“NOW SHE CAN COPE…”
Found itself splashed across a full page spread in the Journal of Medical Economics only two weeks into 1964—a year that would prove to be both economically and sociopolitically contentious. We see this young mother against a marigold yellow wallpaper, back to a stove, gazing down lovingly at a daughter playing at her feet; she’s homely, she’s dainty, and most important to us, she’s happily sedated.
She’s also the face of Butisol, the glitzy new Barbiturate hitting town courtesy of Johnson & Johnson, the benevolent pharmaceutical masters who serve only to ease her ails, turn down the dial of her nerves. This is a woman of the new age, or at least what we’re made to assume. See, this nameless woman isn’t special, but rather a speck of snow cast in a blizzard, made spectacular in her likeness alone. In a house down the street, or next door, or a thousand miles from the site of that ad photoshoot was a woman that year on Butisol or Librium or Miltown. Medications that were being liberally prescribed and even more liberally filled. At a time, one prescription per second was being filled in the United States for sedatives, barbiturates and hypnotics, and considering women were on the receiving end of the prescription pad twice as much as men (I’m speaking literally, not hyperbolically), it’s safe to say— many wanted to be anywhere but here. Most reasonable individuals would come to similar conclusions.
So it should comes as no surprise that the constant jesting and fantasizing I see online asking to be “taken back”, reminiscing about an era that functioned much more darkly than it’s recalled drives me up the fucking wall.
Like most things that grate my nerves, I have a hard time avoiding these types. Maybe I “hate watch” more often than I realized, or only remember content that angers me or the algorithm wants me to be aware of the sheer number of women who espouse the belief that their prospects have somehow suffered comparatively over the last few decades. Whatever the case may be, I’m constantly confronted with some variation of “Dating was so much easier/better/less sexual, take us back!” And to that I ask: What do you think dating was?
Memory is fickle, on that most can agree, but memory also comes with a level of insipidness built into it. As time progresses, the intensity of experiences become so thin they stop surrounding the victims they’d originally consumed. What spectators could obviously tell was a suffocation before, begins to look like a caress. We— those of us with no first hand accounts to begin with, allow these pruned memories compiled of still photos, 45’s and movies to replace what was. The stories, and thus issues are sterilized and the past is imbued with purity where there was none. To put it simply: the math stops mathin’.
And I never expect folx to have intimate knowledge of sex and gender politics as it relates to history per say (that’s my thing), but I always expect people to take what they do know and use it to frame the past appropriately, in a way that honors the information available. Women being heavily medicated for decades isn’t some hidden gem known only to sex educators, archivist and historians— it’s so well known in fact, people readily joke(d) about it.
They were the talk of Congress, sitcom television, and Rolling Stone’s “Mommy’s Little Helpers”. The housewife, armed with a rouged smile, wood paned station wagon and kitty heels found herself thrust in the spotlight frequently, not to be rewarded for years of unnamed labor or inquires into her humanity, but rather to poke her belly, turn her around and say: “Look what they have to do, to get through the little they do!”. It must have been humiliating, knowing the world sees your pain as more fungible and animated than you, the very person it calls home.
And though there is a separate argument about the spectacle we make of trauma and how that is a colonial inheritance we can trace back to The Coliseum (don’t worry, that essay’s coming too), the point is… we’ve all seen the landmine, and yet, people would rather talk about the field of daisies they’d prefer were planted in its steed.
But, I’ll abandon the soapbox for a few moments to provide some context, share the true, mostly abridged version, of dating.
Dating is a young endeavor. We see it come into fashion around the 1910’s with young (mostly White) women leaving home after the Gilded Age attempting to create semi autonomous lives from under their father’s thumb. This was the new age: a time of booze, evolving morals, and a growing class of young people not ready to settle down (what later became known as adolescence/young adulthood). It was a time of change! This was also America though… with Daddy Capitalism ballooning in size. These young women wanted experiences: to go to shows, restaurants, cabarets, but… these experiences cost money, something they had a hard time coming by. And when you consider Women made up less than 20% of the workforce at the turn of the 20th century [1], clocking in was not gonna get many of them closer to The Dove Parlour. So when you wanna live your best life, but don’t have the coin to do so… what is a girl to do? The answer… co-opt the tactics, tricks and language of sex work with few of the social or material risk, naturally!
Yes, you read that last sentence correctly, these young women, who would later be called “Charity Girls” employed the savviness of sex workers to get men to take them on dates while getting to maintain their “dignity” and “purity” at the expense of the SW’s that made their lifestyles possible. [2] For instance, they’d get all dolled up, head to a hotel bar that men with cash frequented, strike up some convo and usually get a few drinks, if not a whole night’s itinerary out of them with no nookie guaranteed. Sound familiar? It should, it’s what all the #softlife girls try to teach you on the FYP and it’s called “freestyling” in the SW world. Essentially, dating became a vehicle for women to create experiences that Patriarchy compounded by Capitalism was making inaccessible. And as time went on, we crafted adolescence around this practice and dating began to function as a rest stop before transitioning to adult life (read: marriage). So if you find yourself lamenting frequently about the transactional nature of dating, that’s because dating, much like marriage, was always transactional. Every social construct formed under Capitalism is transactional by design, something has to be sold to us and in the case of dating’s more recent years… it’s been love itself, except, love was never the point.
Romance is amazing and beautiful and all that good shit. I want to go on record saying that, but that was not the intention of dating. There was no cupid attempting to encourage affectionate union between attracted parties. We ascribed that quality to it years later. Instead, dating was a way of filling a gap in a market. It ensured women got into shows, men had companionship and companies stuffed their pockets with ticket sales. The happy couples and big ole families were lucky side effects. I’m sure that deflates some chest, and to an extent, I’m sorry, but it’s necessary. This revision of what dating is and has been isn’t just an injustice to the women who’ve rarely benefited from it in the past (namely melanated & other marginalized ones), but it flattens the histories of the ones you think did. Dating was the pitstop, these women, in all their “new-man-new-sock-hop-a-night” fervor, were taking huge risk that rarely paid off. Once that marriage license was signed, they were locked in for life, with the only wiggle room coming in partner abandonment or death. There are real reasons women preferred to spend their days medicated and I need us to understand the gravity of that.
It’s why this movement is so disturbing to me. I don’t think women realize how deep this is—have truly stopped and asked themselves what it would take to want to spend your days as muddied as possible. The disservice done to our ancestors becomes trifold. In the process of abandoning the stories of the women who lived these lives, we lose all those who simply couldn’t live dignified ones at all. The disabled women, the queer women, the trans women, the Black women who were doubly suffocated by gendered and racial violence that stole them from this earth too soon. These women existed, had stories worth recalling as it was, not how we wished they’d been.
Projecting modern fantasies onto ancient and historic women denigrates them further and removes them from agency even more than they have been. I’d argue it’s a feminized paternalism, getting to take the material realities of women and contort them for your own entertainment and pleasure. It doesn’t matter whose the puppeteer, if the stories of women constantly find themselves marionetted regardless. Much like digging up mummies in Egypt or disrupting Indigenous burial grounds in the Americas, wanting to escape the modern dating hellscape through reimagined history, as if it’s some HBO limited series unsettles the dirt around their tombstones, takes what little rest they had and restarts the clock to zero.
Watching time and what I refer to as “pop feminism” seem to fold in on itself gets exhausting because it reminds me of how much we’ve been robbed of. Just how often, we’ve been daunted by the idea of painting on fresh canvas’ due to their novelty. The simplicity of endearing yourself to the past should be an indicator that it will not serve to liberate you from your current circumstances or hardship. I tend to be of the belief that if the blueprint exist, is accessible, and the powers that be (in this case cisheteropatriachy) aren’t trying to stop you… then the plan poses no threat. Until I see cishet men in mass running psyops to discourage women and girls from getting misty eyed about the last 60 years, I’m gonna park my ass here and try to mobilize us forward, remind us that there is more freedom in collaborative creation as opposed to whatever the fuck it is that’s going on currently.
You are well within your rights to hate dating or gripe and groan about the ways in which you are treated in a landscape that requires you be everything with little in return— I can’t take that away from you, but the DeLorean and a little pink pill is not the answer. Instead, we can be critical of these systems while keeping into context where they are on the general timeline, remind ourselves that dating may be novel, but men treating women poorly in romantic conquest? is not (unfortunately). Those letters Kafka wrote to Milena didn’t stop him from being a shitty partner (which he was), that “chivalry” we’ve been taught to covet often came with a fist or hostility attached, that kitchen the Butisol woman stood in with her daughter didn’t belong to her, and could have been snatched any day with little legal recourse for her to take.
We treat the grass like it’s greener when it’s all been turf, carefully constructed squares of perfection suffocating what is true in favor of vapid beauty, made opulent by virtue of requiring little thought.
You can spin in circles all day wondering what is leading to your discontent with men and romance but the answer is right in front of your face. If it’s not the apps, or the porn (which has always existed & isn’t inherently evil pls read more books & listen to SW’s!) or the meds or the booze then maybe, just maybe, it’s the socialization. It’s the reality that when groups of people have been relegated into forced endless service, they've been taught to look everywhere but at who they serve. Tech can go away, money can go away, hell looks can go away, but our social currency, the invisible chips placed above our heads before entering rooms are what determine these circumstances. The only way out of this mess is to stop playing the game, which isn’t to say “stop seeing men romantically” but rather “divest from the idea that there’s one way to see men that works formulaically” because what is here, serves oppressive systems denigrating billions of people.
There’s a long overdue conversation about the way we perceive romance and love. Between compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory monogamy and compulsory allosexuality, we’re given the impression that there are working answers to all our social ails that just have to be implemented, when in reality, they don’t exist and require all of us to actively build towards after unlearning all of the toxic shit first.
The love you crave and deserve cannot be found in the past, and it may not be found in the present, but it can be found in the future, if you help build a world that fosters circumstances for its survival. That’s the key. Doing the work now, even if that means not being the prime benefactor— which doesn’t sound particularly appealing to some, I know but is the way most beneficial to us all. If we’re to posture as feminist, womanist, liberationist or whatever label made it into our bio, then we have to be up to task, to welcome the weight of potential sacrifices. Admittedly, it took weeks to write this essay not because I didn’t know the history or couldn’t be concise in my thoughts, but rather because I’ve become jaded in my years navigating sex ed/theory, reproductive justice and so called “feminist” spaces.
There has been progress, don’t get me wrong, but just as quickly, I’ve seen a regression. After Dobbs, the rage my colleagues and I warned people would not sustain their level of care for reproductive justice ebbed and we’re back to having quiet conversations about abortion care and access. A new TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) & SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminist) blows up and introduces old, harmful thinly veiled white supremacist rhetoric to young, impressionable people while stream rolling past the real harm they pose to the women they claim to advocate for weekly. We award an excessive amount of importance and energy to acts of sexual immorality not realizing it feeds perfectly into the moral panic conservatives have cooked into our culture for centuries. Overall, we’re getting a heap of things wrong and a lot of times, it can feel like screaming into the void saying so.
I’m not the first womanist to express these frustrations and I won’t be the last. Even reading this essay indicates to me that you’ve been unsettled by this as well to some degree and are looking for affirmation, like eye contact from a friend in a crowded room— a gaze that says “Don’t worry, I see you.” These challenges are real and require tackling, but they’re not irreparable, just severely beat up, like 5th person to inherit this 03’ Honda Civic vibes.
We may not find the key to love and romance and happiness in the men of the past, but we can find some wisdom in the women. Our mothers and grandmothers and great-grands who braved this world and survived it as long as they could. I attribute my own grandmother as to why I didn’t get finessed into ever thinking shit was sweet. Maybe it’s a Black thing, but growing up under your elder’s dresses, you hear stories, have oral histories adorned on your crown and it leaves an impression on you. Every women in my family would rub my head and tell me to be smart, read books, to go to college and focus on men later, much later than they did, then they had to. I listened and though I’ll have no kids of my own, I plan to impart this wisdom on those after me. Take some young Black girl’s hand in mine and tell her the most beautiful thing about her is her freedom and she would do well to be choosy about how people get to spend it with her.
When I visit my grandmother, I know she wants to give me money when she finds a reason for me to come into her bedroom. We can be looking for a wig or a pair of pants. Maybe she needs me to pull out a cane or crossword book that fell between the bed and wall; no matter what we do, those soft, wrinkled hands will curl around mine with bills in tow, gripping me hard with decades of wisdom and love and resilience. This was our secret and though this stealth felt silly as a child, I accept it earnestly as an adult. I understand why money got passed between plates and mop buckets— I don’t laugh when my grandmother’s face says “The men don’t need to know.” She, along with my great-grandmother who I sat on the lap of, listening to stories is who I think of when I watch the movies and listen to the 45’s. Their legacies have remained clear in all of its dirtiness, there will be no deep cleaning of their histories, only hymnals of praise, throaty crones aimed at heaven to remind them I know they were here, really here.