A Belated Apology to All Our Prude Mothers

Dear Mom,

I read Molly Ringwald’s thoughts about “The Breakfast Club” all these years after those John Hughes movies made her a star. Something about what she was expressing sounded familiar. It sounded like something you would say.

She talked about how the attitudes toward female subjection are systemic and how the art we consume is influential in those attitudes, and I couldn’t help but think of all the times you sucked the “fun” out of some movie, TV show or song for me by making me engage in that conversation. If I was going to sing along to those lyrics, I better be willing to think through what they meant and how they portrayed women. Was that the kind of woman I wanted to be? Was that how I wanted men thinking about me? Did that movie make light of violence against women or depict women as only sex objects? When other people were laughing, you explained to me exactly why you didn’t find that kind of humor funny. And that made it a lot harder for me to find it funny too.

Rebecca Tredway Photography

At the time, the fact that you wouldn’t even let me watch “Grease” without having to engage in a conversation about peer pressure and the pitfalls of trading in your virtue to keep a boy’s interest was just UGH. And sigh. And ANNOYING. But it started a healthy internal dialogue for me when it came to the influence of culture and the messages it’s always been trying to send women about our worth.

I found myself echoing your attitude the other day when a commercial came on TV that implied there was something wrong with having a sagging neck. While it recommended the latest and best “treatment” options to combat gravity and aging, I could hear your voice coming out of my mouth as I yelled back at the TV, “WHY WHY WHY? What kind of world are we living in if we have to be self-conscious about our necks? What does that have to do with our value and how much more could we be contributing to the world if we weren’t wasting time and money on NECK TREATMENT OPTIONS?” I didn’t yell those things because I actually hate neck treatment options. I yelled them because my daughter was in the room, absorbing every moment. I’m not about to let her live in a world where she’s told her NECK isn’t good enough, her eyelashes aren’t thick enough, and her pores are too large without SOMEBODY speaking some truth back to her. She needs to know that a woman she admires and respects isn’t having it. That we have better things to do with our time and money than worry about our literal necks.

It made me think about you, Mom, and all the times I heard you question the prevailing wisdom of the day. Maybe you weren’t doing that because you were a prude, shocked by a changing culture. Maybe you did it because you knew I needed to hear it and needed to know a woman I admired and respected wasn’t having it. I needed you to set an almost adversarial tone for how I would learn to interact with a culture that wanted me to fit in a certain box and find my value by meeting the external criteria.

It’s made me wonder if the first warriors in this #MeToo movement weren’t just the women we think of when we picture traditional “feminists” or advocates. Maybe some of the first warriors were mothers who saw what society was pressuring their daughters to become and said, “Absolutely not.” Maybe it was the women who lived through the sexual revolution and cultural upheaval of the sixties and seventies and decided their daughters were not going to be pressured into having to define their worth by their sexual willingness. Maybe we’ve created a false dichotomy between liberated, feminist women and our dutiful wives and mothers. The truth is, nobody was firmer or fiercer about protecting the dignity and value of womanhood in my life than my mother.

You made us awkward when we wanted to be cool. We weren’t familiar with the movies our friends were watching. We didn’t know all the lyrics to the songs everybody else grew up listening to. We were reading the newspaper after school when other kids were watching MTV. We were having awkward conversations about safety and boundaries and rape and consent when our friends were out partying. Sometimes we found ourselves the only girls wearing a one-piece in a two-piece society. We felt sheltered and strange when we just wanted to be “normal” like the other kids.

But I don’t regret it.

I think our current cultural moment is proving you right. Those song lyrics DID seem to imply that treating women like consumable goods was fine and that DID have an impact on us. Those movies DID rationalize and justify rape and we’re paying the price. We live in a pornified culture and we need women and men, sons and daughters to push against it. We need mothers who will risk seeming like prudes to raise children who see their value is more than just skin-deep. We need children to be sheltered not from truth or information, but from messages that would demean them and minimize wrongs done to them.

I feel like a traitor to my generation to admit this, but I’ve never seen all of “Pretty in Pink” or “Sixteen Candles” and I think I’ve only seen the TV edited version of “The Breakfast Club.” There have been snippets I’ve watched of those movies when they aired on TV, but I could never get past all the conversations we had. You made me think deeply about messages that do the most damage when they remain shallow and unquestioned. I can see in retrospect what didn’t make sense to me at the time. You were fighting a battle for my soul and my worth and my womanhood. When the message was, “If it feels good, do it.” and we were all supposed to be cool about however anyone wanted to express themselves, you told me some things weren’t funny, weren’t okay, and needed to be addressed. Remembering those messages has given me the strength to be firm even when my kids wish I was the “fun mom” everybody else’s mom seems to be.

So this is the belated apology you probably always knew was coming. I’m sorry I hassled you about being so “strict” and sheltering. I’m sorry I didn’t always follow your rules. I’m sorry I thought feminism sounded kind of awesome, but you sounded lame. I’m sorry for the rolled eyes and the deep sighs as you tried to teach me to question the status quo.

Mom, you resisted before resisting was cool. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” could have been said about you as you pushed against an aggressive cultural tide of demeaning messages about how we define a woman’s worth. You were making dinner and doing laundry for my dad and fighting the harmful aspects of the patriarchy all at once.

Yes, the attitudes toward female subjection are systemic and the art we consume influences our attitudes. May we all be brave enough to speak those truths to our daughters and not be casual about what we allow to shape what they believe about themselves.