The Rydell High Patriarchy

Grease was on TV on Wednesday and it got me thinking…

I saw Grease for the first time when I was three years old. My parents were completely unaware of the content rating as I held my boombox microphone to the TV and recorded “Summer Nights” and “Blue Moon,” memorizing the hand jive as the movie progressed. When I was six, I wanted to marry Danny Zucco. When I was ten, I wanted leather pants, Grease’s official symbol of conformity and change…all to please the boy. When I was twelve, a girl in my seventh grade class and I sang that final number, which marks the demise of Sandy’s individuality, when she interrupted, “Grease is just so sexist!”

I did not understand how a movie I saw as such a positive romance could coincide with a word that spouted patriarchal venom and encouraged outrage. Thanks to my bad-ass classmate, I have never seen Grease the same way. Sandy starts out as an innocent idealistic high school student coming to a new school where her kindness is a fault (especially according to the Pink Ladies’ very own “feminist” Rizzo) when trying to win over the bad boy. Pretty soon, she learns that in order to win over the guy who treats her like crap and is ashamed to introduce her to his friends, she has to pick up a cigarette, some leather pants, and become utterly unrecognizable. She becomes a new Sandy, transforming for the sake of the Rydell High patriarchy.

This is not to say that I have boycotted Grease since the seventh grade. However, I have watched it with open eyes, peering through my feminist glasses at this truly sad message. The only way to fight this sexism is to tell those three year olds watching Grease for the first time (I’m sure I wasn’t the only one) that they should not change for the benefit of anyone but themselves.