I was flipping through the April issue of Glamour magazine — thinking how much I hated Cindy Crawford — when a photo stopped me cold. There, across two color pages, were five models cavorting on the beach, buck naked. Or rather, butt naked. Their backs were to the camera.
“A better butt starts here,” declared the headline. With diligent cleansing, scrubbing, moisturizing, exfoliating and, if necessary, camouflaging, with dedicated lifting, squatting, extending, pressing, and rotating, I could soften my butt, fight “pink, itchy pustular bumps,” and hide “blemishes, bruises, cellulite and stretch marks.” I could sculpt my butt, raise it, define it, tone it, shrink it, grow it, and make it as round and as firm as a beach ball. In other words, I could have a “buff butt.”
Boy, am I glad I’m old. Way too old to care about what’s happening to a part of my body I can’t even see, when the ones that I can see have taken early retirement. But I can honestly say, there never was a time when I would have exfoliated my butt. I was too busy ironing my hair.
It was so much easier being a young woman in the ’60s and ’70s. We wanted to be thin and look like Sandra Dee, and that was about it, beauty-wise. We didn’t care if we were toned. We didn’t know what toned was. We never exercised, and we had no guilt about it. Nobody did, except maybe Jack LaLanne. There were few gyms, no exercise clothes, no workout tapes. Jane Fonda was purging, not pumping in those days. If we weren’t as thin as we wanted to be, we wore a girdle.
Young women don’t wear girdles anymore. The things are as politically incorrect as a fur coat at a PETA meeting. Instead, the youthful do hours of situps. You want to compliment a young woman? Tell her she has “great definition.” She’ll melt. Because it’s not enough to be thin, she has to be taut. Her butt has to be “buff.”
I continued flipping through the same magazine — deciding Kate Moss was an alien — when the following question caught my eye: “Can oral sex give him herpes?”
Have I offended you? Well, I’m offended myself. Glamour is a magazine for young, mostly unmarried, women. In the ’60s, before everything went crazy, it was assumed that young, unmarried women didn’t have sex. Helen Gurley Brown made a fortune with her “shocking” book “Sex and the Single Girl,” which wasn’t even about sex. It was about flirting, teasing and getting guys to hang your towel racks until you manipulated them into marrying you. In the movies, Doris Day hung on to her virginity until her 40s. (Although, with hindsight, you have to wonder how hard Rock Hudson was trying.)
I was in college in the mid-’60s when a survey came out saying that one in four college girls was not a virgin. My three roommates and I looked at each other and giggled. Which one of us was the slut?
The nice thing about assuming that young women didn’t have sex was that even if they did, they didn’t have to be good at it. In fact, it was better if they weren’t. It would have ruined the image.
Today, it is assumed that young women, the daughters of the “I never did this before” mothers, are having sex, freely and openly. And they’d better be good at it, as experienced as hookers. Glamour teaches them. Every month another technique, some of which haven’t been practiced since the court of Louis XIV. “Can oral sex give him herpes?” Death is too good for him.
When my fellow Boomers and I were young, our recipes came off labels: the Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup can, the lime Jell-O box, the mayonnaise jar, the chocolate Whip-and-Chill package. As I continued flipping through the magazine — thinking how much I’d like to slap Linda Evangelista — I came across a recipe for “a sunny spring frittata,” best made with extra virgin olive oil, fontina cheese and salty Tuscan ham and served on rosemary-scented focaccia. No wonder eating disorders are as common as PMS.
It’s so hard to be a young woman today. So exhausting. The pressure on them is enormous. They have to have a terrific financial adviser and a fabulous manicurist. They have to be able to support themselves, fight wrinkles, cook in several languages, do volunteer work, find a husband, maintain healthy, glowing locks, outmaneuver the Kama Sutra, make time to have children and flash a “buff butt.”
I get tired just thinking about it.
