This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
The 80s were a confusing time for young women. Not only were we bombarded with all of these images of female strength and the dawn of the power suit, but we also had the opposite images of bikini-clad bodies bombarding us in film. While adult women were being objectified on film just like their teen counterparts, they still managed to also emit an air of (albeit limited) power. But, the teen female set was still stuck in the role of object or trophy. There were a few stand-outs that bucked the trend, but usually the female role–if she wasn’t the trophy–was never front and center and was some typecast girl playing the role of the quirky best friend. Sure, you could be a cool , confident, different, smart girl, but you couldn’t be the star.
In 1985 a new kind of teen flick came out. A film that handed us a smart teenage female protagonist who acknowledged and called out sexism and wasn’t used as background noise or the social conscience of the group. Just One of the Guys was an eye-opening surprise for me. Usually when films had a woman being diminished for being attractive it was a grown man doing the the diminishing and if a young woman was present she was being set straight by her strict father who was out to save her virtue. This film was unique in its portrayal of teen life and the perceptions that society has in regard to young women. It quickly became one of my favorite films when I was a child.
If you weren’t lucky enough to see it or just don’t remember it, Just One of the Guys is the story of high school student Terri Griffith played by Joyce Hyser. Terri is a stunner. She’s beautiful and everything that 80s teen movies led us to believe was the ideal when it came to popular girls. But, unlike most of these 80s poster girls she had dreams beyond moving to New York and becoming an actress or escaping their small town. Terri wants to be a reporter and no, not your typical eye-candy TV reporter but a hard-hitting journalist and she has no reason to believe that these dreams won’t come true because she’s smart and works hard. This is where the story takes a turn for the real, Terri doesn’t get what she wants. In fact the only thing that Terri gets is rejection. Her ideas are passed over for the school paper in favor of more simplistic ones that the male reporters have pitched. After her article for a coveted internship at the local Tuscan paper is passed over and her slime-ball adviser hits on her, Terri begins to come to grips with her reality. Seeking someone to vent to besides her supportive best friend, Denise, she tries to lean on her boyfriend, who continues the cycle of male dismissiveness that has permeated every bit of her life. She realizes that her problems stem from more than just her good looks–most of her problems stem from her being a girl in general.
This is the point in most 80s movie where a man would come in and save her or where she would wallow in her sadness and fall into a pit of despair. Or worse, try and change herself into an “unattractive” woman to perpetuate the myth that looks are the only thing that matter. She instead does something more proactive, daring, and wonderful. She acknowledges the and goes after the bigger-picture story. With the help of her best friend, Denise, and her younger brother, Buddy, she transforms herself from a beautiful teenage girl into a teenage boy. The thing that makes this decision so great is its intersectionality. It doesn’t just shed light on looksism, it calls out gender inequality and sexism.
Terri sets out to explore the luxury of male privilege disguised as a young man. Just One of the Guys smacked us straight in the face with the unspoken universal knowledge that sexism was real, it existed and the film gave us tangible proof. Terri decides to use her parents’ trip out of town to switch things around for herself by getting another shot at the newspaper internship with another article, an expose of sorts. She switches high schools and uses her brain, and as much as she can, is herself.
It’s interesting to watch the female-socialized Terri try and interact as a male-socialized teenage boy. She pulls a lot of typical stereotypical teenage boys moves. Her interactions with other teenagers in her new school are often comical but they’re understandable. Most (young) women, especially in the 80s, saw men through a very specific gaze and gender roles were clearly , even if often incorrectly, defined. Terri’s portrayal of a what she believed most teenage boys were like coupled with her feminine (female-socialized) tenderness and compassion created an interesting mix.
As expected in every teen 80s movie, our female teenage protagonist falls for a guy. In this case it is her new (as a teenage boy) best friend Rick. Rick, played by typical too-old-to-be-in-high-school Billy Jacoby, is as nerdy as they come and he offers Terri and this movie something different. Their relationship follows some of the same guidelines that most 80s films followed: nerdy teen gets made over by attractive teen and becomes instantly popular and they fall in love. The difference here is that the nerdy guy gets made over by the attractive girl in disguise and she falls for him. The love story in this film adds an extra layer of drama to the lighthearted teen fare that was usually thrust upon us. In the beginning of the film Terri starts out with a boyfriend–the sexist college guy dating a high school girl who he expects to become his trophy wife. But at some point she comes to terms with who she is and accepts it. She realizes that she wants more than to be someone’s arm candy. She no longer wants to rest on pretty or be someone’s cookie cutter ideal. Once she gets a taste of the freedom that being a teenage boy is, she finds herself wanting to be her own person even more than being a journalist.
Terri’s journey isn’t just an exploration of gender roles, it becomes her exploration of who she is as a person, what she wants in life, and on some levels, realizing what she wants and who she deserves to be with. Is it the super macho sexist guy like her boyfriend, who belittles her ambition and calls her babe? Or the “nerdy” Rick who despite not knowing that she is a she, supports her journalistic ambitions? After a lot of missteps and a scene after a fight during the prom that ends with Terri kissing and then flashing Rick and some awkward banter about how she’s not a homosexual because she’s a she, they part ways. Terri doesn’t let the loss of the guy she’s in love with, or the fact that she’s now single, hold her back from turning in her story and getting the internship she wanted. She writes her article and sheds light on her experience as a teenage girl pretending to be a teenage boy and essentially, gender inequality. She uses the pain of heartbreak to fuel an article about all of the good and the bad, the gender bias, and the rules that we’re all expected to follow.
The thing that makes Just One of the Guys so amazing is that the hero is a heroine and does, in fact, after a long hero’s journey, get everything she wanted. Outside of some minor humiliation at her unmasking, the honesty of her article helps her achieve her goals in the long run. She gets her internship, she finds herself, and she moves on to the next phase of her life. Rick even comes to terms with the whole situation and his feelings for her. There is a hint in the last scene of a possible first date and the thing that makes it even better is that there is no loss. The movie doesn’t punish Terri, or make her change to have it all. It doesn’t make her dreams seem unattainable or destined to fail. It just causes her to grow and it proved to a generation that the teenage girl can have it all. Society and gender roles be damned.
It was one the first films of the decade to bring feminist issues to light and the teenage feminist wasn’t portrayed as a yappy unlikable side character–she was a lead. They even cast a young woman who was the antithesis of every other mean spirited , stereotypical (save for the short haircut) caricature of what a feminist was supposed to look like. It showed her journey of self discovery and called out gender roles and society’s expectations for and biases toward young women. The film combats the myth that “pretty” girls can’t be smart or that young women can only fit into certain roles or that feminists are all man-hating bitches. It tore apart the typical movie idea that either you’re the smart, driven unpopular girl who isn’t pretty until someone changes you or you’re her hot best friend who doesn’t have enough of a brain to calculate change but all of the guys want to claim her. It showed that looks really don’t matter and women can be just as strong, determined, and focused as our male counterparts. It cracks open the shallowness that radiated from most 80s teen flicks and holds a mirror up to and then smashes that mirror. And for a teen movie to take this stance so early in the 80s, years before we saw grown up women take this stance on film, was a pretty awesome thing.
Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac , recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in main stream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13
Well said.