(no subject)

[charliesmum]

Was, for some reason, explaining the song William Wants a Doll to the Boyfriend yesterday - I forget why, but it came up in conversation with my mom, the Boyfriend having missed out on it, being just a tad too old for it when it came out in the early 70's.

For those of you too young to know the song, it's from the hippy-dippy feel good children's album put out by Marlo Thomas And Friends - Friends being some of the stars of the day - Alan Alda, Carol Channing, Mel Brooks. The songs and stories were all about how Girls Could Do Anything, and Boys Are Allowed To Cry (illustrated in song by football player Rosier Grier, I believe).

William Wants a Doll is a song about a little boy who, well, wants a doll. His brother and friends all pick on him, his father tries to bribe him with sports gear, but William is steadfast. Grandma eventually brings him one, pointing out to the Concerned Manly Father that a boy having a doll is a Good Thing, because it will teach William how to be a good father.

Which is true, I pointed out. Learning how, as the song says, 'to dress it, put diapers on double, and gently caress it to bring out the bubble and do all the things that every good father should learn to do would help William be a better father when he grew up.

Assuming, of course, he and his partner are able to adopt.

But the song isn't that brave actually. They actually go through great pains to point out William is not gay - he's good at all the sports his father bribes him with, you see, which is kind of sad when I think of it now. It's okay for William to want a doll if he's perfectly straight, but if he wants a doll because he's...effeminate, that's not okay, apparently.

See what happens when you think to hard about childhood songs?

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't think it's a question of the song not being that brave; the song was trying to correct an underlying assumption of the 1970s, which was that any boy who wanted a doll (and, to a lesser extent, any girl who played with cars and trucks and liked sports-at least past the age when such things were "cute") either was gay or would be turned gay by playing with toys reserved for the opposite gender. There would have been no point in telling the parents of the 1970s that William was gay; most parents of the time probably would have been wondering (even if they didn't say so) if a little boy who wanted a doll had some tendencies "that way." William's father is clearly worried about this, and is trying to steer his son away from dolls toward sports...and a more heteronormative male role. And the song delivers a Take That, for Grandma points out to William's father that the traditional male role could use expanding--and that it would be GOOD for William to be able to care for and demonstrate his love for his child.

The song was saying that a boy not only could but SHOULD like things that were traditionally tagged feminine, that a father's role could be nurturing and could involve feeding and diapering a baby, rather than leaving all of that to the mother, and that things people thought of as "for girls only" should be valued by everyone. Those were pretty revolutionary messages back then.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's true, actually. There's also "Dudley Pippin and The Principal where he learns that its okay for a boy to cry if he feels sad.

I guess I was looking at the song with the angle of 'father should accept the boy for what he is, whatever that may be.'

Which is a good message, but not the one the song was going for.

Do you think many of those lessons actually stuck, or do you think we all kinda rubber-banded right back into the more traditional way of thinking?

Part 1

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I don't know if people even know the song about William anymore. I must have heard it when I was in high school if it was a 1970s song, so it didn't have much impact on me when I was growing up.

That said, I think that a lot of ideas have changed since then. You mentioned some of them--that being LGBTQ is perfectly okay, that parents should accept their children for who they are and not who they want the kids to be, and that LGBTQ people should be respected, just like everyone else. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who disagree with these ideas...but the fact that sexual orientation isn't automatically seen by 99% of the population as "something wrong" is a big transformation in a fairly short period of time.

Part 2

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Or...well, take the way women used to be seen.

When I was growing up in the sixties, being a girl and good at sports was considered a misfortune. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls' teams didn't exist in high school (at least the ones in my state), except at all-girls' high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.

People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone laughed indulgently and told me it was impossible--those just weren't realistic goals for a girl...the latter, especially, because you couldn't trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie...because, as he put it, "she was just his wife."

Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.

A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.

The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no--a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.

(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender is legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)

The male law students didn't like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.

My reaction was, "Thank you for proving my point..."

The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states--even in the early 1980s--a man could rape his daughter...and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.

Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as "cute." The implication was that a woman attempting to defend herself was absurd, but wasn't it just adorable for her to try?

I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school--1978-79 and 1979-80--because, as the principal told me, "Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won't use it."

When I was in college--from 1980 to 1984--there were no womens' studies. The idea hadn't occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor--a man who had a doctorate in history--informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because...wait for it...womens' brains were too small.

(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)

We have a long way to go toward true equality. But so many of those assumptions just aren't built into society anymore.

So I think people change. We just don't realize how much things have changed, because we've changed along with them.

Re: Part 2

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

That's so amazing - I was a kid in the 70's, and I remember is people talking about 'women's liberation' but I was to young to catch all the nuances.

I do remember the commercial for perfume that said a woman could 'do it all' and we used to run around singing the jingle - 'I can bring home the bacon/fry it up in a pan', but when I look at the commercial now, it seems a bit condescending.

Oh, and the one for Love's Baby soft! It implied that aggressive women didn't get the boys! Driving up in a convertible confidently is a no-no, but wobbling up on a bike with a basket on the front was okay.

But...I never felt there were things I couldn't do, so that was good, anyway.