Hey lovely people. This is a piece I wrote for The Wandering,
a feminist and art collective. I think it's a really important topic, and I want to spread the word. Thank you for reading.
Get out your time machine, we are going
on a journey. The lights are blinking, and we are in 1955 again, in a
suburb, in front of the vinyl shop. Adults are staring at you,
whispering to each other about the strange kids over there. You don't
give a shit. You smoke your cigarette, like women do in movies, with
elegance. You smooth out a crease in your polka dotted dress with
your petticoat underneath. Smiling, you look at this boy with his
Elvis-like hairdo and his worn-out jeans. You are both rebels. Sick
of the boring, stuffy, narrow-minded thinking of your parents. Elvis
Presley is your hero, with his new way of dancing, of singing. You
want to be different, to be happy, you are the youth and you are
celebrating it. You guys are rock'n roll.
Flashback '68. It's a new era. There's
revolution and rebellion in the air, maybe mixed with a little scent
of weed. People are demonstrating, going on the streets, struggeling
for the end of the war in Vietnam, for gender equality, for peace.
They are peaceful, though, with psychedelic prints, sandals, flowers
in their hair. They revolt against the hate, the greed, the
capitalism destroying people in our world. They are living in
communes, listening to psychedelic rock music. Using acid, LSD, or
weed to explore all states of consciousness, they embrace life and
happiness. They also celebrate a new way of sexuality, see sex as
something natural and great, don't hide it like it was used to do by
society. They call themselves Hippies. Festivals like Woodstock
changed the world of music, actually, hippies changed even more.
Music, fashion, politics got different. With peaceful demonstrations,
they were a new kind of youth, showed a new kind of living, revolted
against war.
We go on on our travel through time.
It's 1977. There's a group of young women, talking. Yelling,
sometimes. They are kind of angry, and want changes. They fight for
gender equality, against sexism. These are strong women, revolting
women, surprising the sexist society with their strength. They help
each other, they are proud of being women, they achieve many
important things. Feminists demonstrated against sexism, starting a
movement that hasn't ended at all in the present.
Time machine brings us to 1994. You are
sitting in your room, your whole makeup is smeared all over your face
by your tears. Nirvana music floats through your house, making you
painfully realize that Kurt Cobain will never sing again. You cry
because he has just shot himself, because Grunge ended abrupt with
one bullet. You think of the last few years. Desillusionated,
overwhelmed by society, blurred. There were no special goals, but
there was a movement. There was „a burnout feeling amongst teens,
they were kind of depressed about the future“ (music critics
words), and Grunge provocated. The fashion was simple, cheap and the
exact opposite of flashy neon styles in the 1980s. Grunge was filled
with angst, alienation, and longing for freedom.
Back to present. Look around. There's
nothing. In the past, there always was a movement amongst young
people. It started with music, just take Woodstock or Elvis Presley,
and then continued in other cultural aspects like fashion, it got
politic, changed something. There always was a movement, kind
of a big thing, something to identify with. There were role models,
music you lived with. Demonstrations, emotions. Teens identified with
movements like second-wave-feminism, or the Hippie culture. All these
groups were somehow political – they expressed the feelings of
young people.
Being young, growing up means that
something changes, and the youth itself always changed something.
There is a desire amongst teens to revolt, to change something, to be
rebels, and this desire was always there. And today? There is no
movement, no action. Well, actually, there is so much. Maybe
that's the point behind it all – there is too much wrong that needs
to be changed. There is sexism, our climate suffers extremly under us
humans, there is so much unfairness and poverty, and there is still
war, there is this pointless consuming. But it's like the
whole youth is asleep. Sure, there are a few feminists, and a few
people who fight for our environment, there are still Punks and
hippies. However, these are all relicts, fading memories of earlier
movements. There's a lack of something new. We
all need something to change, we all need to wake up. Society is
blind. Everybody walks around, eyes closed, masking out the problems.
We live in a consumer society. Teens are fed with materialist things,
clothes, technical stuff, and they are so replete that there is no
space for thinking anymore. On my endless travel through the
internet, I found a picture which says „I shop therefore I am.“.
That's all of the thinking which is done nowadays. As long as we have
enough possessions, we don't care about anything else. There are way
too less people which think. As long as they have money, materialist
things, they don't think about anything else. But are they happy that
way? Can you be happy without thinking? I can't. We all pretend to
be, to fit into society, and most teenagers forget to think this way.
There is no desire for changes anymore. Only a few people are longing
for something new, but as there is nothing to identify with, they
hold on to old movements, trying to change as much as they did. But
they are just too less people. We need to open our eyes. We teens
need something to change. Teenagehood is the age where you figure out
what you want, who you are, and what you need, but how could it work
without changes? Teens were always able to identify with something,
to fit into a group by protesting. It's hard to figure out who you
are without movements like those. If you at least want to figure out
who you are, you have to do it all by yourself. And if you come to
the conclusion that things need to change, you are completely
powerless. You can still feel some Grunge vibes today – we are
longing for freedom. But being overwhelmed, we don't know how to
change something, we can't identify with something. All we do is
escaping from the present, to the past, full of desperate nostalgia,
or just feeding ourselves with materialism so we don't feel the
longing for freedom anymore. Youth needs to change something. We
can't just suppress our desire for changes. We need to revolt, to
rebel against todays issues. But with what can we identify? The
youth needs to open its eyes.
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