Grease Is Not That Romantic Story We Thought It Was
Let me take my feminist badge off for a sec
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There are some golden movies that all of us love and that, no matter the time, will always be relevant, punching us right in the feels.
Like Casablanca or Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
I still dance to The Time of My Life every time the radio blesses us all with an oldie but goldie — whilst also trying to force someone to catch me mid-air, Jennifer Grey style. And I can’t stop my tears from wiping away the remains of my foundation every damn time that E.T score makes its way into my ears.
As we’re all finding comfort in the mundane act of watching a shit ton of TV — or building our own private island on Animal Crossing — we’re also diving into comfort movies that we know by heart and that will instantly make us feel good.
For me, one of them is Grease.
Well, was.
Not only this was the first movie my mother ever saw in theatres back then, but it was also my initiation into girlhood and the only resource for my bad boy fetish.
The leather jackets, the racing cars, the weird walk. Those guys were the epitome of what it meant to be cool and popular in High School.
Who didn’t try to pierce their ears at a friend’s house with an apple and ice cubes, feeling endlessly cool on the outside but praying not to catch a tetanus infection on the inside?
I loved that movie so much so that I actually put up a tantrum in Middle School when the teachers decided to do a play based on Grease and I was not cast as Sandy because I couldn’t fit into a damn pair of disco pants.
It was only recently, when I re-watched it with my mother during a night in quarantine, that I found out that the movie that shaped me, that taught me how to be a girl, is actually the most un-feminist movie of all time.
While I was distracted by the catchiest songs and the sexiest leather jackets, I completely missed the whole moral of the story: that a girl being the way she is, is clearly not enough and that if she wants to get the boy, she has to change.
What now?
