The Total Woman Was a Mother-Clucker
A Black Eyed Review of the Total Woman & 80s Moguls
“Never let him know what to expect when he opens the front door; make it like a surprise package. Be a pixie or a pirate, a cowgirl or a show girl… Your husband needs you to fulfill his daydreams. You can be lots of different women to him… Costumes provide variety without him ever leaving home… A Total Woman caters to her man's special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports.”
—Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman: How to Make Your Marriage Come Alive
Find an audio reading of this Black Eyed Story above.
Playboy Club Print Ad Circa 1982
In the ninth grade my best friend and I made a pact that we would “shake the dust of our crummy little town off our feet and go see the world!”
Sherry Richards was the first and only Black classmate I’d ever had and we were like peas on rice, gravy on mashed potatoes, butter on bread. We shared a locker. We had sleepovers. We both worked at our small town library after school and at each setting, we dreamed and manifested with nary an ounce of reality.
Our biggest, most special, most divine, most dreamiest dream was to move to the Big Apple, share a penthouse condo, and work as Playboy bunnies. We talked about it endlessly. We were certain that it would just happen. It didn’t matter that neither of us came from Manhattan-money. It didn’t matter that she wore braces and thick glasses and I was as skinny as a rake with buck teeth that could bite an apple through a fence. It didn’t matter that we were awkward and often hid behind our locker door when the cool boys sauntered down the hall. We just knew that we’d one day magically become not only desirable but also sophisticated and wise-in-the-ways-of-men.
How in the world did we come to desire this world of glamor and seduction, and how were we so sure that our little, stringy bodies with their ashy knees, cracked lips, pimples and blackheads would someday rise to meet its standards? It was the 80s and early 90s, and Playboy bunnies were as heralded as supermodels and the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders. Strippers were pretty popular too back then, as well as sex-workers with good hearts like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Talk shows, daytime and primetime soap operas, MTV and VH1 music videos and movies told us so. And as Black girls, we also had Jet magazine’s Beauty of the Week to idolize.
GQ Magazine Circa 1984
“REMEMBER THE 80s?!?!? WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES!!!!
Friends, the 80s were dangerously weird. Its misogyny and male toxicity was so normalized that it was nothing for Sherry and I to envision impossible, and—let’s just say it—not very noble, worthy, or heroic dreams. We could have dreamt of becoming anything!!! I mean, women were going to outer space for goodness’ sake! But did we dream of galaxies? Nope. We dreamed of being sexualized women, serving men drinks while donning bunny ears and cottontails on our derrieres.
As a country, when news pundits and journalists continue to ask how we got ourselves into the current political fix of having a candidate who not only incited an insurrection, stole classified documents, committed fraud in his business dealings, but also paid hush money to a porn star, sexually assaulted a woman in a dressing room, bragged about kissing women without their consent and grabbing them by their genitals, I want to climb through the TV with a megaphone and scream into their ears, “REMEMBER THE 80s?!?!? WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES!!!!