by Nancy Friday
The Looks of Revolution
The sixties were so thick with change that it is difficult to disentangle the revolutions. Their fever was all-consuming, making it easy to think of your impassioned crusade for your own high goal as the only parade in town. Watching the evening news with the sound off, it was impossible to discern whether the on-screen marchers were Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, Civil Rights marchers, Feminists, Hippies, or another wave of as yet unnamed revolutionary zealots. Those days, the look of the land was a sea of jeans, T-shirts, boots, long hair, pony tails, Afros, the women sometimes indistinguishable from the men unless in profile. The one thing the revolutionaries had in common was not to look like the establishment.
Even so, it was possible to go through those years as your parents had done. Eventually, the cumulative changes wrought by the sixties would affect all our lives, but at the time, the vast American majority (who were not on television) didn’t want to know about The Sexual Revolution and bitterly resented the counterculture’s takeover of the airwaves. The Hippies, the Flower Children, the students staging a sit-in at Berkeley in 1964, the music of Jefferson Airplane, such oddball pronouncements as Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The media’s fascination with these sights and sounds made mainstream America feel left out of some secret, which was exactly what was intended: You were either In or Out, an expression we thought we’d invented but which I’ve since discovered has been around for centuries.
When the antiwar demonstrators spit on the flag and jeered the boys going off to Vietnam, it understandably infuriated people who thought of themselves as true Americans; it was a different resentment than what they felt when their children adopted the Beatles’ music and hair and demanded the miniskirts hot off the fashion pages in 1964, but it was resentment nonetheless. Something foreign to The American Way was taking over the land, and those who didn’t like it felt invisible. It was a division that has never healed.
In time, the anger of the Invisible Majority would include the bitterness of traditional women, who felt denigrated by the national spotlight on the new feminism, which not only looked down on their values, but obliterated them. To my knowledge, no one has written sympathetically about the anger and resentment of the men and women who were not part of the many overlapping rebellions of the sixties and seventies; I am not just referring to the older generation, which was automatically outraged, but to the people in their twenties, and younger, who fought in Vietnam by choice, the women who chose to marry, work at home, raise children as their mothers had. Eventually, many of these traditionalists would become the backbone of today’s Republican Right Wing.
If you weren’t there watching the fifties being shelled from all sides by the SNCC march in Maryland in 1963, the Watts riots in 1965, the bloodshed at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the march on the Pentagon in 1969; if you didn’t sing the songs, wear the clothes, smoke the smoke; if you missed all that, you may be puzzled by today’s revivals of everything from those years, the TV series, the films, the music, and especially the revolving doors of fashion. I was there, and I’m puzzled.
As I write, there is an Andy Warhol retrospective. I remember Empire the first time around, an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building as time passed and passed, until we ambled from the screening room out onto the balcony, smoked marijuana, and stared down at the city until Andy appeared and walked among us. You see, it doesn’t tell well, the whole point of the “happening” to be nothing happening at all, to be “laid back”; to understand this, you had to be In; to question was to be Out. Nonetheless, empty or filled with meaning, here it is again, not just the film but a continuous reemergence of Warhol’s inner circle, one by one turning up in lengthy interviews in newspapers and magazines, looking and sounding old, tired, and empty thirty years later. Why do journalists seek them out? I suppose it is for the same reason that designers reinvent little Courréges skirts and the cropped, tight, poor boy sweaters that Edie Sedgwick—another of Warhol’s superstars—wore.
I take the clothes of today’s runways very seriously indeed. Like Nelson Thall, president of the Marshall McLuhan Center on Global Communications, I too believe that “our clothing is an extension of our skin, just like a hammer is a technological extension of our hand.” Clothing is also an extension of what we feel, including our unconscious feelings. What we wore in the 1960s and 1970s was meant to carry messages. Some of those looks were antifashion, some antiestablishment, anti-Vietnam War, antisegregation, antimaterialism. But clothing as political statement was very different from today’s clothing, which serves more as a desperate plea for recognition.
What are we looking for in those years? Fashion may revel in revivals, but recent years have been a desperate bad dream, as when something is lost, like a key, and to find it we have to go through all the clothes, the closets, the pockets. Writing about the sixties I’d hoped to find a clue as to why history blames today’s ills on what happened then.
In his review of the 1995 Warhol film retrospective, critic Stephen Holden wrote, “The esthetic running through Warhol’s films is an icy voyeurism…. Again and again, one has the feeling of confronting people with limited inner resources, desperate to be noticed at any cost…. Taking it further, the Warhol superstar can also be viewed as the forerunner of the thousands of ordinary folks who seem more than eager to disclose their most intimate secrets on talk television.”
To which telling observation I would include the people on today’s streets in their exhibitionistic dress, who are also “more than eager to disclose their most intimate” physical parts, so desperate are they to see themselves reflected in the eyes of strangers walking toward them. But everyone is sated by outrage; we are jaded. The potential voyeurs have by now seen everything; fully aware of what is wanted of them—their eyes lighting up, the gasp of wonder—they will be damned if they will give the exhibitionists the time of day.
Warhol himself was not a nice person. His genius was in recognizing society’s emptiness, the human hunger to be seen. He tapped those individuals who would gladly, eagerly, do or show anything that would get them seen. He was the master tailor of the modern fairy tale, convincing the players that their nudity and sexual extremes were filled with meaning; he then hoodwinked the audiences who watched his films and bought his canvases into believing that they now had content. His fascination with women’s shoes—notebooks filled with drawings—and his collections of antique toys has, in my mind, always fixed Warhol in the nursery. His talent was in recognizing his own emptiness in everyone else, and putting it to work for himself.
Many people carried things too far in those years. Some died from overindulgence, and a great many who marched against the Establishment, smoked and fucked at the Sleep-In in Central Park went on to become rich or famous or more conservative than their parents. My friend Joanna spent several nights in jail for various of the above offenses in 1968; fifteen years later she was senior vice president of a major Wall Street firm, which she left in 1990 to return to full-time mothering and work at home. Today, she and her little girl wear mother/daughter look-alike dresses.
Because we marched in different parades on different days of the week, many of us had complicated wardrobes. My friend Kate, who worked at Grove Press, which had published Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and then at Random House, which was publishing Stokely Carmichael, Abbie Hoffman, and Tom Hayden, vividly remembers the complexity of looks: “I had one whole closet full of short, sexy dresses from Paraphernalia and The Electric Circus that I wore to Max’s Kansas City or Le Club, and then I had my torn bell-bottom jeans, with the little scarves to tie around the leg, and the shrunken T-shirts with no bra underneath for the rallies in Central Park.” We laugh when I remind her of the night a friend’s father had looked at us as we left the house for the rally; cupping Kate’s lovely face in his hand, he said, “You’ll never get away with it, not with a face like
that.” Did we ever feel subversive in our costumes? “Not a bit,” says Kate. “What held it all together was sex. Everyone was getting laid. We were on the Pill, or had an IUD, something. Whether we were marching or dancing, we were all having sex.”
Even when the revolution was stridently against looking good, the look that emerged as symbol of that particular rebellion became as obligatory as what was being replaced. For all the singing of freedom and “do your own thing,” the Hippies and Flower Children with long hair and wearing Salvation Army castoffs, who were involved in nudity, drugs, and sexual excess, were absolutely rigid about anyone whose look didn’t fit the mold.
In the late sixties I was in Haight-Ashbury with a camera crew filming the scene and remember people being thrown out of parties because they looked “wrong.” Wear something found, torn, dirty, wear a blanket, just don’t look like “them,” a demand that was as much a uniform as the practiced look at Mom and Dad’s country club. In the words of Timothy Leary, “The essence of the 60’s was a populist movement, but there was a dress code among the hippies that was stronger than the ones at West Point and Park Avenue.”
One night in the fall of 1967, Michael Butler telephoned to invite me to a musical at Joseph Papp’s theater downtown. Michael had given me my first job in New York editing a magazine called Islands in the Sun. I’d never written an article, much less Sited a magazine, but he hired me with the same spontaneity with which he acquired Hair, a musical that was about to close and disappear into oblivion. From that night on, all of our lives changed, no one’s more than Michael’s, who would never again wear one of his custom-made suits.
The night before Hair opened on Broadway, a group of us sat in Casey’s Greenwich Village restaurant, the director and producer finally conceding that it would be left to the individual members of the cast as to whether to emerge naked from under the tarpaulin at the end of Act I. Opening night, the stunned audience gasped as a cast stood, stark naked, for the first time on a Broadway stage. The next morning, drama critic Clive Barnes had this to say about the show: “Fresh and frank… likable… rock musical that last night completed its trek from downtown, via a discotheque, and landed, positively panting with love and smelling of sweat and flowers…. So new, so fresh and so unassuming….”
Hair made theater history; at one time a record twenty-one companies were performing it around the world; but more significant, Hair put to popular music the schisms in our society over the issues of homosexuality, drugs, the Vietnam War, racial and sexual freedom, schisms that still exist. Hair didn’t create the problem, it opened the window that gave us a clear view back into time of what had been brewing for years. Hair’s use of nudity and long hair was no theatrical trick; these looks have remained with us for almost thirty years because of what they still represent. What Hair did with bare breasts and buttocks was to strip the human package on a Broadway stage at a time when we were morally and intellectually empty. It showed us to ourselves.
Hair called itself the “Tribal Love Rock Musical,” when, in fact, there was little love among those most deeply involved in the production. “Peace and Love” was on everyone’s lips, but it was not a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the Warhol family and other In groups around town, members got a lot of warmth from exclusion: “We are In and you are Out.” It’s an interesting game that people play and gets much of its nihilistic anger from the nursery.
As much as I loved the sixties, I remember the cruelty of the contemptuous looks of certain Insiders, who just five minutes earlier were Out; it was so like those girlish cliques when two little girls leave another out, or like sibling exclusions, or Oedipal games. But that we practiced In and Out so cuttingly in the Age of Aquarius says how ill-equipped the children of affluent Post–World War II and, yes, McCarthyism were to build a society on love.
Around the mid-sixties, a depressing, different vogue began that has never let up. People were wearing other people’s names and initials on their clothes. One day I walked into Saks Fifth Avenue to see a mad commotion around the Yves Saint-Laurent scarf counter as women grabbed at the big beautiful silk squares, fighting over them. Yes, they were lovely to behold, but “YSL” was all over them. Why would someone pay hundreds of dollars to put another person’s initials on her body, like buying bed sheets with a stranger’s monogram? Soon it became impossible to find even a T-shirt that didn’t have someone else’s initials on it.
Until then, the “LV”s on the Louis Vuitton luggage that my great-aunt Mildred carried were the only initials I’d ever seen used this way. Today, Vuitton luggage, once only carried by the wealthy, is everywhere; secretaries save their money to buy one of the ubiquitous LV tote bags so that people on the street will recognize them; meanwhile, Vuitton’s luggage becomes increasingly ill-constructed as the profit margin replaces pride in product. Hermés, Gucci, and Ralph Lauren’s customers would feel cheated if the recognizable initials were removed from their socks and shirts. Who would know who they were? How would they know who they were?
People are so happy to be In, to have an identity and feel substantial, that they eagerly take up the aloof, haughty arrogance of a hollow celebrity, forgetting that until their own recent purchase they were Out. It is the knowledge that others see them, enviously watch them, even as they pretend to be oblivious to the voyeurs, that give the In people the substance that makes them high.
As John Berger observed, “The happiness of being envied is glamour…. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable…. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.”
The values that the sixties revolutions rejected were long overdue for questioning, but when the dust settled and time passed, we wondered if we’d replaced emptiness with emptiness. When feminists barked at men for holding the door open, they outlawed a civility that may have been an empty gesture when women had no real power. Now we have power but have lost not just the chair and door-holding but all the other manners, kindnesses, seemingly empty gestures of politeness that are the ground rules on which a society rests; a civil conversation regarding peace, dénouement, reconciliation, détente, the preservation of a marriage, can only be held with manners. Once women were the custodians of the invisible virtues; now no one has the time or inclination to demand and practice the civilities, out of which word “civilization” is coined; instead of manners we have “icy voyeurism” and desperate exhibitionism.
In his 1994 Encyclical, Pope John Paul referred to the 1960s as the beginning of all that is evil in society today—the breakdown of the family, AIDS, the spread of homosexuality. For some of us, however, Howell Raines’s editorial in the New York Times summed up those years more accurately:
The 60s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption… to raise their voices to end America’s most disastrous foreign military adventure, the Vietnam War. On this level, the Sixties saw an exercise in mass sanity in which a nation’s previously voiceless citizens—its young—overturned a war policy that was, in fact, deranged…. At its essence, the counterculture was about one of conservatives’ favorite words: values.
The Sexual Revolution Versus The Women’s Movement
I suppose it’s because they happened simultaneously that we tend to think that The Women’s Movement and The Sexual Revolution were one and the same, a magnificent march (or freedom across the board. At the beginning I assumed we were all on the same side. Certainly we all looked alike in our jeans and T-shirts proudly punctuated by our recently bared nipples, making it easy to assume that it was one historic movement, along with the Civil Rights marches and those against the Vietnam War.
To this day, many who were there presume great sex was on the Women�
��s Rights agenda. Nothing implied this more than the arrival of the contraceptive pill, an obvious declaration of sexual independence. Along with the highly visible and vocal Pro-Choice Movement, whose banners trumpeted a woman’s right to control her own body, it was blatantly automatic to assume that feminism was pro-sex.
Disentangle these assumptions and you will find the fine print that became the genesis of today’s War Between The Women: at first, the two camps looked like the traditional women with families who chose to work at home versus The New Woman in the workplace. However, in recent years new schisms have splintered us into other divisions, as victimism in particular has divided feminists to the point where the new generations of women are reluctant even to call themselves feminists, even to use the word. As the debate boils, the subject of sex becomes increasingly important as to how you want to define yourself.
We will never know how much ground we might have won over the past twenty-five years if women hadn’t been so divided among ourselves. In hindsight, I’d say the schism between The Women’s Movement and The Sexual Revolution was our Achilles’ Heel, especially when sexuality, not just the sexual act, is viewed as an essential part of our humanity. The rigid, exclusionary demands of antisex, anti-men, Matriarchal Feminism didn’t just lose the Women’s Movement the membership of women who felt pressed to choose between the love of men and The Sisterhood. It weakened card-carrying feminists who felt alienated from their sisters for being less loyal by continuing to sleep with the enemy.
