are still dismissed when they make claims today. I suspect that young attractive women are still less likely to report harassment or abuse – not because there’s something “weak” about them as I’ve heard some people say (WTF?!) but because young women are in an incredibly awkward position. They have a whole lot more to lose – they have not much career behind them and a great deal to gain in the future. Predators prey on young women precisely because of that vulnerability of position. Young women have historically had no real authority and are judged almost exclusively on their ability to be pretty and compliant. Disrupt either of those and your currency as a young woman goes down dramatically.
As we’ve seen, even just rejecting advances causes tremendous consequences – Mira Sorvino was blacklisted and had her entire career derailed because she fought off Weinstein’s advances. Rose McGowan was called crazy for years because she said something at the time. Young women are believed less than older ones. And now that the majority of the actresses who were abused in their twenties are now in their 40s and 50s, there’s nothing to lose and no reason to hide the truth anymore.
That is, Gen X women are no longer really seen as bankable young women so are now in a key position to call people on their shit.
I also don’t think the fact that many of these women are now mothers is insignificant. Every woman I know who became a mom became more fierce and stronger and determined to fight for their children to grow up in a better world. I know that that’s a part of why my Baby Boomer mother is out resisting every day – to make the world a better place for me. And Gen X moms are fighting, not so much for themselves, as for their children. Many Gen X women waited a while to have children and are now not only entering their power years, but are entering their power years with the ferocity of young children to defend.
I think the moment that this movement will really soar is when all the Dads join in, too. Some are already on it. But, at the moment, men are mostly still leaving the heavy lifting of social change to the women. While women addressed #MeToo and #TimesUp at the Golden Globes, the extent of participation from men at that ceremony was to wear a button.
Gen X women kicked this off and while I don’t want to see us left out of the conversation, it is my hope that the cause gets lifted up by all genders from all generations so that Gen X won’t have to keep this movement afloat by ourselves. We’re good at going it alone but change works better with everyone involved.
In part, I think Gen X women are leading this movement because, at our age, we are suddenly confronted with, not only the sexism we’ve endured for decades, but also ageism. The culture wants to put us out to pasture and Gen X is just not having it. We won’t accept invisibility. We won’t accept things the way they’ve always been. Suddenly our ability to call bullshit is coming in very handy.We’re not going to take it anymore. Time’s Up.
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Filed under: age | Tags: Baby Boomers, feud, Generation Jones, Generation X, Generation Z, Grumpy Old Man, Millennials, resentment, rivalry, robot overlords
This brings me to this supposed rivalry I’ve been reading about around the web. According to the AV Club, Gen X and Millennials are in a battle. There are articles like What Are Millennials Killing Today? and Why Gen X is So Pissed at Millennials. This “blood feud” seems unlikely to me. I recognize that there’s a lot of anti-millennial talk out there and maybe Gen X is to blame. If so – on behalf of Gen X, I would like to apologize to you, Millennials. That’s shitty behavior and we will try to do better in the future. But…I think it’s kind of hard to be in a rivalry with a group of people when you are outnumbered by them so dramatically. I suspect it’s hard to be in a rivalry if the other side doesn’t even know who you are. A Gen X friend of mine recently described having to explain what Gen X was after being mistaken for a Baby Boomer by a young bartender. The bartender didn’t even know Gen X existed.
I have seen some resentments bubble up, of course. Gen X is outnumbered and that’s never an easy position to be in. It’s like, a few locusts are cool, they make cool sounds and they have cool legs but when there are more of them, they can be a little overwhelming, especially if they get into your trees. So sometimes it’s just a numbers game, a situation of feeling alone in a room, like no one understands where you’re coming from. And sometimes it’s a sense of having waited years for your work to pay off to be promoted or signed or published or produced or whatever and then while you were waiting patiently in line, someone came up with an app that eliminated the line completely and they leaped into rewards that you’d been waiting for for decades. Articles about Gen X at work point to a kind of skipping over us that seems to happen to a lot of Gen X-ers. So if some Gen X-ers resent you, Millennials, it’s not personal – it’s just a bit like watching one’s parents change all the rules for your younger siblings and also not giving you the present they promised you.
And my fellow Gen X-ers, it’d probably be best if you toned the resentment of Millennials down, otherwise we all end up like the Grumpy Old Man from the SNL sketch of the 90s.
“In my day, we didn’t have smart phones, no, we had dumb ones, ones you had to dial with your finger in a little plastic or metal prison that you raked across the surface below the razor sharp end point over and over again until your fingers bled. And when you finally finished dialing the number, if they happened to be on the phone with someone else when you dialed, you’d have to hang up and go through the whole process again until you got your bloody-fingered call through. And we liked it! We loved it! We were bloody-fingered, exhausted, desperate dumb phone callers without a hope in the world of reaching anyone and we liked it. We loved it!” (*Not an actual Grumpy Old Man sketch)
Also, it wouldn’t do to get our future overlords angry. (JK, Millennials, we know it’s actually the robots and sentient smartphones who will be our overlords.)
Maybe we should all just pile on to Generation Z, who are growing up with Smartphones and are clearly the worse the wear for it. By the way, while growing up with Smartphones is a legitimate concern, one of the things that Sherry Turkle has often pointed out in her work is that it is often not the child’s use of the Smartphone that is the problem, it is the parents’ use of the Smartphone (and tablet and so on.) That is, the thing we blame younger generations for may in fact be our problem. We’re the ones who can’t put our phones down and talk to each other. We’re the one who get anxious, living in a constantly plugged in world and we project that onto kids. Or in the words of an often mocked Gen X ad, “I learned it from you, Dad. I learned it from watching you!” So I don’t think piling onto Gen Z is the answer.
We need to find ways to work together. Generationally, Millennials and Boomers are better at coming together within their own generations than Gen X. That’s something for Gen X to explore doing more of. Simultaneously, what we all need to look at is including a diversity of age and generations in our structures. If you’re not Gen X, you might not notice when Gen X is missing but it’s worth paying attention to, I think, because we do have quite a lot to contribute. If nothing else, we can provide missing Gen X. If ping pong games at the office are always Millennial vs Baby Boomer, you’re missing someone. It could be Gen X or it could be Generation Jones AKA OG-Xers AKA Shadow Boomers AKA The Following Edge – or as I like to call them, the heroic generation. Because damn, Gen Jones! You got Barack Obama, Rebecca Solnit, Sally Yates, Jaron Lanier, Billy Bragg, Angela Merkel and so on. I mean – Gen Jones is badass and even less often discussed than Gen X. Probably because they didn’t get a trendy nickname at an opportune time. I think Gen Jones is so cool, you guys.
Which makes me think about generations a bit like a family. See, I tend to idolize Gen Jones, like a really cool big sister or brother and I see Millennials and Z as spunky younger siblings. And Gen X starts to get resentful when our younger siblings start to behave as if they are Only Children – when all we ever wanted was for our little sisters to know how cool we are and we were. If there is a rivalry (again, I’m not sure there is) this is what it’s about.
This familial feeling is a huge aspect of the “rivalry” conversation and age-ism is another. Often, the generational shots fired are age-ism in disguise. Ageism is usually thought of as an issue of the old but it goes both ways – ageism can impact all ages. Our culture fetishizes the young and dismisses the old, particularly old women. This TEDtalk by Ashton Applewhite makes a great case for why ageism is everyone’s issue. I imagine we can all do a better job of listening to and learning from each other.
I heard some Millennials on the younger side of the Millennial spectrum chatting in a coffee shop recently. They were sure that they’d have their lives completely figured out by the time they were 30 – that they’d stop caring what anyone thought by then. This made me laugh. Because the gift of not giving a fuck anymore is probably much further away than that, if my generation’s experience is anything to go by. Most of us just entered this stage in the last few years and we’re long past thirty.
See, this is why it’s worth it to talk to each other about this sort of stuff – to know how other generations made it through the same things that are coming down the pike for you. To find inspiration and courage from the heroes ahead of us and the heroes behind us and the ones we’re standing right next to. The more we talk to each other, get to know each other, have some of those valuable conversations Sherry Turkle talks about in her newest book – the better off we’ll all be.
In diving deep into my generation with this series, I’ve not only learned a ton about my cohort but also about the rest of you. It helps to get together. It helps to learn about ourselves and it helps to learn about each other. Even things as seemingly small as what songs meant something to you in your youth or what TV shows shaped your world can help us understand one another. A generation is a way of understanding waves of experience, of understanding the formative landscape for each group of people. I want to read your generational analysis, too. I want to know what it was like to grow up Millennial, to know what it was like to grow up Xennial (yep – that’s a thing) or to grow up Generation Jones or Baby Boomer. Generational Thinking may be bullshit. It may be a marketing ploy. But it is still meaningful bullshit.
I think I was born at the right time. I belong here in Generation X. But I also think you were born at the right time. We were all born at the right time to teach each other what we missed or what we still need to learn.
This is Part 7 of a 7 part series.
You can read Part 1 here Part 2 here Part 3 here
Part 4 here
Part 5 here
Part 6 here
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Filed under: age, music | Tags: age, experience, Feminist, music, singing, song, women
She told me her voice wasn’t what it once was. She’d taken time off from singing to raise her kids and was now coming back to it – distressed that she was not as perfect as she once was. There was a sense that her lived-in life had diminished her instrument.
I, too, had left aside my singing for a bit. Not entirely, of course, but aside from the occasional song for a friend, I hadn’t really kept at the technical practice of vocal performance. But ever since the election, I have leaned back into music and find myself singing again – because it is the only thing that makes me feel better. Raising my voice in song is how I express my fury, my fear, my determination to fight for the things I believe in. And I’ve been around the block a few times so my voice is not as technically proficient as it was, once upon a time. And I find that I really don’t care. I don’t care if I don’t hit a note with the exact tone I was imagining. I don’t care if a sound comes out strangled that I meant to sound clear. When I listen back to moments like that, I find that I like that catch in my voice. It is what I feel now. That catch is a feature not a bug. My age is a feature, not a bug.
A lived-in voice is a feature, not a bug. It’s funny to use a tech metaphor for something as organic as a voice but it leaped to mind when talking with that mother coming out of retirement. Her years of experience, of life, are a gift, not a problem.
I started going to voice lessons as a child and continued into college. My first year without regular vocal training was the year I spent abroad, in Italy. I did no vocal exercises, made no attempt to expand my range. I just sang and spent my year leaning into a new culture. When I came back to college, after I sang – one of my teachers said to me, “That was some year you had.” I didn’t know what she meant right away but something about it eventually helped me understand that she could hear the year in my voice. My year of learning a new language, growing bolder and opening up to new experience was all there in my voice. I don’t want to say she could hear the hills of Tuscany in what I sang but that’s how I imagined it.
Of course there are technical ways we can explore and expand our voices. Of course vocal training and coaching are incredibly useful and valuable. But our voices are more than simple instruments. We respond to the lives of the people who sing to us and to be able to hear the years in a song is to hear the agonies and the ecstasies, the thrills and the tedium, the passion and the despair. That is a great gift.
I want to hear the voices of mothers, of fathers, of grandmothers and grandfathers and all the adventurers among them. Your life, your years are a feature – not a bug. Give us your voices. Raise them in joy, in fury, in protest or in peace. Even if it catches, even if it cracks, even if you don’t like the sound – we need to hear you now.
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Filed under: age, feminism | Tags: American Exceptionalism, Generation X, Generation Z, Good Girls Revolt, Josie and the Pussycats, Millennials, Reality Bites, sexism, Systematic Sexism, The Breakfast Club, The Muppets, The Smurfs
If you haven’t seen it, Reality Bites was a film about a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to figure out what to do with themselves after college. (A subject that would never play with contemporary twenty-somethings – oh, wait! That’s the exact premise of Girls!) Singles was also in this genre. So was Kicking and Screaming. And also Last Days of Disco. And St Elmo’s Fire.
The funny thing about thinking about the movies of my youth is realizing the sorts of men that the culture wanted me to find attractive. Watching clips of The Breakfast Club anew helped me understand a lot about why I was attracted to jerks in my youth. (Oh, Bender! You’re just misunderstood!) Reality Bites taught me that it was better to be with a cool asshole than a nice square. Lindy West’s article “I Re-watched Reality Bites and It’s Basically a Manual for Shitheads” sums up the issues of that film quite hilariously and succinctly. Heathers features a sexy sociopath that you’re supposed to find attractive and then realize that he’s an actual murderer and that’s not really so cool, you know? In music, boys were “Nasty” and “Wild” and “Bad.” In Singles, the bar for men was so low that all the Bridget Fonda character wanted was a man who’d say “bless you” when she sneezed. The ideal Gen X man was a scruffy tortured cynic who told it like it was.
And, pretty much, this cut across genre. David Foster Wallace is the literary Gen X man. Kurt Cobain is the music version. It’s a sort of hyper-masculinity, a hyper-cool. And it was clearly toxic. Almost every icon who embodied it eventually killed himself. (Keep it together, Ethan Hawke! We’re rooting for you! Eddie Vedder – do you need anything? Any kind of support group we can send you to?) The quintessence of Gen X-ness was a sort of aggrieved masculinity. While Winona Ryder may have been a Gen X icon, she was always in a relationship with this type of cool dude.
There was never a real Gen X feminist movement. We were told our mother’s had taken care of that for us. And surely our mothers hoped they had. Some of our mothers (and fathers! There were some feminist fathers then, too!) bought us Free to Be You and Me and from that we learned that mommies were people and daddies were people and William had a doll and that it was alright for all of us to cry. Lego was for all of us and girls were told we could be anything we wanted.
But it wasn’t that easy. I’ll leave it to a male Gen X writer to speak to how boys took on these messages but I can say that there weren’t that many models for girlhood back then. The percentage of girls in film and TV has gone up in the last decade or so, due to Geena Davis’ remarkable Institute for Gender in Media but when I was a child, there was pretty much just Josie and the Pussycats for me. (And watching clips of that now, I’m a little disturbed by how much those costumes look like kitty versions of the Playboy Bunnies.) On the Smurfs, being a girl was the girl character’s only trait. While the entire village was full of male Smurfs with one defining characteristic (Brainy, Jokey, Painter, etc) the one girl was just Smurfette – the girl one. The Muppets main characters were mostly male where once again the only major female character was defined by her femaleness – and her species. And while Miss Piggy has a distinctive personality – other animals have names that define them more than their species. What if Fozzie the Bear had been Mr. Bear? Or Rolf the Dog had been Mr. Doggie? Or Kermit was Mr. Froggy?
At home we learned we could do anything but at school, and in pop culture, it became clear that mostly we were supposed to be cute, pretty and/or sexy. We were supposed to get ourselves boyfriends this way. Cool boyfriends who’d (maybe) say ‘bless you’ when we sneezed but who’d admire us and tell us we were pretty. Oh and maybe also we could go to college and learn things and maybe have a little career while we were doing that. Nothing too demanding, you understand. We weren’t gonna be challenging anyone for their jobs – don’t worry, we just want to have a little something to make us interesting enough to marry.
I was a pretty feminist kid – and I hung out with feminists. But I also wanted a boyfriend. And I felt that I’d have to sell out a little of the sisterhood, a little of my feminist sensibility to enjoy the affections of dudes. This same impulse made its way into my career. My dream was to perform in the theatre. But I clocked pretty quickly that the professional theatre was not a feminist friendly place. In one of my first acting jobs, I was berated by a costume designer because I did not own a push-up bra. “You want to be an actress? And you don’t have a push-up bra?” he said, horrified, before fitting me for the costume with the plunging neckline. I wanted to work, so I kept my feminist feelings to myself. I bought a push-up bra. I auditioned for floozies and girlfriends and vamps and worked in companies where men always outnumbered women, sometimes three to one. I knew the deck was stacked before I started but my belief in myself was so powerful, I thought it would overcome anything. Even a sexist theatrical landscape. I believed I could transform the world around me. Newsflash. I didn’t quite.
And this is a mistake that every generation seems to make. We think that by raising our girls to believe that they can do anything, that they will. But if we don’t make inroads into changing the systemic sexism, we continue to perpetuate the same patterns. Belief is a wonderful thing but without systemic changes, the same old shit gets reinforced.
The thing is, I expect older generations to be sexist and I expected my generation to be sexist. (I saw what they were seeing. I heard their jokes. I got into those arguments about boys just being better than girls.) What troubles me are the sexists that are younger than me. Because I had some idea that the generations behind me were so much more open, so much more diverse. That’s what the media tells me. Millennials have a reputation for being well ahead on cultural open-ness. And a lot of them are. But some didn’t get that memo. According to this article, the KKK was about to go out of business but are back in play due to the revitalization in the young. A third of Millennials who voted, voted for Lil’ Donnie T. This doesn’t fit into the story of who Millennials are in the common imagination. Avocado toast and Nazis wouldn’t seem to be compatible. (Also if avocado toast is a Millennial invention, I applaud you because it is awesome.)
Millennial feminists are rockin’ it so hard. I love the exuberance and the vitality of their fight. They started a dye-your-underarm-hair trend. I love that. But I watch Millennial men enjoy the same sense of entitlement that my male peers did and that the generation before them did and I can see from this angle how patriarchy gets handed down from one entitled fella to another, like property.
In my local coffeeshops, I see 22 year old men already in the seats of power while the 22 year old women chat about their internships at a magazine. I see young women defer while young men take. And it is so much worse to watch a young man do this than an old. I see young women baffled by a system that they thought was fair when they were getting good grades in school but that doesn’t seem to want them when they graduate. The system banks on young women not noticing the hurdles to their goals until they’re older and the system doesn’t value them anymore. It banks on young women being so busy trying to shape their bodies to an ideal to please some imaginary man that they won’t have time to change the world.
Gen X just got wise to this. We crossed over into the middle space and lightbulbs have started to flash. No one’s coming to fix this for us. Percentage wise, American Gen X–ers vote more than any other generation. We are politically engaged. We are calling misogyny. We are calling bullshit. But we don’t have the numbers. We’re the smallest generation.
So Millennial women, I’m especially talking to you and to you, Generation Z and whatever we’re calling the generation after you. You probably stopped reading this a long while ago, (if you’re reading at all) but if you’re still here, thank you. And I’m just going to tell you what I wish someone had told me earlier: You may think, from where you’re standing, that you will be the woman to beat the odds, that sexism won’t have its way with you. But even if you do beat the odds – one way or another, sooner or later, sexism will become apparent, if it’s not obvious already. You can be the valedictorian of your class, marry an attractive man, try and shape your appearance to please the masses, do all the work, win a bunch of battles, be fierce and capable and prepared and you’ll still be beaten by a man with none of your accomplishments or skill. You think it won’t happen to you – that you are the exception. And I hope you will be the exception. But I have yet to see a woman make it through a few decades without some patriarchal bruises, even if she doesn’t recognize them as such. If you start fighting it now, Millennials and Gen Z and beyond, maybe you won’t have to watch the generations that follow you go through the same frustrating cycle.
This makes me think of Good Girls Revolt, the TV series. (The book is fantastic, too.) Good Girls Revolt tells the story of the young women working at Newsweek in the 1960s. In the TV series, there is a character who doesn’t join the lawsuit filed by most of the female employees at first because she’s doing well. She gets opportunities other women aren’t given. She feels exceptional, because she’s the one beating the odds. She rises in the ranks. Then, in her position as the token woman, she runs face first into some high level sexism. The show perfectly illustrates why the exceptionalism we can fall victim to can be so damaging to our progress as a whole. Our power is in collectivity.
Each generation seems to look at the ones before it, blaming them for their troubles, while meanwhile, in our own midst, the same trouble is brewing. While I was busy worrying about the Baby Boomer Patriarchs and OG-xers in charge, many of the men in my generation were busy learning how to take their places. I missed it because I was too busy working on my exceptionalism. Now as I watch it grow up behind me, I see how it happened. We hope each generation will be better than the last and in some ways they are. But the patriarchy is still in the water.
I know some amazing Millennials of all genders but watching entitled white male Millennials embrace their power gives me the shivers – because the world has a slot for them that they have only to step into to fill. This happened in my generation too – but I missed it because I was too busy looking at the sexism ahead to worry about the sexism next to me. And there was plenty.
When I started my theatre company in 2001, there were dozens of others doing the same. But as I went on, the men’s companies received recognition while the women’s companies floundered. The companies started by men were reviewed and funded and mentored and fostered and encouraged, while the women worked on in obscurity until most of their companies finally folded. While it was happening, I thought it was just me, that somehow my work just wasn’t as good as all those guys getting reviews. It was exceptionalism again but the shadow side of exceptionalism. And in my generation, pointing this sort of thing out wasn’t cool. (And as we learned from our films and music, cool was the best thing to be) so I went along, hoping to swing from the shadow exceptionalism to the one in the light. I think a lot of us did this. Maybe every generation falls victim to exceptionalism. Each generation thinks it will be the one to beat the odds. Each generation blames the other generations for the problems in our own.
Perhaps nothing makes us more American than this attachment to exceptionalism. Even if we don’t necessarily believe in American Exceptionalism, (if we don’t think we are an exceptional nation, for example) we might still find ourselves believing we are exceptional individuals. I suspect that this impulse to believe we will be the exception is how we end up with such abysmal safety nets, such terrible health care and so on. We always think we will be the ones to rise above, that we won’t get sick, that we alone will beat the odds. It is the dark shadow of American optimism. Maybe Generation X is the dark shadow of the optimism of the generations that surround us.
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This is Part 4 of a multi-part series.
You can read Part 1 here Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
And to continue: Part 5 is here and here is Part 6.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist