WOMEN AND MEN TODAY

I was watching Neil Sedaka in a 1961 rendition of "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" - a great source of happy energy, by the way - and I noticed that a young woman (she posted her picture) commented after it that the song was "hilariously creepy." That startled me and I began thinking, How can that be her take on it?

The key is probably in the song's words "But since you've grown up / Your future is sewn up / From now on you're gonna be mine." That seems so proprietary by today's standards! Today a woman is her own person, is autonomous, whether in a relationship or not. And a man who says "You're gonna be mine" seems a caveman, maybe a stalker, someone seeking to deny her rightful and cherished independence. That Sedaka's young audience was enthusiastic, clapping and swaying as we see on the video, must have appeared creepy indeed to this woman.

But let's look at the song. It talks about when the girl was 6, when she was 10, when she was thirteen: that's what precedes the infamous lines. So it establishes that he has had a relationship with her for years, an evolving and intensifying one that is mutual. I think we can assume that she wants to be "his" and to have him be "hers."

In the social world of 1961, what the guy is doing is not appropriating her against her will but (1) making clear that he is not ambivalent about the relationship: that he wants it; (2) expressing confidence that he can make his end of it work; and (3) showing his confidence that she will make her end of it work, too. This is not sexist, not creepy. But ironically, the very assertiveness that made the "girl" of 1961 feel secure would make the "woman" of half a century later feel insecure.

Women's rights and feminism necessarily came to the fore when the economy began requiring both partners in a marriage to work if they were to survive. I'm sorry that women who don't want to leave the home and go into the workforce have no choice but to do so. But I'm glad that women can go out and have careers, and I note that rightists - the same people whose corporations and anti-union activities brought about these constrictive economic conditions! - have denigrated women for doing that, saying that they're putting their ambitions ahead of their families. You can't win on the right wingers' terms. If the woman stays home, the couple can't get by; if she gets a job, she's disloyal as a wife and a mommy.

Rightists frequently want to punish those who divorce, also; they talk about "saving the family" by making divorces harder to obtain. So a marriage can be made into a cage or a torture chamber, another "freedom-loving" rightist contribution to our lives.

It is the political left that has promoted women's rights, but part of what has resulted is more individualism with its accompanying alienation. That is the kind of thinking that can make "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" seem "creepy" to women now. And it contributes greatly to our high divorce rate.

Sexism must go, but so must excessive individualism, and both of these are right-wing attitudes. Marriage will come back only when a family is seen as bigger than the individual selves of the people in it: as something both voluntary and - you should excuse the expression - collective.

Marriage is not an alliance of convenience but a life partnership in which each partner becomes more than (s)he could have been through accomodating, and being accomodated by, the other, and through working together for the kind of future that they want. That's something we can learn from an old song.

Neil Sedaka, for his part, has been married only once: since 1962. Maybe he knows something about these things?