Why "Grease" Teaches Horrible Life Lessons

Ok, I'm going to start by saying that I'm not going to bring up the whole argument that the film basically ends with Sandy changing who she is to please a man, considering that it has been brought up countless times before (I do agree with this argument, but it's in no way my idea).

However, besides the borderline mysogynistic ending, Grease has many other parts that have always bothered me. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the movie, but there are certian pretty bad lessons it teaches:



1) Girls are all money-hungry golddiggers and guys care about nothing but sex:
This issue comes from the song "Summer Nights". Notice that the girls' concerns about the Danny consist of "How much dough did he spend?" and "like, does he have a car?", while the guys ask "did you get very far?" and "Did she put up a fight?" I understand that the purpose of the song is to show two different sides of a story, but do these two sides honestly have to so stereotypical and demeaning? It's one thing to show Danny and Sandy as being two different types of people with different perspectives, but the fact that all of the pink ladies are only really interested in mystery guy's financial situation, and the t-birds are all focused on sex is kind of mean to both sexes.

2) Give up on your dreams and get a menial desk job
This comes from "Beauty School Dropout". Frenchie has been in beauty school for a relatively short period of time, and hasn't been doing very good (turned her hair into an easter egg). When she feels like just giving up and working at a diner forever, an angel in the form of Frankie Avalon appears to her in a dream. However, instead of something inspiring like "don't give up!" he tells her to "Join a steno pool". Instead of telling her to keep trying at beauty school because she's just starting out, or to go back to high school and find a dream or passion, he tells her to go be a secretary, because that's the only thing she'll ever be good at. Less inspirational and more depressing than an angel should be, and delivers the message that women should be saitisfied with a high school education and a secretary job, and nothing else. If you don't do well in your first few weeks of beauty school, then give up... these things don't take alot of practise to be good at.

3) Once you grow up, it is perfectly normal to torment a bunch of higschool kids and challenge them to super dangerous car races.
This one basically speaks for itself. The scorpions are clearly too old to be in higschool with the rest of the characters, yet they find it normal to go through all the effort they do to torment them. The super dangerous car race is a bad message in itself, but the idea that it's normal for adults to coerce teenagers into doing it is worse. Bonus points for the auto teacher at their school being all supportive of the race: even educated professionals are encouraged to help teenagers risk their lives.

4) If you're pregnant, keep it bottled up and don't tell anyone.
So, Rizzo missed a period, and is super worried that she might be pregnant because Kenickie's condom broke. She tells her friend Marty, who then tells everyone, making Rizzo the laughingstock of the school. The intended message of this is not to trust people with secrets, or they will spread like wildfire. However, the fact that opening up to a close friend about the fear she is going through results in a crapstorm kind of gives off the message that it is not a good idea to tell anyone if you're pregnant. The only problem is that anyone who follows this idea will loose any support system or chance to let her feelings out, and will instead be bottling all of her worries up and stressing herself out, neither of which are healthy when you have a baby growing inside of you.

Anyway, despite being a great movie, I really think that the writers of Grease should've been a bit more careful when picking the lessons they wanted to teach.