Lipstick on. Crown straight. No more fucks to give.

Did we survive patriarchy differently or did we unknowingly uphold it?

For most of my adulthood, I wore terribly uncomfortable high heels because my mother said it made a woman’s legs look better. My daughter wears combat boots because they’re comfortable. I put on lipstick before my husband woke up because my mother told me I looked dead without it. My daughter could give a shit what she looks like in the morning. I dated 21-year-old guys when I was 16. My daughter now finds this gross.

Her reaction today exposes how different our definitions of normal have become.

My mother was a beautiful creature who dyed her hair blonde, wore red lipstick, and carried tap shoes in the trunk of her car. If I’m looking at contradictions, she was a walking one. She was confident, independent, and charismatic and had lived a pretty exciting life as a dancer in New York City, but after marrying my father, a macho Italian mobster, she lived under his thumb. She put out his three-piece suits, put on his socks and ties, and combed his hair. She made dinner every night and breakfast every morning. He was the king of the castle and she was his queen, but it was obvious who was in charge. He made all the rules and she was happy to abide. In her eyes, he was a saint, but nothing about my dad was saint-like.

I often wondered how she could put up with a brute like him. She could have married anyone she wanted. I can remember when she’d get angry at something he’d done and her only reaction was to aggressively chop vegetables while muttering expletives under her breath, but that was as far as it ever went. I vowed to never bow to a man.

I married twice before the age of 26, first to the only man my father approved of. He was Italian, respectful, and intimidated enough to know better than to cross him. After my father died, I married his antithesis, a long-haired, skinny rocker in skin-tight jeans, cropped leopard tops, Capezio shoes, and always a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other. This guy was the type my dad would have thrown across the room with one hand.

Both of those marriages ended in divorce, but I was the one who left. I used to tell myself I was in power because I earned my own money and made my own decisions.
I thought that was the proof, but if I’m honest, I was just living a different version of the same patriarchal model that my mother lived under.

It’s taken me years to understand that control and conditioning can look almost identical.

I defended bad boys when they showed me exactly who they were, whether it be stumbling alcoholics who were also shitty fathers, or misogynistic idiots I worked with in the music industry because somewhere deep down I believed that defending my choices made me strong and accepting them made me weak. I tolerated a culture that demeaned women because walking away felt like admitting defeat. I was called “Queen of the (Sunset) Strip,” but my male business partners and rock musician clients often blurred me with the groupies and girlfriends they treated as arm candy or sexual props.

I didn’t really understand this until recently. Maybe this is what happens when you’ve lived long enough to stop lying to yourself and finally become a wise woman.

And when I trace it back, I see that it began in the contradictions of my childhood. Church-going standards for the women and kids, while my father and uncles lived by a different set of rules. A father who protected me from dating boys my age but somehow saw nothing wrong with his 16-year-old daughter dating a 21-year-old Italian man because he fit his idea of acceptable. Maybe this is a generational or cultural thing, but just because something was normal in our house, or in that era, doesn’t mean it’s okay. It shaped the way I learned to measure love, beauty, womanhood, and power.

And now I find myself reexamining everything I once accepted without question. How dating rock musicians over 21 when I was 16 felt normal instead of troubling. How I once adored Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan” and now watch it through a lens of discomfort. How I instinctively trusted only male pilots and doctors with gray hair and even felt a flicker of apprehension when a woman was in the position. How being told I “look young” was the highest praise I could imagine as if youth, male authority, and their approval were the measures of my worth.

Well fuck that shit.

As I sit here drinking my second glass of prosecco, I’ve been thinking about today’s feminist culture in a way that feels a lot more personal. Women my age say we’re empowered, but we’re still chasing youth like it’s the ultimate prize. We want tighter skin, smaller waists, and bodies that almost erase our adulthood, as though aging itself is something to apologize for. And something about the attention from men makes us feel desirable and sexy. How sick is it that we were taught to call that power?

When everything about Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful men connected to him came barreling back through the stories of these brave women, I was shook. I began to see the patterns that had always existed around me. I thought about my father and how he would call my mother Marilyn Monroll if she gained a few pounds. He poured us shot glasses of wine when we were young girls, telling himself it would make us strong enough so no man could ever take advantage. I guess he thought that preparing us for the world meant hardening us for the very men he wanted us to marry.

And here’s where it gets complicated for me: I’m a passionate woman who loves romance and chivalry. I like when a door is opened for me or a chair is pulled out. I like looking good. I love makeup and fabulous clothes. And yes, I even like the occasional shot of Botox to remove those two wrinkles between my eyes that make me look like I’m frowning. But wanting to look good is not the same as wanting to look like a girl. And who am I trying to please? I can try to convince myself it’s for my own confidence, but in reality. I’m chasing approval from a system that taught me my value lived in how I looked to men.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about giving a big middle finger to these ridiculous standards that fetishize girlhood instead of honoring womanhood. I’ll dye the gray hairs that pop out of my roots blonde, and I’ll wear fabulous clothes until I die. And I’ll embrace the wrinkles as they come. I earned these fuckers.