Cole Storer- Beatlemania- A sexually defiant consumer subculture?
Beatlemania by Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs is an essay about the liberation of women and the double standards of female teen culture in the 60's. The essay begins by describing the screams of these teenage girls and the seemingly absurd actions they were taking to get close to the Beatles. The way these girls were acting, however, was not by mistake, they were protesting the sexual repressiveness of their elders, and according to the text, "It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution"(Beatlemania,524). The argument of the essay is that the Beatles lit the ignition of the revolution of women in the sixties.
The Beatles created an entirely new subculture that had never been seen before in the United States, nor anywhere else in the world. They were a hit from the second they got off the plane in New York, and they sold out shows all over the United States. Their fame didn't end there though. 73 million Americans watched The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. It was referred to as the night 'when there wasn't a hub cap stolen anywhere in America.' Ehrenreich then moves on to what the teenage girl was supposed to represent in the 60's. They were supposed to act a certain way, mainly withhold any sexual actions until marriage, and they were put in the position of keeping their innocence until that time. Basically, they were supposed to conform to what their parents idea of love was. However, they chose a very different route of conformity. That of the rock n' roll scene. From an economic standpoint the best thing for any entrepreneur to do was to enter the teen consumer subculture. Their song titles were turned into movies, Beatle's posters were everywhere, and you couldn't change the radio station without the Beatle's coming over the airwaves. These 4 regular guys from Liverpool had managed to come over here with their shaggy hair and turned our stifled teenage girls into outspoken young women.
This article goes along with the movie Speak to Me extremely well because they are both taking place in a time of revolution. One for women's rights and the other for the rights of African Americans. The people are all speaking out and lashing out in different ways to get at 'the man' who is holding them down, suppressing them from what ought to be theirs in the first place. For women, they were being told how to act from everything from sex to how they dressed. For Black Americans, however, it was a little more concerning with segregation and a lack of respect from the white community.