The Starlet on the Tarmac
Judi came swinging around the bookshelves on a mission. It was a dull evening on the second floor of the campus library and I looked up from my carrel of books just in time to see her whisper-yell “Down with the patriarchy!” with a raised first and swinging breasts. She was moving fast and headed right towards me, but her focus was above my head and far out beyond the walls and into the world. Her smile was radiant, her eyes were fierce, she’d read one too many tome of the canon. The dead white males had piled too high, the switch had flipped right then and there on that night, and she was ready to burn it down with ebullience and glee. I scurried to slam my books shut and join her wake, a few more women gathered, and we hatched a plan — our fight against The Man would begin tonight with a raid on the student center.
One of us rode our bike to the corner store and bought an armload of magazines — Glamour, Cosmo, Vouge — conflicted about paying money to support such things, but certain they were being used for a cause. Others went back to their dorms to gather fancy bras, undies, and lipstick, and I was mystified that they had these things at all. We met in the dim light of the empty student center with our gathered loot and began to decorate, to vandalize, to deface — slogans in lipstick on the glass, collages of tawdry mainstream magazine ads taped to the brick walls of the staid, beige, common space.
Cleavage-selling-bimbo-bombshell advertisements were cut up and magnified, let us show you how wrong they are. Bras were stretched and pinned down onto bulletin boards in a chaotic display of defiance, a subversion of culture, and elevation of the female mind over body. Don’t look. Don’t touch. This body is not for you, it is not for sale, the objectification will end now. Expose the tools, flip the script, and rebel. The patriarchy will die because this is how we kill it.
The next day, the talk on the small campus was curious and cautious, everyone who showed up for breakfast and lunch saw our artwork. Who did this, are they organized, what’s next? To my surprise, this act of political vandalism in the public space was being taken seriously - not by any college officials, but by our peers. While there were plenty of liberal vibes in the school, it also attracted do-gooders and dweebs — this was an honors college and the people who were admitted were in the habit of doing their homework on time and getting straight A’s. They were the good kids, and this display rattled the sense of order. The undergarments and slogans went up onto the walls early in the first semester and the new crop of students had their notebooks out, ready to learn the rules.
We had no plans beyond that wild night, this was just a one-time way to bust out of the chilled stacks and the monotony of the entombed white male. Later that week, having been identified as one of the vandals, I was pressed for an explanation by a strident young man - what does it mean, what exactly is your point? I was inarticulate and failed to elegantly summarize this situation because I hadn’t taken the course on the Male Gaze yet — I didn’t have the crafted, smooth language to describe the essential problems with objectification, subjugation and control. Judi was way ahead of me, she had logged semesters of dutiful readings and analytical papers within the Women’s Studies department.But me, all I could say was Men Bad, Women Good, and here are my hairy legs to prove it. Bras on the wall mean take me seriously, get it?
Beautiful, young, and sexually empowered women had posted twin messages in a place no one could avoid seeing - Do Not Look, Do Not Like. For the small group who did it, the moment had passed, but the impact on the little community lasted. The young men fresh from the countrysides were quaking in the corners with their nuts cupped under their hands, and I don’t blame them. There was a band of women among them, watching from the shadows, eager to take them down for crimes they didn’t yet know they were committing. This took place on a campus in steamy Florida, bare feet, tanned skin, and tiny clothes were everywhere - how exactly was one supposed go through the world and not look, and not like?
Three semesters later, Judi had graduated and I was sitting alone in a very different part of the library, a dim back corner. A tall, sweet, shaved-head rock-n-roll playing young man with beautiful eyes emerged from the stacks, slipped into the seat across my table, stared right into me and said: “When a woman bends over and her shirt falls forward, I look at her breasts. Do you hate me?” I stared right back at him and shrugged, “I do it, too.” With that delightful volley of pick-up lines, we began a year-long romance that lasted until his hefty thesis on the dissonance of Sonic Youth and my homemade butch hair cut slowly fizzled us out.
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Fifteen years out of college and well into family and career, I lived near a two-lane country road that branched off the north-south interstate and leaned into the center of Vermont. This road carried crowds of people driving up from the big cities, streaming up to their retreats, ski mountains, and B and B’s, traffic the little state counted on to survive. My regular gas station was just up the road from the interstate exit, and occasionally huge out-of-state SUVs stopped for gas, but mostly they kept on going.
The pumps were typically full of local commuters, construction crews, cordwood haulers, repairmen and office workers, all filling up and grabbing some grub. The summer brought the roaring packs of motorcycles, in the winter enormous snow machines clattered up like snarling beasts. Inside was a deli counter that was the home of the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. I bought gas at that store every week, and was a serious regular at the fried chicken counter, and no matter how many times I ordered from the same person, there was never a glimmer of recognition. I lived down the road and for seven full years I remained a newcomer not worthy of acknowledgment.
New Englanders are a cold and stony bunch, everybody keeps to themselves, deeply fortified in each house and car, peering out with cool, spare regard. It’s the kind of place where businesses don’t bother with signs such as “We’re Open” because if you don’t know, then you shouldn’t be there. I kept to myself, just a tad miffed as the years went on and the blank stares continued. By keeping my head down, I was doing just what the locals do, as if we were all trying to blend into the woods and look like just another stone in the wall.
So this is the scene at my gas station on the hot summer’s day I headed down for an afternoon treat. The pumps and parking spaces were full of lunchtime business, with quite a few people sitting in cars waiting for a spot. When off the little highway in pulls a big black SUV, a city car with orange New York plates. It is filled with young cool people, road tripping in cushy style, clearly on their way to a gilded place far away from the dusty station. We’ve all seen this before, but what happened next was less common. The back door opened up, and out teetered a rumpled starlet - blond hair, bronze skin, and wearing gold - a mini skirt, a tank top, and high wedge heels. She walked across the pavement, not to the door of the store, but to the soda vending machine along the wall, and it took her a few moments of fiddling with the change, pushing the buttons, figuring it all out before the bottle dropped down for her to bend over and retrieve it.
I was fascinated. Living where I lived, and working where I worked, was pretty much like living in a nunnery. Drab, plain, no ornament, not a sequin or a sparkle to be found, and certainly no skin. So there in that moment, in the summer heat of the grey and gritty gas station, the beauty of the female form struck me, and in the most objectified way possible. She was not a person, but a divine specimen, dropped down from a rift in the heavens to alight on the tarmac for only an instant. I was fascinated because I had forgotten that version of female beauty was possible, that it was even an option. I don’t think I’d seen a woman walking in high heels for decades. That people do this, they dress up in fancy clothes and make-up, they dress to impress, they dress to proudly and loudly say Look At Meeeee - this was a revelation.
We all looked. We drank her in like a tall glass of cool water - those legs, those shoulders, that hair, oh my god! After a few moments of being utterly entranced, I snapped out of it and took a look around, and there I saw every single male head turned, gazing. Men walking out of the store, men walking into it, men sitting in the cars waiting, men paused in mid-chew, men standing outside the gas pumps frozen in place — all of us were transfixed. Each of us in our isolation felt free to stare, and stare. I seemed to be the only woman in the crowd and I bonded with those guys across the ages and professions— we experienced this moment together. And it was good. And I got it — sometimes the female form is absolutely, drop dead gorgeous. A gift for eyes filled with grit and surrounded by stones, a golden starlet with bouncing curls and graceful curves was here for just a moment, and we saw.
My years after college were lived in a bubble far away from the mainstream - no TV, no internet, no movies, analytical publications the only source for news of the outside world. Watching my gardens grow, struggle, thrive, and die each year was my main source of drama and entertainment. I was in a uniform monoculture of simple, spare conformity — the patriarchy raged on, sex continued to sell, the female body was commodified and brokered as one prong of a complex web of domination and control — it all carried on without me as its witness. I hadn’t been saturated and bombarded with cleavage-selling-bimbo-bombshell advertisements every day, I’d kind of forgotten about it.
That’s why I wasn’t filled with rage to see us all in the thrall of objectification. If I had been, if Judi had been in the driver seat, I’m sure we would have had a different response to all of those men gawking, lusting - Not this again, pigs! How about we run you over right now so you can die while you’re happy!
The golden one wobbled with her mile-long legs of bronzed skin back into the waiting vehicle, a single bottle of pop in her hand. The door closed, she was gone, and off they flew down the road with sunglasses on and heads nodding to the music. All of us there left behind, they never noticed us, we’d done a good job of blending in, we didn’t exist in their world, in this pit stop on the way to a grand adventure. But they gave us something good, a taste of what’s possible, a drop of sweet honey in our dry whole wheat world, a moment where we looked and we liked it, and everything turned out just fine.
