Imaginary places of escape

At different points in the movie Gallipoli one or both of the two lead characters run, and each time the two heroes run the music that accompanies them is by Jarre: Oxygene II.  At the time I first watched Gallipoli while on holiday in New Caledonia I had never heard anything like that music, and I desperately wanted to hear it again.  By chance it was playing in a shop in Noumea the next day, and I pointed it out to my mother who was also struck by it.  I’m not sure if she asked the shop assistant what the music was or not, but whatever happened, by the time we were back in New Zealand we had either forgotten or never knew the name of the composer.

It is incredible to me that we hunted down the music.  I remember going to a record store with my mother and trying to explain to the woman who worked there what kind of music it was.  Somehow she managed to decipher my probably monosyllabic descriptions and produced the album Oxygene.  It was love at first sight because at the age of ten I thought the album cover was about as cool as you could possibly make an album cover, and when we got the cassette home and played it a whole wonderful imaginary world unfolded in my head.

Music is a very emotional thing for me.  It really has to take me somewhere.  The two albums that stood out for me in the 80s were Purple Rain and Welcome to the Pleasuredome because both of them seemed to take you on a journey, and be attempting – however imperfectly – to connect up each of its songs in a way that suggested a larger idea.  Now I wonder how much listening to Jarre and opera as a kid had to do with my desire to escape into music for longer periods of time than a three minute single would allow.

Opera was probably the first music that I really heard as a child.  My mother had cassettes of Puccini’s greatest hits, and Verdi’s arias, but she also had full works by Bizet and Wagner (I’m not kidding about the Wagner).  Her father was a fan of operatic singing and had a lot of very old records that we inherited but which were unplayable on modern record players, and which we one day passed on to a family friend with a wind up gramophone. 

What was remarkable to me about these arias that my mother sometimes played was their emotional intensity.  Some of the Puccini arias are so overwhelming in their emotion that I find it hard to get through them without welling up.  Full operas have unsurpassable power.  I realise that opera leaves a lot of people cold, and even to people who love it opera is a somewhat bemusing and inexplicable thing.  I certainly can’t explain it to you, but it triggers strong feelings in me.

It therefore makes perfect sense to me that the other major musical moment in Gallipoli, aside from all the Jarre, is operatic: an aria, the aria, from Bizet’s Pearl Fishers.  It comes the night before the boys of the Lighthorse go over the top to “glory”.  When the commanding officer sits in his sandbag bunker alone and plays the aria it is so poignant because it seems to be all the fragility of civilisation’s achievements pitted against the inevitability of barbarism’s victory.

I have a small box of cassettes that my grandfather made of himself singing hymns, and light opera songs.  He has a good voice, and there are at least four of these tapes with handwritten lists of all the titles in a cursive script.  I am sure that music was a place he could escape to, and I wonder where it took him.  How far away could he get when he sang, or played opera arias?  I suppose that my mother might have some idea.  There is very little of my mother’s father left to me: perhaps two indistinct memories, some photos, and a box of cassettes of him singing.  I am happy to have all of those things, but most of all I think I am happy to have him left to me as a voice in song.

Which is a curiously intimate memento for a person I barely remember, but it is one that makes me feel connected to him.  In general I am disconnected.  Looking at photos like the one above is strange; they’re photos that I am in but that may as well be of a different person in another country.  They do not cause my memory to rise in response.  There is a blank space where a memory should be.

But with the idea of him sitting down at a table one day with a tape recorder and singing songs I do feel a tie.  I have spent a lot of my own time sitting at the table with a tape recorder and a guitar singing songs.  At the time I was readying myself for stardom, but now I wonder if these tapes will one day be pulled out of a drawer and played by a distant grandchild with a kind of embarrassed fascination.

Which is probably how I should feel about Jarre.  A lot of his music has dated.  Cathy dislikes him.  She makes faces at me when I delicately balance a Jarre album on my fingertips as I transport it to the stereo.  I reverently bought quite a few of his albums again, because I had owned almost all of them on cassette and these tapes had long since perished.  I am only slightly ashamed to say that I have eight Jarre albums.  Of those eight I am prepared to still stand behind three: Oxygene, Zoolook and Concerts in China.  All three still take me on journeys.  All three still transport me. 

The opening track of Zoolook used to so enthrall me that I made up an imaginary screenplay to accompany it.  As I recall, my Zoolook screenplay began in a huge alien starport with slow, docking ships covered in lights.  I think the reason that Zoolook still sounds good is that Jarre used a lot of real instruments on this album, and at times this music manages to sound like a pretty funky, world music band.

Concerts in China takes me on a more literal journey to (ahem)… China.  It’s actually a sort of early greatest hits album, but a lot of the songs sound a lot better on this album than they do on the original Equinox or Magnetic Fields.  I think this is because they are played live, and don’t have as many unrealistic playing speeds and effects.  Jarre also managed to capture the exoticism of China, as well as the ennui and dislocation of travel, which gives the whole a kind of poignancy.

Oxygene though is best.  Even though it is the oldest, and uses the simplest musical machines, it has the most powerful hold on me because it was the first.  I can’t tell you where Oxygene takes me, and anyway, you probably have never heard it or, if you have, like Cathy, you would probably find it mostly laughable.  So I can’t tell you what it is, that place it takes me, but I can tell you what that place isn’t.  It isn’t a mortgage, or Monday morning at 8.00 am, or doing the dishes late in the evening.

It is, I suppose, an imaginary place of escape where I might meet you, my friend, when you let yourself drift to the place of your dreams, or – perhaps – where I might see the ghost of my grandfather singing like Caruso.

Eurovision, 1973

Mexico – Les Humphries Singers

Number one in New Zealand 16 November – 23 November, 1973

No, I’ve never heard of them or the song either.  They were a German group with a large cast of singers and numerous albums of covers.  Mexico was number one in New Zealand for a solitary week.   It appears that this number one hit was largely a rip off a song called The Battle of New Orleans.  The follow up “hit” for the band was called Mama Loo.  A cursory listen to this tune reveals that it is Barbara Ann with the words changed.  They represented Germany in the Eurovision song contest of 1976 with one of the worst pop songs I have ever heard, with definitely one of the stupidest song titles and choruses ever written, Sing Sang Song.  I include it here, but I defy anyone to listen to more than thirty seconds of it.

Which leads me to Eurovision in general.  I am led there because I can find out nothing about Les Humphries Singers that you can’t find out yourself by looking at Wikipedia.

Eurovision 1973 was hosted by Luxembourg and the winning entry was from… Luxembourg.  I was particularly drawn to this fact:

In the light of events at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, there were fears of a terrorist threat, particularly directed against Israel’s first-ever entrant, leading to unusually tight security for the contest. This gave rise to one of the best-known Eurovision anecdotes, frequently recounted by the UK’s long-serving commentator Terry Wogan. He recalled that the floor manager strongly advised the audience to remain seated while applauding the performances, otherwise they risked being shot by security forces.

Having heard the entries for Eurovision 1973 I feel there might have been more risk of people getting shot when they tried to leave in disgust than of a standing ovation breaking out.  On a not unrelated point, how is Israel part of Europe?

Most of the entries are dull, but let us linger on three.  Firstly, the entry from Sweden, You’re Summer.  I would like to draw your attention to the look the two singers exchange at 1.10 in the video immediately after the lyric: ”I want you and I long for your caress.”  This is followed by the immortal line, “your breasts are like swallows in nestling.”   Maybe this plays better in Swedish and melts nordic hearts, but the girl/summer comparison throws up some odd images, “you’re the summer, life grows in you, summer wind blows in you, summer rains flow in you… you never tell me no.”

Is this a song about farting and weeing? 

Speaking of songs where chicks don’t say no, we should have a look at the entry from Norway which seem to be a jazz prototype of ABBA (who broke through with Waterloo in Eurovision 1974).

I am not going to say anything about facial hair.

Here are the lyrical highlights:

Oh, when we pet don’t get all upset, it’s a game

Place a bet, play the game, come on and join us

It’s a game of girl-and-boyness

So don’t you upset us, stay loose and just pet her

Keep cool and you’ll get her

And finally, this song’s greatest line: “We’re giving  our all and just living and balling.”

The best for last (please persevere, the dancing from 2.10 onwards makes me laugh out loud everytime I replay it).

You will be pleased to know that this couple, who married in 1971, are still recording together and were given an award in 1990 for their contributions to the Flemish entertainment industry.  Bless.

Curiously, it might turn out that Nicole and Hugo are unacknowledged pioneers.  If you read the Wikipedia entry for ABBA’s Waterloo (the Swedish entry in 1974) you get this:

The song broke the “dramatic ballad” tradition of the Eurovision Song Contest by its flavour and rhythm, as well as by its performance: ABBA gave the audience something they had never seen before in Eurovision: flashy costumes (including silver platform boots), a group not singing in their native language, plus a catchy uptempo song and even simple choreography.

Well, you and I know better.  1973 was in fact the first year when countries didn’t have to sing in their native language, and Nicole and Hugo deliver a far more spirited dance number with costumes that put ABBA’s in the shade (a hard thing to do with all the glitter).  Not to be a real stinker, but even Benny’s guitar looks like he nicked it from Slade.

Still, it’s the best song to ever come out of this dreadful competition.

The lyrics of Waterloo inspired me to make write this joke letter many months ago, and I see no reason not to repeat the joke now.

Dear ABBA,

in what way was the relationship you describe in your song Waterloo, similar to the principal causes of Napoleon’s defeat at the aforementioned battle, which are listed as, first:

the arrival, skilfully combined, of Blücher, and the false movement that favored this arrival; the second, was the admirable firmness of the British infantry, joined to the sang-froid and aplomb of its chiefs; the third, was the horrible weather, that had softened the ground, and rendered the offensive movements so toilsome, and retarded till one o’clock the attack that should have been made in the morning; the fourth, was the inconceivable formation of the first corps, in masses very much too deep for the first grand attack.

Yours sincerely,

A concerned fan.

To draw this post about nothing to a close more or less where it started, the only thing I can find to say that is even slightly interesting about the song Mexico is that the “writer” of the song - Les Humphries – was a British born German, and when he wrote the lyrics of Mexico he chucked in a few pro-British references.  The original song, The Battle of New Orleans, on the other hand, is all about how the Americans beat the nasty Brits and showed them what for.

Hey, I said it was only slightly interesting.

This post is part of a series about the number one songs of 1973 in New Zealand.  The series can be found here.

Half breed

Half Breed – Cher

Number one in New Zealand 9 November – 16 November, 1973

I suppose it’s not really surprising that Cher’s autobiography The First Time is based around a gimmick.  Each entry is supposed to be about the first time she did something, presumably with the deliberately sexual connotation of what “your first time” usually means.  So we get a chapter on her first kiss, the first time she met Sonny, the first time she made a recording, and so on.  I say that it’s not surprising because I think that if you were going to look for an overall theme in Cher’s music career gimmickry would be about right. 

From the start of her career the fact that she was a double act with her husband and that they seemed such an odd couple sort of seems like a gimmick, and the Sonny and Cher Show was a series of gimmicks strung together for laughs.  Cher’s hit songs were often a bit gimmicky too.  Their first and only enduring hit I Got You Babe (1965) played nicely on the fact that they actually were a couple, and made reference to the then new fad of the hippy.  The hippy thing was a gimmick but the song was simple and sincere and I suppose that is why it has lasted.  Cher’s later gimmicks were less attractive.  I think a whole generation of boys have been emotionally damaged by seeing Cher try to turn back time, and her pioneering use of the electronic voice on Believe has spawned a generation of synthesised, plastic, pop wannabes.

Even though Cher’s autobiography (as told to Jeff Coplon - he either wasn’t listening properly, or was drunk at the time) is incoherent, and gimmicky, and superficial, the woman telling the story comes through not unattractively.  Her relationship with Sonny has clearly been the defining one of her life, and it sounds like they had great fun together for ten years.  Although Sonny wasn’t much to look at he clearly radiated charisma.

I was fascinated by Son from the moment he walked through the door.  And I actually thought to myself, Something is different now.  You’re never going to be the same.  As he walked through the coffee shop, smiling, Son immediately became the centre of attention.  I could see that everyone liked him.

The First Time

That meeting was in 1962 and Cher was sixteen.  Something else had happened to Cher in 1962: she had met Warren Beatty.  Warren doesn’t come across too well as he passes through Cher’s story.  He appears as a twenty-five year old movie star running a sixteen year old girl’s car off the road and then putting the moves on her.  All class.

Sonny appears to have been fairly ambitious, and was a hanger-on of Phil Spector.  I was surprised to find out that Sonny and Cher were background singers on You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, Da Doo Ron Ron, and By My Baby, but by far the best story in the book comes after Sonny and Cher have become famous and are invited around to Salvador Dali’s suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York:

We walked into what looked like a sex scene in a Fellini movie.  Four or five strange people were sitting around the living room, including one chick who had her breasts right out there in a see-through blouse….  I sat down in a big plush armchair and tried to look as if nothing fazed me, but something was poking me.  I reached behind me and found what I thought was a rubber bath toy: a cute little fish, with a remote control gizmo that moved its tail back and forth.  Dali smiled at me.  Then he spoke the only English he would speak all night: “It’s wonderful if you place it on your clitoris.”

The unhappy gathering went out to dinner.

I was seated next to a woman named Ultraviolet.  She was dressed in a velvet skirt and man’s shirt and tie, and she kept rubbing my leg with her walking stick….  Less than ten minutes after we had sat down, [Dali] turned to us and said, “Excuse me, but we forgot we have a previous engagement.”  And then his group got up, moved to another table, sat down, and ordered dinner.

I have never read a biography of Dali but I’m picking that he got beaten up a lot at school.

***

 In 1973 Half Breed was a brief number one in the USA, Canada and New Zealand.  At first the video seems a piece of inspired tack, and then after about thirty seconds you realise that nothing is going to happen.  Youtube “commentators” make suggestive comments about wanting to be the horse, but this video is about as erotically charged as a pair of bloomers.  The song’s story is this:

My father married a pure Cherokee
My mother’s people were ashamed of me
The indians said I was white by law
The White Man always called me “Indian Squaw”

The troubled young lady at the centre of this story seems to have resolved her identity crisis by wearing sequins.  Oh, and sleeping with lots of guys.  Cher is half Armenian by the way – just in case you thought there might be some autobiographical reference in the song.

As a comment on the state of race relations in the USA in 1973 Cher’s song is not a particularly incisive one.  In fact, given the events of that year for American Indians, Cher’s gimmick this time was in fairly bad taste.

In February of 1973 a group of American Indians (a group called AIM) had seized a church and a trading post and begun a seventy-one day seige at Wounded Knee.  Their protest appears to have been worthy and legitimate although a little mismanaged.  In March, while the seige was still on, Sacheen Littlefeather went to the Oscars instead of Marlon Brando, and when his name was read out as the winner for best actor (The Godfather) she went up on stage on his behalf and stated that owing to the “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry” Mr. Brando would not accept the award.  (Sacheen Littlefeather’s other claim to fame was winning Miss American Vampire, 1970.)

One of the things that bothered members of AIM was how American Indians were portrayed in American culture.  The author of the article below for example thinks that this kind of logo might be slightly racist,

During the past couple of seasons, there has been an increasing wave of controversy regarding the names of professional sports teams like the Atlanta “Braves,” Cleveland “Indians,” Washington “Redskins,” and Kansas City “Chiefs.”

Thankfully, he has a handy solution.

First, as a counterpart to the Redskins, we need an NFL team called “Niggers” to honor Afro-Americans….  And why stop there? There are plenty of other groups to include. “Hispanics?” They can be “represented” by the Galveston “Greasers” and the San Diego “Spics,” ….  Asian Americans? How about the “slopes,” “Dinks,” “Gooks,” and “Zipperheads?”

I’m guessing the leaders of AIM weren’t regular Sonny and Cher Show viewers.

At least, I hope they weren’t.

This post is part of a series about the number one songs of 1973 in New Zealand.  The series can be found here.

Take Me to the Mardi Gras

Take Me to the Mardi Gras – Paul Simon

Number one in New Zealand 19 October – 9 November, 1973

Take Me to the Mardi Gras is from Paul Simon’s second solo album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973).  Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970 as Bridge Over Troubled Water swept all before it, and it was two years before Paul Simon’s first solo album Paul Simon was released at the start of 1972.  In 1975 he released Still Crazy After All These Years, which was well recieved, the last thing that would be until he released Graceland in 1986.  For the last week or so I have been listening to Paul Simon (1972) and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973) and while they are both good, the debut reminds me why Paul Simon is great, and the follow up why he can be a little bit irritating.

Paul Simon walks two very fine lines for me.  Firstly, he walks a delicate lyrical line.  Being told you are a poet is usually the death knell for any lyricist, and Simon has been told it many times, but he has survived it pretty well.  In fact he is often very, very good, on the whole better when he is writing narrative lyrics as a character rather than as himself.  Secondly, he often treads musical territory between interesting, sing-a-long tunes and flaccid, wishy-washy noodling on an acoustic guitar.  One thing that has always seemed to get him inspired though is the music of other cultures.  It’s interesting to reflect that he was already fiddling around with ”world” music on Bridge Over Troubled Water in 1970, and maintained that interest over the sixteen years before he ran into unkind accusations over the provenance of some of Graceland‘s material.

Take Me to the Mardi Gras is actually a good example of what I’m talking about.  For me the first part of the song is forgettable acoustic guitar noodling, and then it sharply gains interest as the Onward Brass Band joins in to give the song some authentic New Orleans flavour.  Lyrically it’s a mixed bag.  Sort of boring,

C’mon take me to the Mardi Gras

Where the people sing and play

Where the dancing is elite

And there’s music in the street

And a little interesting,

In the city of my dreams

You can legalize your lows…

And I will lay my burden down

Rest my head upon that shore

And when I wear my starry crown

I won’t be wanting anymore.

Which is nice without being too wonderous.

Reading about Paul Simon reminds me of a Prince song: All the Critics Love You in New York.  Here’s a review of Rhymin’ Simon from 1973.

[There Goes Rhymin' Simon] is a fully realized work of art, of genius in fact, but one that is also endlessly listenable on every level….  Thematically, Rhymin’ Simon represents a sweeping outward gesture from the introspection of the first album. Simon has triumphantly relocated his sensibility in the general scheme of things: as a musician, as a poet of the American tragedy, and most importantly as a family man. Rhymin’ Simon celebrates, above all, familial bonds, which are seen as an antidote, perhaps the only antidote, to psychic disintegration in a terminally diseased society. As an expression of one man’s credo, therefore, it is a profoundly affirmative album.

21 June, 1973 – Rolling Stone

Poet of the American tragedy?  An expression of one man’s credo?

You can mingle in the street
You can jingle to the beat of Jelly Roll
Tumba, tumba, tumba, Mardi Gras
Tumba, tumba, tumba, day

There is a line in Take Me To the Mardi Gras about putting down your burden, and Paul Simon’s work often seems to be over burdened by critics.  They expect too much, or want to wring too much out of his work.  When Simon tries to “say something” you sense his gift for words turning leaden; when he is at play or in disguise he can say a lot more with a real lightness.

In the solitary interview I have found of Paul Simon the Rolling Stone interviewer constantly presses Simon to say if his songs are autobiographical.  Sometimes he seems to say they are, and sometimes he says they aren’t, that they are the feelings of the characters in his songs.  I suppose this means they are both things.

I believe it’s no good to talk about your songs; it’s wrong.  You should leave your songs alone and let them say what they say; let people take what they want from them….  All I try to do in the songs is write about the world that I’m in, and I try to do it honestly.

Paul Simon interviewed by Tim White for Rolling Stone (1975)

In 1973 his personal world was positive, but it was not a cheery year for America.  Simon married Peggy Harper in 1969, and they had a son in 1972 (they divorced in 1975).  Simon seems very happy to be married and a dad in 1973.  On the other hand, the year Rhymin’ Simon was released was also the year that Watergate slowly played out in the American media (not to mention the end game of the Vietnam War).  You feel like it is these things that Simon is writing about in the song American Tune.

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
Don’t have a friend who feels at ease
Don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to it’s knees.
But it’s all right, all right, We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on,
I wonder what went wrong, I can’t help it
I wonder what went wrong.

The song surges a little, and expands its sound as Simon broadens the lyrics outward,

We come on a ship we call the Mayflower,
We come on a ship that sailed the moon
We come at the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing the American tune
But it’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s gonna be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest,
That’s all, I’m trying to get some rest.

Musically this song is based on a piece by Bach and the critics loved it claiming it epitomized the seventies, and was his best work.  It sort of doesn’t work for me though.  Musically it is mostly forgettable, and personally the lyrics seem to suffer from saying something so directly.  Then again critics love to pick something like American Tune, and sniff at Kodachrome because, well because you can actually sing that one at a party.

The song I really like off There Goes Rhymin Simon is St. Judy’s Comet which started out life as a lullaby for his baby boy Harper.  The lyrics here are specific and real (“Well the hour of your bedtime’s/long been past/And though I know you’re fighting it/I can tell when you rub your eyes/You’re fading fast”), a little funny (“I’m going to sing it three times more/I’m going to stay ’til your resistance/Is overcome/’Cause if I can’t sing my boy to sleep/Well it makes your famous daddy/Look so dumb”), and little poetic,

Won’t you come see St. Judy’s Comet

Roll across the skies

And leave a spray of diamonds

In its wake

I long to see St. Judy’s Comet

Sparkle in your eyes

When you awake.

There is a lovely version of this song from Sesame Street in the final two minutes of the clip below.

This post is part of a series about the number one songs of 1973 in New Zealand.  The series can be found here.

Feminism (3/3)

SHAME is unknown in nature!

Sex and the animals.

See over 50 species of animals at courtship, mating and birth!

Its boldness will startle you!

Its content will inform you!

Its intimacy will amaze you!

Now showing at the St. James Theatre

“The theatre of distinction”

Advertisement in the Evening Post, March, 1973

WOW!  I can think of only a few movies I would want to go and see less than this one.  50 species of animals mating!  Holy hell.  I wonder what the review cards at the preview screening for this one said:

• “I never want to have intercourse again”
• “Black widow spiders – right on, SISTER”
• “No man is truly hung like a horse.”

The seventies seem sort of awash with sex.  It’s like nobody was allowed to talk about it, and then suddenly it was ok and then you couldn’t shut people up.  It’s sort of been like that ever since, and I think feminists might be partly to blame (if you think it’s a bad thing… which I only do whenever I flick through a celebrity magazine).

Specifically I think we can blame American feminists of the early 1970s who were quite iconoclastic and… uppity.

How about this excerpt from the crackingly good piece The Politics of Housework (Pat Mainardi, 1970):

It is a traumatizing experience for someone who has always thought of himself as being against any oppression or exploitation of one human being by another to realize that in his daily life he has been accepting and implementing (and benefiting from) this exploitation; that his rationalization is little different from that of the racist who says, “Black people don’ t feel pain’ (women don’t mind doing the shitwork); and that the oldest form of oppression in history has been the oppression of 50 percent of the population by the other 50 percent.

Or Why I Want a Wife (1971) by Judy Syfers, a piece which featured in the premier issue of Ms.

I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.

It’s quite interesting reading these pieces because one of the things that you often hear is that feminists are humourless.  Both of these articles are hilarious and well worth reading in full.  While the role of the wife depicted to us in Syfers’ piece has changed considerably since 1971, I would suggest that the politics of housework remains very much alive and well.

Of course not all the pieces written by the 1970s feminists were funny.  Some were deadly serious, and had titles that are simply uncomfortable for a bloke to read let alone imagine discussing with the missus.  How about: Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, by Anne Koedt?  Not feeling uncomfortable yet?  Read a little,

Whenever female orgasm and frigidity are discussed, a false distinction is made between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis.

Ok, I’ll stop.  But actually what you are reading here is the foundation piece of about 50,000 Cosmopolitan ”articles”, and points at a different kind of liberation for women, one to do with their bodies.  Syfers touches on it a little in her piece when she mentions the cause celebre of the early 70s women’s movement: birth control and abortion.  In this sense the bodies of women were very much contested in the court rooms and debating chambers of western democracies, and the Roe v. Wade decision in America is a landmark of that period.  It is easy to take the outcomes of these debates for granted now, but the 1970s were a very different place.

***

On 8 March 1973, the day before my birth, the Evening Post gave some coverage to International Women’s Day.  I don’t think this day is particularly noted anymore by society at large, but in the early 1970s it found support among feminist groups wanting an alternative to the “overly commercialised” Mothers’ Day.  Why March 8?  On that day in 1908 female garment workers in New York spontaneously stopped work and marched on the streets protesting their working conditions and demanding the right to vote. 

On 8 March, 1973 in Wellington a gathering was planned at the Trades Hall on Vivian Street and members of N.O.W. visited a variety of government departments and discussed issues that concerned women.  They met with Mr. Amos (Department of Education) and talked about the sex roles depicted in educational materials, the need for childcare facilities and contraceptive education.  With Mr. Watt (Department of Labour) they discussed equal pay, work place discrimination and male and female job classifications in situations vacant advertisements.  With Dr. Finlay (Department of Justice) they asked that the law making it a criminal offence to give contraceptive advice to people under the age of 18 be hanged.

Read that last one again.  A criminal offence.  And the legal age of marriage?  Geez.  Mind you my mother tells me that on going to see the doctor to ask for the pill he sent her home to think about it, because it was “a very serious decision”.  Unsurprisingly my mother had already thought about it quite a bit before she went to the doctor. 

As for some of the other issues rasised by NOW, a quick scan through the situations vacant page of The Evening Post reveals that advertising jobs by gender was commonplace in 1973:

• BNZ.  Young Ladies.  We have vacancies in our staff for young ladies with a pleasant personality to be trained for an interesting career in banking.
• The AMP Society has a vacancy for a young lady who has a bent for mathematics.  We also require a female clerk, 16-20 years of age.
• We need special men who can work harmoniously in a small staff engaged in producing about 40 different electrical products, men who can stand the challenge of endless variety, and yet maintain the high standards of workmanship required.

And as for the desire of NOW members to have sex talks in school, not everyone was a fan as the letters to the editor page reveals.

The only sex talk I had with my mother was when I became engaged at 20 years of age.  She gave me a booklet on love and marriage.  I say, toss the sex talks out of schools.  Then pupils can be taught cleanliness and respect for their parents, elders, and one another. 

A 60 year old grandmother

Despite this grandmother’s concerns, the shift in attitude towards sex has probably been a good thing, but as with all seismic change there are a thousand unthought of consequences.

For some women the new pressures of the fashion parade were just another form of oppression.  To them, liberation from traditional home and family roles allied to endless talk of sexual freedom had created a new kind of pressure: to be fashionably dressed, sexually active and subject to the male gaze….  This was something that concerned Juliet Mitchell: ‘For women… the sexual revolution has meant a positive increase in the amount of their sexual (and hence social) freedom; it also has meant an increase in their use as sexual objects.

Dave Haslam, Young Hearts Run Free

Which means, I think, that while sexual liberation has had many good flow on effects it has also probably led to other things that are not so good, like the porno industry which has boomed from the 1970s onwards.  Of course some “uses” of women came under a lot of scrutiny in the 1970s.  Feminists protested beauty contests and pushed them out from the centre of the media mainstream to the edge.   A group of feminists protesting a beauty contest in the USA in 1968 began their list of objections with this:

1. The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol. The Pageant contestants epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women. The parade down the runway blares the metaphor of the 4-H Club county fair, where the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best “Specimen” gets the blue ribbon. So are women in our society forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous “beauty” standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.

Such protests and concerns over gender images in education led to society becoming highly sensitive to the ways women were portrayed in the media in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.  By the 90s I think this sensitivity had begun to decrease. 

In the positive interpretation of this step back from being sensitive you get women who portray themselves in the media as educated professionals, controlling their relationships, but who like playing into some of the conventional ideas about what a woman likes… when it suits them.  This is the Destiny’s Child, Sex in the City version of being a women, although it was probably pioneered by that troubling figure Madonna. 

The bad version of a loss of sensitivity to how women are portrayed in the media can be found in rap videos where some clown tells us how great he is as twenty women in bikini gyrate in the background.  This seems to be an even worse version of the cliché of women in bikinis selling cars, or appearing in beauty pageants.

From the late 70s and into the 80s we became sensitised to this kind of use of women in the media, and it became less and less acceptable.  Now it seems that it is acceptable, particularly if it is black women.  I can remember a 60 minutes “journalist” interviewing a black producer for numerous rap stars and asking about the dodgy videos that denigrated women.  The producer got quite angry, and then said that these videos were just showing us how it was on the streets for these rap stars when they were growing up.  I don’t know what ghetto these rap stars came out of but we all need to move there because everyone in that “hood” has chauffeur driven limousines, champagne, money, fur coats and scantily clad hotties on tap.  When I see this rubbish I can’t help but feel that the media has deliberately twisted some of the messages of women’s liberation in order to get away with being sexist.

I grew up thinking women could do anything they had the ability, talent and inclination to do, and that that ability, talent and inclination was in no way different to a man’s.  I thought this not because I had been specifically taught it, but because that is what all my role models had shown me.  Now I have a three year old daughter and I would like her to grow up thinking the same thing.  This means I will have to turn channels like C4 off.  As with most of the issues that pull at us from many directions nowadays we get told it’s a matter of individual choice; the choice of the individual to create or not to create, participate or sit it out, watch or turn it off.  In all choice there is a cost.  So I make my choice and turn off C4.  I will gratefully take all the benefits of the changes that these feminists fought for on and hand them on to my daughter.  The unexpected results I will try to guide her past, until she can make her own mind up.

I’ll let you know how my daughter turns out in about twenty years.