"How lovely to be so grown-up and free"
Billie Eilish, Kim McAfee, and the lachrymose vision of young womanhood
When reading about 19-year-old singer Billie Eilish’s rebirth as bombshell (prior to which she’d apparently dressed like a goth kid circa 1998, best as I understand youth fashions), I found myself thinking about a phenomenon, somewhere at the intersection of “heteropessimism” and #MeToo: a lachrymose (apologies to Salo Baron) vision of young womanhood. The moment a teen girl becomes a young woman, and the world of grown-up sexuality opens up to her, of relationships with adults (remember, her fellow adults!), of adult relationships, whatever, is now understood solely in terms of the bad. It is also now conflated, in confusing ways, with girlhood, such that the 20-year-old may think she’s a woman, but will later realize she was a child. And, aaah! It’s not that bad things don’t happen to adults of all ages, a subset of those specifically to women, and of those, specifically to young and inexperienced women. But there are also good things that become possible when you’re old enough—not just legally, but yes, legally is a prerequisite—to enter the world of adults. (For more on that theme, check out the latest Feminine Chaos podcast.)
“How Lovely to be a Woman,” sang Ann Margret, as Kim McAfee, in the 1960s musical “Bye Bye Birdie,” all the while changing into tomboy garb. I think a lot about that song. It’s not fully ironic, but nor is it exactly what it seems. It’s the observations of someone who is very much not a woman, but a 16-year-old girl, imagining what adulthood consists of. As visions of adulthood go, it’s humorously tame (“to go to a fancy nightclub, and stay out after 10”), and simplistic (mascara, lipstick, and high heels get mentioned; mortgages do not). There’s a nod to the way teenagers do observe adult life (“to pick out a boy and train him, and then when you are through, you’ve made him the man you want him to be” - with “train” in an almost butch growl.)
There is exactly one ~problematic~ lyric: “Whenever you hear boys whistle, you’re what they’re whistling at.” But it’s of a piece with the overall fantasy vision of womanhood, which is about finally finally finally getting to be around grown men. To be around them and attractive enough to do something about this. At 15, Kim sings, “you doubt that you will ever be appealing.” 16 is, she sings on, another matter.
As naive as Kim’s notion of adulthood is, as a way of understanding not womanhood itself, but womanhood on the horizon, it adds up. There’s nothing retro or strange about someone looking forward to going out in the world as a grown-up. And for hetero ladies yeah this means men. That men, for their part, find girls on the cusp of adulthood more interesting than in an ideal world, they would, does not mean that teen girls only exist in the minds of grown men. Kim is not succumbing to heteropatriarchy, she’s just a boy-crazy girl looking forward to the freedom of adulthood (“to be so grown-up and free)”. It is quite simply the 1960s girl version of all those 1990s/2000s teen movies about high school boys desperate to lose their virginity.
There’s a 2017 parody version of “How Lovely to be a Woman,” with lyrics about rape, chores, and objectification. 2017 was more or less 2021, for these purposes, if few others. Why do that to the song? And why conflate the moment when a girl begins to elicit attention from sketchy older men (in my own experience, something that peaks at 12 or so, and has nothing to do with resembling a beautiful young woman, and everything to do with seeming like an easily-startled child) with one where a young woman’s physical desirability conveniently coincides with, and makes realizable, her own desires (also a thing that can happen; I would put this at older than 16, but I do not believe minors were harmed in the making or viewing of “Bye Bye Birdie.”)
But that’s the message that won out. Women are miserable, especially the young and pretty ones. Repeating that, as if it sums up young womanhood, is meant to be progressive. All it does is further entrench its association with (titillating to certain audiences) vulnerability, while erasing the thing where even the objectified are doing their own share of looking. Kim is more boy-crazy than vain, eager to use her new, grown-up physical appearance as the means to an end, that end being maybe a high school sweetheart, maybe some sophisticated college men “from Yale or Purdue” (whose praises she sings in a different song), or maybe a campier, better-looking Elvis imitation. Or maybe she just looks forward to growing up.