Yay Feminism

1.

M hadn't planned on doing this. It wasn't the kind of thing she enjoyed or approved of. She pretty much got bullied into it. Didn't want to be called a chicken or a prude.

Her friends acted the whole time like it was no big deal, and she envied how easy it was for them, or at least their ability to fake it convincingly, if that was what they were doing, and she was pretty sure they were.

No, actually in all honestly she couldn't tell one way or the other. Maybe all five other girls were bullshitting each other, and bullshitting themselves, and secretly in their hearts they were just as freaked out as she was right now—but maybe not. Maybe she really was the only one of the group having a super hard time with doing this thing.

Maybe she really was a prude or a chickenshit. Or both. Maybe that was all there was to it.

Well, either way, she was doing it with the rest of them. She was hating every single second of this but she was doing it anyway. 'Cause they'd made her.

She was surrounded. No escape now.

2.

Every year, the first weekend of August, their city had a community festival in a big park downtown, or right on the edge of it. Actually they had a couple much bigger and nicer parks that would have fit it better, further in along the river, but this one was always still used 'cause it was where the festival first happened, when it was just a little word-of-mouth neighborhood event rather than a splashy city tradition. Every year there was talk of moving it because too many people had showed up to the previous one and the whole thing got too crazy, and then there would be an outcry against that idea and it wouldn't happen.

That particular park was behind a semi-isolated neighborhood called the High End, which a decade ago had been the bohemian part of this city, and it still pretended like it was, but now you had to be rich as fuck to live or shop there. The festival was known as Summer Smash; everybody usually condensed that to Smashfest or just the Smash. Originally it was intended as a very hippy kind of thing—most people thought it had got started in the sixties. Really it didn't go back nowhere near that far. The first one was in eighty three. The organizers, though, had in fact been hippies; old nostalgic hippies, striving to kindle some of their idealism in the youth of the day.

Those founders would not be entirely pleased by what the Smash had evolved into since then, and their neighborhood in parallel along with it. More likely they'd be pissed.

The Smash didn't really fit anymore with the High Enders. Not the High Enders of the present era. Those ritzy people currently inhabiting the pricey refurbished townhouses directly overlooking the park didn't like to attend. They just complained about the noise and the smells. And in fairness, it generated a lot of noise and a lot of smells to have to cope with. If she herself lived there, M thought she wouldn't like it any better.

The festival nowadays had two different faces—neither matching the vision of the founders, though both pretended to. One face—the nicer face—was a folksy art-and-crafts market, a winding line of colorful tents and booths. This was the face the city promoted. A hell of a lot of money got made in that part. Very, very little of it ended up in the pockets of actual local artists. These were not street gypsies with handcrafted jewelry and sculptures and paintings, not like you saw on the posters. Maybe one in ten. The majority of those booths were run by retail chains. M saw a tent selling fancy ultramodern kitchen cabinets—you didn't actually buy them right inside there; you just picked the display you liked, filled in an order form on the guy's laptop, and a team of remodelers would be sent to your house a few days later. There were a whole bunch of tents that worked like that, promoting new bathrooms or expensive furniture or household air conditioners or giant fucking HD televisions ... Entire place was just a suburban mall in disguise, and a ritzy-ass one for ritzy-ass people. As far as food, it was all from those roving chef trucks that have got so popular. Good stuff, gourmet shit like you see on food channels on cable, but super-expensive. Couldn't get yourself so much as a hotdog for less than fifteen bucks. It would be a hell of a hotdog, yes, no argument. Still, didn't seem quite right.

And all that was just along the outer rim of the park, on one side. All the rest, inside the perimeter, was for the other face of the Smash. And that second face—much larger than the other—was where it lived up to its name.

Across the body of the park were six or seven different stages for live music, all going at once, from ten in the morning 'til midnight. Now, unlike the art market, this was all still genuinely local talent (though often that term had to be applied loosely). Very few established well-known artists played the Smash, and whenever one did, a stink was stirred up about it. Despite that fact, the current organizers were bound to give up and change the policy eventually, no doubt right at the same time they finally broke down and moved the location to a bigger park—much more money could be made if "real" musicians were brought in. But so far, just barely, the old tradition continued to hold out. The Smash was supposed to provide a venue for new community talent to try to get noticed, and thanks to that, everybody played for free. Pretty much anyone could perform if you signed up on time, no matter how good or bad you might be, and as for the audiences, anybody could wander all over listening to anything they wanted in there, as long as they wanted to explore.

Each little stage had a particular genre—two country stages, a rap stage, a jazz stage, and then two or three rock stages. That last category was too general; trying to find something they liked, crowds were always streaming back and forth between the rock stages, every time the bands changed and even while they were all in the middle of playing. The rock bands were never sure how many people ended up liking them or not by the end of their shows. Also, the rock stages were too close together—but then, lots of people complained that all the stages were too close together, or that there were simply too many of them in the park, so all the different competing musical genres just blended together into a huge horrible ghastly mess, wherever you went.

A counter-argument to this was that nobody cared much about the music anyway. The music was fundamentally beside the point. Most of it was shit, regardless what the genre was. These were all amateurs; you couldn't expect anything better. And to this view, the real point of the festival, deep down, wasn't to listen to music or to buy folksy art from a tent. The real point for most of the people that came year after year, if we're gonna be honest with each other, was just for everybody to get drunk off their asses on cheap beer, and to smoke a lot of weed, and maybe drop a little acid if you felt more adventurous. That sort of thing made the noise seem just fine and dandy. Also, it was supposedly getting you into the true core fundamental spirit of the Smash. Since the founders were a bunch of old hippies, right? And the whole point of starting this festival had been to open up young people's minds. To bring back the sixties. Isn't that what they'd said?

Now the founders themselves might have disputed this limited interpretation of their initial guiding philosophy, at least to a degree, but the last of them had croaked of a heart attack back in ninety one. And bad as the rowdy concert scene tended to get (which was pretty damn bad), they would still have probably been much more outraged by what the so-called art market had turned into.

The park always ended up getting pretty rough in there, toward the first evening. Then much worse, and much earlier, during the second day. The final day usually deadened down considerably—except if it didn't. Every few years, the Smash would end on an apocalyptic note instead. Brawls, fires, rapes. "How could this happen?" people would say when it was all over, and demand for the festival to be shut down permanently. Then others would rise to its defense: "Smashfest is a vital tradition in this city. It stands for important community values and ideals! How can we consider abandoning it after a single unfortunate incident?" As if the same appalling fiascos hadn't already happened periodically, half a dozen times before.

In fact, it was like the Smash had three faces, not just two. There were the two that were real, that you could actually visit, and then a third illusionary face—this grand rosy fantasy version of what the whole silly mess was supposed to represent. Completely detached from how it actually played out, year after year, sloppy and ugly and stinking.

Yet it wasn't that high-minded fantasy that kept it alive, not really. Like everything else, it was just money.

The organizers didn't charge nobody to enter the park, but they did sell them a fuck of a lot of beer, through the course of those three days. They made out quite good on the deal.

3.

Another fairly distinctive feature of the Smash was a lot of women going around topless at the thing. Didn't see that going on at semi-similar city events, like the Fourth of July "Big Blast" fireworks display downtown, or the half-dozen other yearly arts-and-crafts fairs that came and went in different areas, many of them much bigger and more legit than the Smash's ever turned out. Now it was never an enormous number of women doing this, despite what some people claimed, yet it was also more than just a couple or a few. Varied year to year, depending mainly on the weather. At most, though, even on the sunniest and sweatiest days, you wouldn't find more than twenty women out there like that, and generally no more than ten. And they tended to stick pretty much to certain corners of the park, around the rock stages.

It still continued to shock certain people. No surprise. Every year there would be complaints about it, angry letters and emails written to the papers and the mayor. No action was taken. Even so, the topless women generally kept clear from the art market throughout most of the festival, except late at night, the last half hour or so just before everything closed down until the next morning. Because those were the people that liked to get offended about it, the upperclass people that only came to the Smash to shop in the booths, and never ventured further inside the park. Fussy old folks and housewives pushing huge strollers.

The toplessness, like the rampant drug use, was justified as part of the founding spirit of the festival. Frequently you'd hear it claimed that lots more women used to do it during the first few, back when everyone was supposedly so much more laidback about that sort of thing—then it just fell out of favor during the eighties, until our culture finally started loosening up again. All that was another myth, sprouting off the apocryphal notion that the Smash got started all the way back in the sixties. In fact, no women ever appeared topless at the Smash until just three or four years ago. It had been a single lesbian couple, that first time, making something of a political statement. Then it had caught on—kind of. Not in a huge way, not so far. It was not a steady progression. But each Smash that followed, a fair number of other women showed up like that, with their tits hanging out. Didn't feel like this trend was going to die off.

This year, M and five of her friends were going to participate. Certainly wasn't her idea. She would have backed out if they'd have let her. They just wouldn't let up on her about it, and she knew they would torment her mercilessly if she didn't give in and go along with them. M couldn't face that. Scary as the festival would be, in that state, they would only be going for one day. While if she didn't go, her punishment would continue for weeks or months. Her friends were relentless with that kind of shit.

In fact it's perfectly legal for women to go around topless in public whenever they like, if that's what they wanna do, just like a man can. Of course restaurants and stuff can ban you from going in, if they want—"No shirt, no service"—but as long as you're outside, or in a public building, nobody's entitled to fuck with you over it. Not anymore. Now M was personally a little muddled about whether this was a brand new thing or not, because several different people had told her several different things. Some said the law was always like that; others told her it just recently got changed after a big court case over breast-feeding in public. A major victory for women's rights! Somebody else told her that was half-right and half-wrong; there'd been a court case but not over breast-feeding—that had nothing to do with it. Then yet another person claimed all this happened not recently but decades ago, only most women still didn't know anything about it. On account of the "current shameful state of the women's movement".

And legal or not, there's obviously still a big social stigma. If you bare your boobies in public, it freaks people out. M's first response when she heard about all this was just: "Why would I wanna do that, anyway?" Sure, maybe if she had a baby, it would feel nice to know she had the right to breastfeed it out in public if she felt like doing that, or if she needed to, 'cause she was stuck somewhere for some reason. Car trouble or what have you. She could get the business taken care if the baby started crying without having to hide away behind some bushes, or do it in some smelly public toilet. But she couldn't really imagine another situation where she would want to take her shirt off outside in front of random strangers. Not her kind of game.

Breasts are highly sexualized. Fetishized. It's our culture. Maybe it's ridiculous or even twisted that we've turned them into that, and you can bitch about it however much you want, but that won't alter the facts. Displaying your tits to people is provocative. It's primarily, fundamentally, a sexual display. You're saying: "Hey look at these, aren't they nice? Bet you wanna fondle them. Do I turn you on?" Only time it didn't was in the doctor's office, checking them for lumps.

You could argue about that. Sure. You could say it doesn't always have to mean that. Fair enough. In M's opinion, you were just bullshitting yourself.

The "sexualization" of breasts didn't bother M—she didn't see it as a social problem. Lots and lots of women feel differently, she understood that. She also knew she might share that opinion if she had a pair she wasn't proud of. Only she did—she was lucky that way. Hers happened to be a real good size and shape; they were also pretty darn responsive. Lots of women don't get much physical pleasure out of theirs, so when men touch them and squeeze or put their slobbery mouths on them, it just ends up tedious and annoying. For M, it wasn't like that. It was enjoyable, usually. If the guy wasn't a fuckhead about how he went about it.

If somehow the feminist crusaders got their wish, and the whole modern world changed its mind about tits, so nobody cared what yours looked like or whether you covered them or not, that wouldn't feel like a big liberating relief for her, or any kind of grand gender victory. It would be a loss, instead. It would be sad. A basic diminishment of personal sexual power. Devaluing two precious personal treasures of hers.

It sucks that not everybody's beautiful—it sucks that it makes so many people hate themselves. (This is actually a whole different issue, but it's related.) If we could erase the entire concept of beauty, is that really the best answer? It sounds like a fine idea, on the one hand. It would give people one less thing to agonize about their whole stupid lives. It would make the world happier.

M knew she wouldn't do it. Not if it was up to her. Too high a price. But hey, she was biased. She had been blessed with beauty to lose.

Her friends were acting delusional. That was her biggest issue with what they were all doing. They thought, or they claimed, they were doing this topless thing to make a statement about women's rights and individual expression. Or that was what they kept saying they thought. That was what they kept telling her in lecturing tones. M didn't believe them. She couldn't buy into it.

They just wanted to show off their boobies outdoors in the bright summer sun in front of all those drunken rowdy boys swarming in the park, 'cause it would be a thrill. It would be sexy. A test of courage, too—also a test of their own individual attractiveness. How many heads would they turn? Which of them would the boys like best?

If this whole flock of silly self-centered bitches would all just let themselves be honest and up front about that fact—she'd have felt better about joining in. But they wouldn't do that. They weren't brave enough. They had to pretend it was something else. Something more elaborate and meaningful, to give the kinky game a clean justification.

It was bullshit and it was also cowardly. Also sort of sad. How could they claim they were empowering themselves, when they wouldn't even admit that this was gonna be flat-out sexy and that it was gonna turn them on?

"This isn't about sex," Paula said, over and over, "That's not what this is about. This is about freedom. This is about personal ownership of our bodies. This about feminist expression. It's got nothing at all to with sex."

Yeah fucking right.

It wasn't like M disagreed with the idea of feminist expression, or didn't care about it—she did. But was this really the best way? Waving their tits around at a crummy local rock concert, when everybody around them was gonna be wasted or stoned or tripping? Or all three at once? What the fuck kind of statement about freedom and personal ownership was that making? Especially one that had nothing to do with sex. And why couldn't a statement of feminist expression involve sex, anyway? Why wouldn't you want it to? Why take that away from yourself? From your own womanhood, your own bare body?

Let's get real. All those guys in the park—they wouldn't see a proud political non-sexual statement. That didn't even make any sense. They'd just see a bunch of jiggling sweaty tits. They'd see six silly randy college girls, breathless and red in the face, looking to get laid ... That was the message they'd be sending, true or false. Just that and nothing else. Nothing particularly empowering—beyond the basic power to give guys boners, for whatever that's worth to you.

Try telling Paula that, she acted like it was a huge insult. Like, how dare you think that? And any hypothetical guys that might interpret their appearance that same way would just be a dumb bunch of assholes! Hell with them, if that's what they assumed. It wouldn't matter at all.

It wasn't just unrealistic, it was nuts. Just plain nuts. And M couldn't get through to any of them. They all told her she was the crazy one. They told her she was too uptight, too paranoid. It wouldn't be like she thought, they promised. It wouldn't be anything like that. It would all just be totally cool and relaxed and spiritual. Ha. Please.

They told her she needed her consciousness raised. That was her favorite. She was the only one of them that was conscious. She was the only one seeing this shit for it really was. The rest were dreaming. Completely kidding themselves. So wrapped up in their comforting self-protective candy-colored nonsense, it was like they were practically sleepwalking, or fucked up out of their minds on drugs before they'd got into the festival and taken any. More she thought it over, more she realized, that was almost exactly what had happened—except it wasn't anything they smoked or swallowed that did this to them. It was a mental drug. Their own brain chemistry.