Schooling Those Sharing an Anti-Feminist Meme

June 19, 2023

The image reveals three lovely young women in '50s-looking skirts and sweaters, all made up, their hair styled, and striding confidently to the camera.

The meme harps on the fact that the seemingly conservative women — "no nose rings, no tattoos, no ripped jeans, no pink hair" — exuded "grace and elegance."

It goes on to state, "A time when men were men, women were women and we liked it that way."

The anti-feminist meme chose a strange photo to make its point, and those liking it are mostly overlooking some hard facts about what life was really like for women at the time in the U.S.

First, it's a movie still. And it's from a film called Sex Kittens Go to College; hardly the stuff of demure yesteryear!

Presumably shot in 1959, it came out in 1960, and starred (L-R): Tuesday Weld (now 79), Mijanou Bardot (Brigitte's sister, now 85) and Mamie Van Doren (now 92), the latter of whom played a doctor.

So the image is already a construct for a film and not reflective of much more than a filmmaker looking to appease male viewers.

Not for nothin', Mamie is hardly a prototypical proponent of women acting a certain way. She has never stopped posing nude, and she has had many wild hairstyles. Weld was a progressive type of actress who played many edgy roles that pushed back on what women were supposed to be like.

Aside from a poor choice of image, the meme also pretends women were in some kind of golden era, without pointing out that women had no reproductive freedom (Roe v. Wade was unthinkable then), were far from equals in the workplace and couldn't even get a credit card without a husband.

The meme, then is a Stepford wet dream, and it's all the weirder that many of the women liking it on social media have tattoos and ripped jeans and other not-so-vintage aspects to their looks.