Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Saturday, October 27, 2007 7:16:10 AM
TORONTO (October 27, 2007) -- Brent Bozell wrote a column today about the new trend in movies (trendlet, so far, really) pointing out that movies in which *Choice* means that a person who has at least two options chooses something Hollywood dislikes; in this case, that women choose to have their babies rather than abort them. It is my argument that this whole Choice thing is part of the Woodstock Nation Constititution and now that people born in the 1960s are reaching Senior Citizen Age (and I as one of them can say that without being accused of being Hateful), the majority of us who had plain-spoken parents and did not participate in the whole nightmare are speaking up to bring back the true definition of Choice.
It started of course with the whole false premise that Men and Women Are The Same. Men could walk around half-naked without consequences -- equality demanded that women do the same. Except that it turned out women could NOT walk around half naked without consequences. A man with a bare chest wandered Woodstock unmolested; a bare-chested woman was likely to be raped, or at the least was seen as what grandma called a Popsie and we in the Catholic Girls High called the Community Punch Board. Girls who dressed in fishnet stockings and go-go boots and skirts that they could not sit down in were in the same uncomfortable position when it came to perception by men. The day came when women looked at what Fashionists decreed that Women Would Wear and said *Not me, brother; I am going back to buying Classics that are comfortable and will look good next year too, and keeping them.* Left with stores full of rubbish, the fashion industry slowly started coming around and true choice became available in womens fashion. (We are making less progress in changing fashion for little girls, but indications are that this will soon change as well.)
Likewise the idea that women and men could both equally find them, f*** them and forget them proved wrong. Birth control was not The Answer; no matter what we were told, sometimes it just plain fails, and when it does, the number of pregnancies is not equally distributed between men and women. The only thing that men seemed to be left with, by and large, was the urge to convince the mother of his child to dispose of it.
Just like the other trends trying to promulgate the fiction that Men and Women Are The Same, women stood up first and began to decide to keep and rear their babies regardless of what their insensitive *mates* happened to think. But the thing that changed the trend at last was that the men who, it turned out, felt equally that the babies they helped create were not just inconvenient clumps of tissue that would ruin their lives if not quickly excised and forgotten, began to step up. If you will notice the one thing all these movies had in common, this is what it was: The Men Stepped Up.
Naturally this is anathema to the Woodstock Nation, especially when it is their children and grandchildren who are embracing the idea that in order to have true choice, you need more than one option -- and that just like Sister Mary Bernadette and our Daddies taught us, popularity is not happiness after you get out of high school. There are many times when choosing the unpopular road separates men and women from the Herd; and the new trend in movies is showing that it is more important to do right and be happy than to be an unhappy marcher in the Woodstock Herd.
The truth is that only about 5% of the Boomers ever belonged to the Woodstock Nation, and maybe another 10% were on the fringes of it; the majority of our generation who were the first and to that point only members of our families to even graduate from high school, much less go to university, were hard working people who kept, and until recently keep, the wheels turning without any notice from the Media World. And it is our kids who are bringing forward the idea that when Men stop being Little Boys and step up to the plate, sometimes they can influence women to make an unpopular choice and choose that life will continue.
But it is not the women who have to learn this lesson; most women know that they have a choice already. It is the men who step up and offer their strong right arm and their support that, in all the movies Mr. Bozell pointed out, turn the tide and encourage the women to step out of the Herd and choose another direction.
I have five great-nieces and great-nephews so far, and there is no sign that any of my nieces and nephews long for the days of the Woodstock Nation Herd. (My boys are another story -- one has declared he does not want children; the other is too busy trying to invent Time Travel to pay any attention to girls). I think this is down to the men at last taking up Adulthood. I hope it catches on outside the movies among the descendants of the Woodstock Nation.