Virginia Slims Rap II (1963-1980): The James Baldwin of Feminist Pop

206. LESLEY GORE, "You Don't Own Me"
Written by John Madara & Dave White Tricker; produced by Quincy Jones
Mercury 72206 1963 Billboard: # 2

207. IRENE CARA, "Out Here On My Own"
Written by Michael Gore & Lesley Gore; produced by Michael Gore & Gil Askey
RSO 1048 1980 Billboard: # 19

In my last post, I referred to Sheila Weller's wonderful book Girls like Us, which uses the parallel lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon (not to mention many of their friends) to tell the story of feminism's adoption and transformation by a whole generation of American women during the last four decades of the twentieth century. It's an absorbing book and one that I have few quarrels with. On reflection, though, I wonder what Weller might have made of Lesley Gore. Catch me in the right moment and I might be tempted to call Gore the James Baldwin of Feminist Pop.


Let me explain. For many, Lesley Gore is a punchline, of course, merely typical of the manufactured teen sweethearts of the supposedly dead years in [white] American pop, the years between Elvis' induction into the United States Army and the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. (You will note, of course, that those two presumed benchmarks stress the departure and arrival of male performers.) Gore's songs, we are told, are treacle, crying about parties and singing about lollipops and such.

But at least on the strength of its subject matter, I would defend "You Don't Own Me" as an important song for its historical moment. If we measure it against two other prominent 1963 releases featuring female vocals, well then, yes, "You Don't Own Me" may not be as bold a song as "Don't Make Me Over," Bacharach & David's valentine to Dionne Warwick's refusal to be remade for pop success, but it's no the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" either. How many other songs that year granted such a challenging and empowering voice to a seventeen year old girl? In this case, the song is more radical because the singer is a girl and not a woman: she's asserting her independence from boys even before she understands the importance of securing independence from men. And I would point out that she is doing so in the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique is first published.

Like most of Gore's best work, this track is produced by Quincy Jones. While it's not necessarily one of his most complex productions, the eerie tone he lends the verses grants a little more depth through shadow to the triumphant singalongs on the choruses. When Joan Jett covered the song almost twenty years later on her first album with the Blackhearts, she essentially duplicated this arrangement, transposing it from a pre-British Invasion pop orchestra to a post-garage band rock and roll outfit.

Why the analogy to James Baldwin, though? Well, the 1960s as they unfolded were not necessarily kind to James Baldwin, much in the way that they were not necessarily that kind to Lesley Gore. Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a critical and popular success in 1953, but his second novel, the exquisite Giovanni's Room, met with bewilderment in most quarters when it appeared in 1956. Why? Because Go Tell It on the Mountain was an autobiographical novel about the role of religion in African American life, while Giovanni's Room was about a doomed love affair in Paris--between two white men. From his first published story, Baldwin was classified as a "black" writer, and "black" writers are supposed to write about "black" subjects. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, as the Civil Rights era gave way to the moment of Black Power's ascendance, Baldwin also started to be rejected by a number of prominent African Americans. Some movement leaders questioned whether Baldwin was too "accomodationist," "white," or "effeminate" to represent black manhood to white America. To most such challenges, Baldwin's response had been that, like most of the novelists he respected and emulated, the only thing that he was trying to represent in his fiction was humanity.

Still don't see the connection to Lesley Gore? Just wait a decade or two. During the 1980s, both Baldwin and Gore went through something of a renaissance, and it's not too much of a stretch to say that the sudden interest in both artists had to do with a much freer discussion within popular culture of same-sex relationships. For Lesley Gore was lesbian, as James Baldwin was gay, but a pop music star's sexual preferences had been even more closely guarded during the early 1960s than an esteemed novelist's would have been. But suddenly in the 1980s, when Gore's sexual preference was now more widely known, her songs were being covered on record by Joan Jett and she was being interviewed for Ms. by k d lang. No longer solely viewed as an embarrassing stereotypical throwback, she came to be seen by many as a trailblazing pioneer in female pop.

This reappreciation of Gore surely reached its apotheosis in Grace of My Heart, Alison Anders' wonderful 1996 fictional film about a woman songwriter in the 1960s and 1970s whose narrative journey through those years very closely follows the life story of Carole King. At one point, the film's protagonist (Ileana Douglas) and another songwriter of whom she may be jealous (Patsy Kensit) are forced to collaborate on a song for a squeaky clean early 60s teen pop star named Kelly Porter (Bridget Fonda). They're stuck for a subject, until they overhear the popstar having an argument with her girlfriend. They end up writing a song for Porter called "My Secret Love," which allows her to proudly but covertly pay tribute to the same lover that industry publicity demands she must hide from her adoring public.

Of course, Douglas and Kensit didn't really write "My Secret Love," but do you want to guess who did? That's right: Lesley Gore, in collaboration with, among others, David Baerwald of David + David. At the age of forty-five, she helped write the song that everyone now wished she had sung at seventeen, with a chorus that is an almost direct steal from "You Don't Own Me."

You may notice, though, that that's not the second song I've listed here. Instead, I've paired Gore's greatest single with a song she didn't sing on record, a single from Fame that most viewers of the film probably didn't connect with the pretty blonde from almost two decades before who sang "It's My Party" and did a guest shot on Batman. But Gore, who actually cowrote the lyrics for the song to her brother Michael's music, saw "Out Here on My Own" as a sequel to "You Don't Own Me" (which she didn't write) and frequently performed the two songs together as a medley during her comeback concerts of the 1980s.

It's easy to see why. If "You Don't Own Me" is a girl's wouldbe grownup declaration of independence, "Out Here on My Own" is a young woman's more knowing acknowledgement that, even if freedom is both real and vital, independence in its literal sense is pretty much impossible. Gore's lyrics may at first glance seem generic, but in a way that's part of their beauty. Within the movie, they comment on a romantic relationship, but they could just as well be part of a conversation between friends. This song isn't about sex, gay or straight. It's about the fact that, once you've worked hard to win the freedom of full adulthood, it's even harder to give up part of it to someone else. When you're raised to feel incomplete in and of yourself, to feel like an accessory, mature love and trust often feel like backsliding.

A bold cry for freedom, and the confusion of realizing that you can't do everything alone--with two songs, Lesley Gore bookends the initial triumph and continuing challenges posed by modern American feminism. But I'm not sure she'd ever get credit for it.

Virginia Slims Rap I (1966-1971): Strings and Women's Souls

204. RONETTES, "I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine"
Produced by Phil Spector; written by Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich
Philles Records--Recorded in 1966; unreleased until 1991

205. CARLY SIMON, "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be"
Produced by Jerry Brandt; written by Jacob Brackman & Carly Simon
Elektra 45724 1971 Billboard: # 10

How fast did second wave feminism take hold? In social terms, it may never have fully done so, at least not enough. In cultural terms, the reversal in just a few years was striking.

Take these two songs: both fairly sad; both co-written by a man and a woman; both still based in that post-Broadway/Leiber & Stoller belief that deeply felt emotion requires strings if not a full orchestra to attain full expression.

But the earlier song is clearly one that was given to the singer. It's a song for a girl, getting over a crush, even though Veronica Bennett (soon to be Ronnie Spector) was twenty-three when she recorded it. Many feel that this track contains her best vocal ever, but it is almost drowned out by all the instruments that Ronnie's soon-to-be husband feels he needs to pile on top of it. On a song like "Be My Baby" or "Baby I Love You, that had worked, but here it feels as if Ronnie is desperately trying to sing her way out of Phil's oppressive arrangement--or maybe I'm just reading their future marriage back into this earlier single. In any case, when this song resurfaced on Spector's 1991 Back to Mono set, many people were bowled over by it, most notably Beth Orton, who sang a beautifully stripped-down version of the song on her album Trailer Park four years later that put the narrator's emotions front and center. The revolution that made Orton's recording possible, though, began almost twenty-five years earlier, with 1970s artists like Carly Simon.

It's often forgotten now but when Simon first emerged on the scene, she was taken by many for a lightweight bimbo too--an upper-class bimbo even, too rich to be political and too pretty to be intelligent. Not yet attached to James Taylor, she was nevertheless often viewed in the shadow of her male collaborators, in this case Jacob Brackman, who cowrote several songs on the album.

Sheila Weller details the full story of how this particular song was written in her wonderful book Girls Like Us, but even without reading it, could anyone seriously think that a man had dreamed up this scenario? Particularly in 1971, when there were no Women's Studies courses on most college's campuses in which young men could have their consciousnesses raised? (I don't know: maybe he had a sister???)

This is the story of a young woman's fear of marriage and every word of it rings true and fatalistic. But my real point here, as usual, is to listen to the music as well as the words. Here the strings capture the bittersweet nature of the singer's emotion. By contrast, the strings on the Spector track are the idea of a man who thinks he knows what the woman he idealizes is thinking. In the earlier case, they drown out a woman's voice with male projection; in the later case, they amplify the woman's voice and make it loud enough to be heard. That's a revolution--forty five per minute actually--in just five years.

The Subtle, the Blatant, and the Purple

762. CHARLENE, "I've Never Been To Me"
Written by Ken Hirsch & Ron Miller
Prodigal 0636 1977 Billboard: # 97
Motown 1611 1982 Billboard: # 3

763. REBA MCENTIRE, "Fancy"
Produced by; Tony Brown written by Bobbie Gentry
MCA 54042 1991 Did not make pop charts

Like a lot of people I know, I first started paying attention to Barack Obama after his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It wasn't just that he was a great public speaker. It was that, unlike the speeches of so many politicians who tried to inspire me, the moving words Obama spoke actually seemed to describe the country that I thought I lived in. We worship a mighty God in the Blue States, he told the partisan faithful at the convention, and we don't like the government poking into our libraries in the Red States. Even back then, that was the America I knew: conservatives in Massachusetts and liberals in Missouri, not one America ("the real America") or two (Red and Blue), but a dizzying number of semi-interlocking subgroups. It was beyond ethnicity or even ideology. It only seemed to simplify around election time, when the press-politician feedback loop made sure that all those many groups were reduced to just two, two easy actants that even the most casual audience member could follow.

Once can make facile analogies to McCarthyism, to Henry Ford's war on New York City, even to the bimetallist Populists of the 1890s, who saw England and the Eastern United States in cahoots to rob the West blind. But the electoral map of red and blue that seemed so clear throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s really goes back to 1968, to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and (especially) Roger Ailes, who figured out a way to break up the loose coalition that had helped Democrats win the Presidency in all but two elections over almost four decades. The rise of cultural conservatism in post-Nixon Republicanism only made this tie stronger. By 1980, battle lines were drawn, and every American needed to decide which side of the internecine barricades s/he was on.

Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me" is a fascinating artifact of that cultural transformation. The single barely made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, when it was first released (the year before the Moral Majority was founded). Yet it rose all the way to # 3 when it was re-released five years later, after influential d.j. Scott Shannon had taken to playing it repeatedly on his show. In terms of production, it is obviously a 1970s song, so why did it have to be rereleased in the early 1980s to be popular? Reaganism, obviously: just say no; antisex conservatism. Case closed.

Maybe.

"I've Never Been to Me" is musically obvious throughout and lyrically clunky at points, nowhere more so than in the spoken word section toward the end. Admittedly, spoken word in the midst of a sung performance is very hard to pull off on record, as even an established pro like Kenny Rogers could tell you (cf. 1979's "Coward of the County"). There are some cute stretches in this lyric, though, particularly in the internal rhymes in many of the verses, which double the words' impact but must have been hell on Hirsch & Miller's copy of Clement Wood. As anyone who has attempted this song at karaoke can probably tell you, "I moved like Harlow/Through Monte Carlo/And showed 'em what I've got" flows particularly well. Those words can be as much fun to sing on top of those notes as the events they describe were supposed to have been for the narrator back in the day.

And then there's the one internal rhyme that really drives the song home, a better conveyor of its would-be message than the clunky reference to "unborn children" a few lines earlier: "I've spent my life exploring/The subtle whoring/That costs too much to be free." Vulgarity is much more common in pop now than it was thirty years ago. If you weren't around back then, you can't really appreciate the impact of the word "whoring" in a song that otherwise sounded so inoffensive and gentle. It's almost the reverse of Joey Ramone singing that he wants to be your boyfriend over dissonant punk guitars. In any case, the first time you heard those three lines, it hit you like a sledgehammer.

Okay, so there's a little bit of craft in the songwriting. It's still part of a conservative plot to brainwash women, right? The real author of the song has to be Phyllis Schlafly. To which I say, have you seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? A lipsynched performance of this song by drag queens opens the movie. Yes, yes, I know, "camp"--as if slapping that one word on a cultural artifact allows us to avoid all further critical thought. For the entirety of the movie, though, this song almost functions as a sort of thesis statement, emphasizing the way in which one can be oversated with sensation. In truth, what fails about the song, even in Charlene's rendition, is not its delineation of the narrator's problem, but rather the solutions that it offers to it. We don't know how much of a jerk the husband of the woman she's talking to really is, or how much of a strain it is to raise her bratty children. But that still doesn't mean that the narrator's weltschmertz isn't very real.

Indeed, one of the reasons why this song might work better as a drag number is that a man can identify with its narrator without politically letting down his gender. (Rearrange that last clause any way you like--I assure you each meaning is intended.) This isn't a song about turning back from feminism to femininity but rather one about growing weary of compulsive sensation and consumption, a feeling that was certainly very apt in the early 1980s. And if that is a wholly "conservative" emotion, then Charles Baudelaire was a pioneer of Reaganism. Just take another look at his address to his "hypocrite lecteur" at the beginning of Les Fleurs des Mal.

Alright, I hear you say, but you're stretching the point: any anticonsumption weariness in the early 1980s was sucked up by the rising tide of cultural conservatism and then walked in lockstep with the platforms of the Republican Party, which promoted even higher levels of consumption than almost any other organization in our society. I admit you may have a point there, one captured in the ideological contradictions embodied in the antiselfishness/procapitalism acceptance speech that Bob Dole gave at the 1996 Republican Convention. Charlene's single, you could claim, succeeded because it was coopted on the occasion of its re-release and only its antifeminist message remained. As Chuck D most assuredly didn't say, Red States win again.

Which brings me to 1991's "Fancy." This isn't a rereleased single, but rather a rerecorded one. Bobbie Gentry wrote this song back in the late 1960s, but Gentry's arrangement of it almost makes the song come off as a smarmy dirty joke. This is not quite the right approach for a story about an impoverished girl whose mother "turns her out," as the lyric bluntly puts it, pushing her into a life of prostitution. Gentry's original rendition features kicky horns (once again, the continuing curse of Herb Alpert), but while horns may have worked on Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man," they don't work there. Neither does Gentry's vocal, which is too distanced to convey the song's true roach-populated horror.
Logically, Gentry's rendition should be the more feminist version of the song--she's in the thick of the 1960s and crosses over more to rock. Reba McEntire, by contrast, is firmly in the Country camp. After Reagan, Tennessee is as Red a State as you can get.

Nevertheless, McEntire's version of "Fancy" is a revelation, beginning with the electric guitar that rightfully replace's Gentry's popping horns. There's also no distance to McEntire's vocal, which is both tortured and sly in turns, and both at exactly the right places: screaming for momma on one verse and taking the pathetic rich johns in stride on the next. In McEntire's hands, this is an unabashed song about the worst kind of female empowerment, one that balances the agency that its narrator gains with the heavy price that she had to pay for it.

Could you construct an argument that this record is conservative rather than liberal? Sure, if it's really that much more important to you whether you live in New York or Indiana. But whether you're Red or Blue, this is a song about the world of poor, uneducated women, the ways in which they may attempt to form cross-generational ties, and the ways in which they are commodified by a male-dominated world.

Because, my fellow citizens, there is no Red America, and no Blue America. We can grow sated with our consumption, our amusement, our pleasures in the Blue States; and we can feel righteous anger at the way rich men exploit both women and the poor in the Red ones. E pluribus popu[lu]m!

(Southern) Goth Chicks

579. BOBBIE GENTRY, "Ode to Billie Joe"
Written by Bobbie Gentry
Capitol 5950 1967 Billboard: # 1

580. TANYA TUCKER, "Delta Dawn"
Written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey
Columbia 45588 1972 Billboard: # 72

581. HELEN REDDY, "Angie Baby"
Produced by Joe Wissert; written by Alan O'Day
Capitol 3972 1974 Billboard: # 1

The mid-twentieth century American national imaginary is almost unimaginable without the South. Not only was it the source of most of the music from that period that was most identifiably American, but it was also the setting for fiction and drama by William Faulkner, Tennesee Williams, Truman Capote, and others that were among the most riveting stories of the age.

This wasn't the first time that the South took over Northern imaginations--in the late ninteeenth century there had been the Plantation School, in the early twentieth century the Fugitives and Agrarians--but it was the Southern Gothic, which really took hold after World War II, that left the strongest impact on American culture. Its underlying focus was personal and psychological rather than political and ideological, and because of that it was probably able to transcend region more easily than those earlier movements.

What made Southern writing Southern Gothic? Mostly it was about decay, as if the broomsedge against which the protagonist of Ellen Glasgow's 1925 novel Barren Ground fights her whole life had actually won out over all human effort. Mid-twentieth century Southern Gothic is among the most decadent literature that the United States has ever produced, in large part because so many of its characters were being choked by the vines of tradition. Viewed in this sense, you could almost call as old a text as "The Fall of the House of Usher" the first great work in this tradition (although you'd have to finally settle on which state gets to claim Edgar Allan Poe as a resident). Whenever it began, Southern Gothic undeniably flourished in fiction and drama during the 1940s and 1950s. It was dark, it was gnarled, and it was steeped in suffocating tradition.

There was another notable thing about Southern Gothic, especially within the specific context of contemporaneous American literature: it was open to women. Start counting on your fingers the widely read American women fiction writers from the 1940s or 1950s who weren't from the South, and you may not even need a second hand. Obviously, there were a great many talented women fiction writers working during this period, but for various institutional reasons Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and others were the women who were actually promoted and read at that time. Certainly, American women at midcentury knew a fair amount about being strangled by tradition and propriety.

Fastforward a decade or two to pop music, where so many cultural movements seem to go to die. They begin in the avant garde, then move to middlebrow literature, movies, and finally pop songs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the New South was finally about to produce its first emblematic president, the hardscrabble Depression-era region that had given rise to the whole genre of Country music had become, for the most part, a reflexively invoked childhood memory for most practicing artists within the genre. For a time, Country grew almost unspeakably morbid for a widely circulated form of music, and women were at the forefront of this morbidity, just as they had been at the forefront of the corresponding literary movement a few years earlier.

The most obvious example of this trend was Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe," quite possibly the creepiest song to ever hit # 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. What occurs in the song is probably wholly natural rather than supernatural--except for whatever gets thrown off the bridge, which listeners have, of course, been speculating about for more than four decades now. But, as Greil Marcus noted sideways during his thorough analysis of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, the point of this song isn't what happened to Billie Joe. It's what's continuing to happen to the narrator: the slow way she's being crushed under the weight of her family's displeasure; the tightlipped escape she may get to enjoy in the song's final verse. As with the best of Katherine Anne Porter's stories, it's almost pointless to ask whether "Ode to Billie Joe" is a feminist text or not: it captures the inner experience of a young woman's life, and Western art always needs more of that.

By contrast, "Delta Dawn," Tanya Tucker's first hit single five years later, is certainly not a feminist text. It observes the title character from the outside and objectifies her. It turns her into a statue in the town square even as it attempts to pay her tribute, and it should come as no surprise that the song was written by two men for a thirteen-year-old girl to sing on her first album. (As noted in a previous post, the great David Allen Coe judged much better when he gave Tucker the beautiful, impossibly aged "Would You Lay with Me in a Field of Stone?" to sing on the same debut album.) The best line in this song's lyric is the first: She's forty years old and her daddy still calls her baby. There's a novel in that. Even better, there's the sort of compression that a good short story writer would use. For the most part, though, we don't get enough of the texture of the protagonist's life in this song to fully appreciate it: it could be supernatural or merely pathetic, mythic or merely cliched. As in the best Southern writing, however, we do get a sense of the weight of the community pressing down on the protagonist, in the way it presses down on the protagonists of so many of Eudora Welty's stories. In a sense that is almost antithetical to the tenets of twentieth-century modernism, the character almost doesn't exist without her social setting.

By 1973, creepy Southern songs had gone so mainstream in American pop that even non-Southern artists were recording them. Thanks to countless episodes of Mamma's Family and Hannah Montana, many people may think that Vicki Lawrence hails from the South, but she was actually from Inglewood, California--not even Bakersfield, which at that point was still very much an Okie outpost. You can tell how non-Southern Lawrence is when you listen to her 1973 # 1 hit "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" (and yes, even though I sometimes consider that song a guilty pleasure, you will note that I haven't given it a spot in The Thousand and One). Lawrence can fake the accent, but she can't fake the feeling. As lurid as her single is, it's a performance of Southernness by an outsider. You don't believe she's ever lived in a house with a shotgun, let alone learned how to use one.

For some reason, Australians seem to make the translation to Southern culture much more easily than Californians do. In a previous post, I've taken note of Olivia Newton-John's spooky-cheery 1971 rendition of the old murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio," but three years later her fellow sheila Helen Reddy did her one better by recording "Angie Baby," not as creepy a # 1 hit as Gentry's but quite possibly a weirder one. On first hearing, and perhaps subsequent hearings as well, the listener comes away asking Did I just hear what I thought I heard? Those of us who lived through the 1970s can remember an interpretative ballet a la Jerome Robbins on a breakaway attic set that accompanied one of Reddy's variety show renditions of the song. Yes, it probably is up somewhere on YouTube, but I'm not sure that I want to find it and see it again. The memory alone gives me the willies.

Technically, we aren't told that the song takes place in the South. (Given the presence of a portable transistor radio, chronologically it has to take place during the approximate period in which it was recorded.) Still, I've always considered this song a part of the same tradition as those other singles, especially since Reddy's own rendition of "Delta Dawn" had gone all the way to #1 in 1973. Certainly, its title character lives in a small town, and she is subject to the same kinds of smalltown pressures as the characters in those other songs. She is constantly observed and gossiped about, and her life is more a performance being observed by her neighbors than a narrative that she can construct for herself.

The fact that all these songs charted so high beyond the country music ghetto in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests that they had less to do with the actual South and more to do with the birthpangs of modern feminism. Heard today, "I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)" is almost painful to listen to, but this song . . . Angie starts out pathetic, but you may find yourself smiling sickly at the end of the song over her little joke on the world. I am by no means a fan of Reddy's, but she does nail the two lines here that matter: It's so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain. On "I Am Woman," she oversold the song's self-consciously empowering lyrics. These lyrics, though, she tosses off, especially after the release of the bridge. Her undisguised 'Strian accent, the way the As in those two lines almost sound like Is, actually helps the process. Perhaps as a result of cultural prejudice, they make Angie sound like a more likely criminal. In any case, they alienate U. S. ears enough that we can begin to consider exactly how calculating this seemingly pathetic girl may be.

Is this gothic? Noir? Horror? In an age before the Runaways and X-Ray Spex, let alone Hole and Sleater-Kinney, the brief renaissance of Southern Gothic in American pop probably exposed more young girls and women to the possibility of rebellion behind the mask of respectability than Ms. magazine or the collected writings of Valerie Solanis. Songs as seemingly mainstream as these could pass into any home, much like the music on Angie's bedside transistor set. They could do their work quietly, without any immediate, directly challenging signs of revolution. In the end, they may have changed more people's lives than William Faulkner's prototypically Southern Gothic story "A Rose for Emily." So who's to say where the real art lies, in critically recognized literature or disposable 7-inch singles?

Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am

632. DAVID BOWIE, "Suffragette City"
Produced and written by David Bowie
RCA Victor 0719 1972 Did not make pop charts

I'm young enough that I don't really remember much of the public events of the early 1970s directly, at least not before Watergate. I experienced most of that period by refraction, but one of the things that makes perfect sense to me is that everyone who was into rock in the early 1970s seems to have loved David Bowie. How could you not? According to John Lydon's autobiography, Bowie was practically the only musician that British youths wouldn't fight over during that period: proto-punks, pub rockers, art school posers, they all found something to adore in him. Bowie rocked hard and glammed up. He was simultaneously macho and fey. More than anything, he was many heterosexual women's dream: sensitive like a gay man but still sexually available.

Obviously, one of the great things about glam is that it made explicit in popular culture a spectrum of masculinity, just as feminism was emphasizing in the public culture of that same period that there was and should be a spectrum of femininity or womanhood. Some of this had to do with gay and lesbian liberation during this period, but it also augured a second, connected revolution, because it was about gender as well as sexual orientation. Gender didn't have to be a trap, even if you were straight. There wasn't just one way to be straight. You could choose what kind of a man or a woman you wanted to be.

In my hometown during the Bowie era, a lot of this particular culture war seemed to have boiled down to hair. I remember the older generation being very disturbed over the fact that there were all these "unisex" barber shops opening up. Of course, the word "unisex" seemed to scare them in and of itself, but beyond that I believe many men of my dad's generation saw the barber shop as a male place. Why would you want to let women into it? Would you really want a woman to cut your hair? How could you talk to her the way you talk to a guy while he's cutting it? Women couldn't cut a man's hair anymore than they could serve him a drink at his favorite bar. Those were places where a man went to be with other men, and you shouldn't say in mixed company what a man thought of any woman who could be found in places like that.

In retrospect, I find it appropriate that the first unisex barber shop that I remember opening in my hometown was called "Broadway Joe's." It wasn't on Broadway (we didn't have a Broadway), but it was almost certainly named after "Broadway" Joe Namath, the proud and preening quarterback who led the New York Jets to one of the most surprising Super Bowl victories ever. Namath was a ladies' man and he was a fop. He did an infamous TV commercial wearing pantyhose, and still no one questioned either his masculinity or his heterosexuality.

It would be pushing it to say that Joe Namath was America's Bowie, but he did herald a similar transformation for our culture, which would lead by the end of the decade to jewelry, hair gel, and blowdryers for men, not to mention comfort at a surprisingly localized level with women in what had formerly been wholly male enclaves. For a while, my wife and I got our hair cut by the same woman, and all the bartenders at my favorite pub are female, and it seems unspeakably odd to me that there ever could have been a question about any of this.

Plus, as this particular Bowie B-side suggests, for many straight men, there can be a bit of a charge to women not only being equal to but sometimes stronger than they are. Don't listen to Phyllis Schafly and her generational descendants: feminism doesn't kill male heterosexuality. It enhances it.