Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (What WomEn Want Series)

I’m a Gen Xer which means that the song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, was something of an anthem for my friends and me when we were kids. Sung by Cindi Lauper, the video made for the new MTV network, features a young woman in Brooklyn explaining to her Baby Boom or maybe Silent Generation parents that times have changed. While her father seeks chastity and her mother is sewing and baking in the kitchen, Cindi is frolicking in the streets, talking on the phone, and packing her bedroom with so many people dancing, they come spilling out. It’s joyful and long after the song was released, girls and young women repeated that line over and over to each other. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

A few years ago, in honor of International Women’s Day, I started this annual series, What Women Want. Fun may not be the only thing we want, but it’s definitely part of it. But, if we’re going to have fun, we’re going to need some changes in our cultural, political and economic systems.

Young women are both discounted and dismissed, maybe seen as frivolous rather than ferocious. Frankly, old women suffer a similar fate, being not only discounted and dismissed but also made entire invisible.

Have you seen the new Matlock? Kathy Bates, 76 years old, plays a ruthless lawyer hiding in plain sight, someone no one sees coming because of her gray hair. The assumptions made about middle aged women allow her to fade into the walls, to be consistently under-estimated, even by her closest colleagues.

I know I’m talking about young women today, but I have to tell you this story. The UUA Moderator, meaning, the person leading the UUA board and running our business meetings at General Assembly – a power position without question – was doing a little internal growth work. She wanted to set herself up to be rejected, to become practiced in the art of being turned away. She was preparing, actually, for some major fundraising work. So she started knocking on people’s doors, and without explanation, asked them if she could come in, walk through their houses and see their backyards. Obviously, no one would let a stranger do that, so she was sure to get plenty of experience in rejection and would push through and knock on another door. But, that’s not what happened. Also a gray haired woman in her 70s, Rev. Meg was invited in over and over again. Making an unreasonable request to strangers in their homes, she found that at her age, she was deemed irrelevant. Society didn’t see her as a threat. She concluded that they didn’t see her at all, and she could easily walk right into their homes and to their backyards often unaccompanied.

Here's something most women can attest to. The age of invisibility comes almost immediately after the age of immaturity. Society deems women too young to be competent to be taken seriously, too young to be successful, too young to be professional until we’re about 40 years old. At that point we’re seen and heard, but that has a shelf life of about 5 years, because by 45, we have become too old. While men are in their prime in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and often even 60s, women can’t get hired, can’t get published, can’t be heard in the public square, because we’re no longer relevant after peak child-bearing years.

And since we’re dismissed as silly little girls during peak child-bearing years, those of us who identify as female are culturally marginalized most of our lives by all genders. And yet, women, and girls, are ferocious. Dismiss us as your peril.

At the age of 16, Greta Thunberg had already launched a global climate movement powered by teenagers. Furious that the adults were distracted by profit and convenience, or paralyzed by political expediency and dreams of personal wealth, Greta harnessed the anger of young people who took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in multiple nations repeatedly. Impossible to ignore, she was invited to address the United Nations. Her speech, written and delivered entirely by her, standing not quite 5 feet in the halls of power, Greta admonished the leaders of the international order saying:

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act like your house is on fire because it is.”

Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, and named Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience, at 16 Greta was also listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world.

Girls just wanna have fun.

That part is true. We want to relax on the beach or go on a hike or read a good book by a fire and maybe talk with our girlfriends about it over dinner. We don’t want to learn that we’re too young or too old or that what we want or need is dismissed because of our gender.

We can imagine a new world, a better world, an equitable world, and given the right set of circumstances, regardless of how seriously modern society takes us, we are going to do our best to realize our vision, a place where girls and women have what they need, and have time for fun to boot.

We can all imagine a better world, visions that propel us forward, but there’s also a drawback to indulging those daydreams. When humans imagine something better, we can become discontented with what we actually have. It’s the risk of a sermon like this one. If I want you all to feel great, I shouldn’t really talk about what’s not right, because you might start feeling unsatisfied, uncomfortable, or unhappy with the current situation. If I want you to be delighted this afternoon, it’s safer for me to not even talk about the dream of what’s possible. But, we’ll never get to where we want to go if we don’t name the things that aren’t working.

Nietzsche tells us that the primary way humans manage our discontent is to feel guilty about wanting things to be better. We judge ourselves and each other for not loving our current situations or for wanting more. It’s one of the reasons we dismiss young women as being frivolous. We are judging them both for enjoying their lives and for expecting the world to help them create something better.

Possibly as a result of our response to discontent, we judge and attempt control over key parts of the human experience, villainizing sex, our will for power, and our capacity for joy, allowing only a limited number of socially acceptable ways for us to indulge these human experiences. From that judgmental stance, we have created a culture of hall monitors, people watching and determining whether or not we’re playing within bounds. There is a push for conformity in every human culture and how we play, how we enjoy ourselves, how we find fun, is often at the center what we want to control.

Throughout history we see people pushing the boundaries – whatever they are. Speakeasys were very popular when drinking was illegal. Teenagers have been sneaking cigarettes since an age limit was put on them. Every generation finds a way to dance closer to each other than our parents did while sex clubs and prostitution have been with us from the beginning of civilization. We want fun, we want more, we push to see what we can get away with, and we judge and patrol each other in every country in every generation.

Historically, girls have been the most policed. We keep our girls in very small boxes, doing our best to control them, to keep them in line. The consequences of this can be dire, but I actually think this sexist system, reaching across cultures and through time, originated with the consent of women. We understood our power and agreed to what would have started as legitimate protection. This social construct has reached its limits, but some feminist philosophers and sociologists have suggested that women were full partners in the creation of our patriarchal systems, limiting options for girls to ensure the perpetuation of the race. We have always understood the value of the uterus for human survival. Dr. Michael Karson wrote in Psychology Today (December 22, 2022) that “the sensible evolutionary basis for this focus on girls is that sperm is cheap, and uterus access is scarce, so much of what passes for politics involves an argument about who controls the uterus.” The ability to propagate the species is powerful, and politics is often about gaining, managing or limiting power.

I want to say this clearly: While many of us suffer from social limitations, we are also the ones creating them. We are both the prisoners and the guards.

So girls might want to have fun, but society has other priorities. Even over time as population has exploded, we’ve kept girls in small boxes, and now, as population declines, we are again raising alarms about girls and the freedoms they seem to be demanding because if girls are free, we lose control.

When Malala was a child in the mountains of Pakistan, she wanted to dream her future the way her brothers could. Boys could become what they wanted, but girls had far fewer opportunities, and those opportunities all came at the end of a solid education, so she committed herself to going to school. When the Taliban moved into Pakistan and tried to close the schools for girls, locals defiantly kept them open. At 15, Malala was interviewed as a local girl who was still going to school, now 4 years after the ban on education for girls. In this seemingly irrelevant blog, she talked about her hopes for herself as a result of her schooling.

The Taliban, not able to kill this dream of an education and not populous enough to close every school, they decided to make an example of a few girls, creating terror for all the families in the region. Malala was targeted as an activist because of that blog, and was shot in the head while riding home on a school bus.

She survived after massive interventions and has become the voice for girls’ education the world over. Instead of silencing her, they gave her an amplifier and a global stage on which she earned a Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17.

Police our bodies, judge our behavior, gun us down if you can’t control us. In this country, reproductive rights are under attack, a nearly national attempt at removing the right to self-determination from women and girls. And with that outsized value placed on people of child-bearing age, the Vice President of the United States declared post-menopausal women entirely unnecessary as a group, with one saving grace- they can help care for grandchildren.

It's no wonder Cindi Lauper is skipping in the streets, staying out ‘til dawn, assuring her father she loves him, but she and all her friends really just need to have some fun.

We all do. Because we are the victims and the perpetrators. We have built this system and we are the ones who can break it down – starting by having some fun, and letting others have their fun. We can do it by seeing each other, by respecting people regardless of gender or age. People are snippy right now. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Short tempered, demanding, unreasonable, self-righteous. Maybe for Lent, we let it go. We stop monitoring other people, stop requiring others to serve us, stop speaking when we should be listening. For Lent this year, maybe we bring kindness and a generosity of spirit to our encounters as part of our spiritual practice.

And when we see girls dancing in the streets or skipping through the neighborhood, we can just let them, and ourselves, have a little fun.