Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991                   TAG: 9103250230
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: B-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Margie Fisher/ Editorial writer
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

MADONNA AS ROLE MODEL?/ GAINS OF WOMEN'S MOVEMENT WON'T SLIP AWAY - MAYBE

Well, sure. That's always been one of my favorites.

But really: Does it bother anyone else that this '90s superstar would put out such drivel? Donna Reed, maybe, in the '50s. Or Erma Bombeck, because everybody would know she was joking. But Madonna was described in Cal Thomas' column last week as the idol of many 11-year-old girls. How many of them just might buy the notion that tending a husband's dirty underwear is a religious experience?

I read someplace else recently that some doyennes of the women's liberation movement wanted a ban on poodle skirts at a 1950s nostalgia event, because they felt the skirts symbolized the bad old days for women and might cause a stampede back to the kitchen - or the laundry room.

That's balderdash, too, and so reminiscent of the early movement's failure to show any sense of humor. That failure, of course, begged for put-downs, such as Virginia novelist Florence King's wonderfully witty book, "When Sisterhood Was in Flower."

Still, as one who got a ton of laughs reading Sister King but who also believed in the goals of the women's movement, I wonder whether some of its hard-fought gains aren't in danger of slipping away.

I was in Atlantic City in the '60s, covering the Miss America pageant for this newspaper, when a few uppity women burned their bras in metal barrels on the boardwalk to protest the pageant's demeaning image of women: dingbats with 18-inch waistlines, pert bosoms and fixed Ipana smiles, who paraded in virginal white swimsuits and spike heels, and played "Tea for Two" on the xylophone.

It took a few years, but the fumes from those metal barrels eventually flared into a full-fledged movement for sexual equality, for women's being seen as something more than the pitch-girls for male dreams, something more than Playboy bunnies who could bake an apple pie like Mamma's.

Now here we are in 1991, and the most mesmerizing event of this fledging decade has been the war in the Persian Gulf. It was a different kind of war in many respects, not least of which was involvement of women at the front lines as never before. Six percent - about 27,000 - of U.S. military personnel in the gulf were women.

They were barred from combat, the rules said, but there's no insulating anyone from the dangers of modern warfare. That hit with a jolt when a 20-year old Michigan woman, Spec. 4 Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, was captured by Iraqi soldiers.

Rathbun-Nealy was not the first American woman to become a prisoner of war, but she was the first in this war, and her capture drove it home for us: As one of the successes of the women's movement, women are getting more of the benefits of military service. They also get more chances to be killed as they face the horrors of war.

But at the same time those horrors were losing gender distinction in the gulf, "boudoir photography" was becoming the rage in many American cities. Stories about such photography parlors in Richmond and Virginia Beach describe them as places where ordinary-looking young secretaries, and middle-aged grandmothers with middle-age spreads, and even wrinkled octogenarians go for make-overs that instantly transform them into Marilyn Monroe or, perhaps, Madonna. Then, clad in lingerie so skimpy that Victoria's Secret can't show it in catalogs, or maybe wearing nothing but a garter or a feather boa, they recline on silk comforters or settees and - at least for the time it takes the camera to click - they are sex goddesses.

"My kids and grandchildren would have a hissy fit if they knew about this," confessed a Richmond woman. "I've been divorced 15 years and the man I date has been after me to have a nude photograph done . . . . I want to get married again. I hope this helps convince him."

Said another satisfied customer: "Deep down, I think every woman wants to look like a Playboy model."

(Never mind that some of these women still look more like Miss Piggy.)

And what of the argument - reflected in every manifesto of the early women's movement - that such soft-core porn degrades women and underscores chauvinistic ideas that women should be judged by the standards of girlie magazines?

Shucks, it's just good clean fun and "very much entertainment," said Judi Lee, owner of L.A. Glamour photography parlors in Virginia Beach and Norfolk.

OK, nobody said women with brains have to give up their right to be frivolous, and even Betty Friedan dyed her hair blond to look prettier the summer she finished writing "The Feminine Mystique."

But what next? Will the parlors start running specials for the returning women of Desert Storm?

"Slip into a teddy and flaunt your form. Remind the world you don't look like Norm."

Will the next generation of career women sound like Capitol Hill secretary Elizabeth Ray boasting, in 1976, that her services were more sexual than secretarial? "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone."

Probably not. Too many women, recognizing that the equality movement has not accomplished all its goals, are actively engaged in pushing forward. They are in no mood for retreat, and don't intend to stand still - even for a photo of the way we were.