girlfriends and whores
found myself thinking this morning, for whatever reason, about robyn’s call your girlfriend, which i never got around to reviewing at the singles jukebox because i kept trying to sort out my thoughts on it and then the post was up and oops. in retrospect i should have just dropped my 10 with the first quick line i dashed off: “this track sort of makes me want to go and take all my other 10s back.” you can see some really scattered musings at the post which i don’t recommend you read, but i do recommend the rest of the comment thread because some really interesting conversation is happening.
one thing i find really fascinating on the song is how many wildly different interpretations seem plausible - even just in that one post there’s more consensus on the song’s quality (mostly great) than on what it’s actually about, with some people loving the song’s bitter warmth and other people digging how mean it is. jonathan bradley is in the latter camp, which he went into more extensively at his own tumblr, in a post i thought was interesting but viscerally disagreed with but couldn’t figure out exactly why i disagreed or at least how to phrase it, but on the train today things sort of started to coalesce, maybe. (i wrote this paragraph and then a million years later i finished the post and am coming up here to laugh at myself for thinking this was the case.)
i think my main issue is with the idea that niceness is boring. you should know that i read pride and prejudice and thought elizabeth was sort of obnoxious and jane - the excessively sweet, excessively optimistic elder sister - was the only likable character in the whole book (well her and mr. bennett, because he just did not give a shit. he and i had that in common. god i hate austen) so there is probably some self-serving bias here. i do love me some id-expressing pop, and niceness can be dull, but i don’t think it has to be, and i also definitely don’t think it’s inherently more interesting than its opposite.
this got way longer than expected, and also became about many other things, so: click for more!
both linked posts compare the song to paramore’s misery business, which… i am a music-first-lyrics-second girl for the most part, it is near impossible for lyrics to wreck a song for me, especially one as musically killer as that one, but wow, you guys, these come really close, because: “once a whore you’re nothing more.” let’s rewind the tape: “once a whore you’re nothing more.” every single time i hear that line i cringe a little bit, because: “once a whore you’re nothing more.” each time, i briefly flash to my initial reaction, which was OH MY GOD, HAYLEY WILLIAMS, ARE YOU FOR REAL RIGHT NOW?
and let’s be clear: my issue with this line is not that it’s mean or cruel; it’s that it is blatantly misogynistic. i think there’s plenty of room in music for unsavory human emotions of all kinds, but there’s a difference between that and ideas that buy into networks of oppression, and “once a whore you’re nothing more” (!!!!) falls squarely behind door number two.
in that line, incidentally, one can find the roots for my issue with the you belong with me video (VIDEO. NOT SONG. I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE SONG. DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT THE SONG.). girlboymusic once noted that the thing that made reading slut-shaming into the video incorrect was that, hey, white-dress taylor clearly wants to have sex with this dude! which was another one that got filed into “interesting, but i disagree, but i don’t know why” and which i have pondered a lot, actually, but i stand by my gut feeling about the video (VIDEOOOO) because: the word whore is not about fucking.
we don’t know anything about the sex life of the other girl in misery business except that she’s having sex with the dude the singer wants to be having sex with (and then… dumps him? but gets mad at the singer anyway? i find this internal logic questionable, but whatever), but she’s a whore. the only other characteristic we get is, to me, almost equally egregious: she’s introduced as having “a body like an hourglass,” meaning conventionally hot, meaning she’s a whore, because the word whore is not about fucking. it reminds me of a new york times article i read years ago (and found online, check that google-fu) about the trend for mannequins with bigger asses, which is its own giant can of worms but the quote that stuck with me was:
“It’s a little sexist,” he said. “It’s not creating an image of a woman as an elegant creature. It’s a little bit down and dirty, a little crass.”
which felt like a slap across the face, because: congratulations, women, you can be labeled as inelegant, down, dirty, crass (clearly implicit: slutty) by virtue of your genetic make-up (see also: what happens to D-cup girls in high school), no matter how many men you do or do not sleep with, because slutty is not about sex, and the word whore is not about fucking — at least, not in an easy equation in which “large number of sexual partners [what is large?] = slutty whoreface.” the words gain their power from fear of and disgust for female sexuality — it’s strong enough that identifying it, rightly or wrongly, as a key part of a woman’s personality is considered an insult — but in practice they are both simpler and more broad (as sarah points out in her gorgeous essay on my so-called life), meaning: the bad girl. the wrong kind of girl. when you want not merely to insult but to truly hurt a woman, to degrade her and deny her any worth, you don’t call her an asshole (too gender-neutral to take full advantage of the force of misogyny) or a bitch (implying, in an ultimately irrelevant way, some small grain of power). you call her a whore.
or, to paraphrase mean girls: “i don’t hate you because you’re a whore. you’re a whore because i hate you.”
so i can totally buy that good!taylor wants to have sex with her dude as much as evil!taylor does, and i don’t think that whoever was in charge of the video (VI. DE. O.) set out with some master plan to shame girls who have had sex, but when you put your heroine in a white dress and her arch-nemesis in a slinky red cut-out number, regardless of your intent or personal feelings on female sexuality, you are perhaps not actively engaging in but, yes, i think perpetuating slut-shaming. i doubt it’s malicious; it’s just the laziest most uninteresting costume choice you could make, up there with making your television bad guy a cigarette smoker, and in a fucked up culture, lazy writing means fucked up things happen. it’s drawing on a trope viewers are familiar with — we all know which of those girls we are supposed to root for — and it’s a trope that’s inextricably intertwined with the virgin/whore dichotomy that firmly aligns whore with evil; to subvert it would require a lot more creativity than that video showed, because, okay, good!taylor wants to have sex. so do many, many people, including women, who rely on slut or whore to mark other women they disapprove of, without knowing anything about their actual sex lives, because — once more with feeling — the word whore is not about fucking.
part of what i enjoy about call your girlfriend is that robyn is the whore-figure presenting herself as a good girl. and you know; sleeping with someone in a relationship is not a good thing, on this i think we can agree. i don’t think, though, that doing some definitively not-good, even bad, things makes one inherently a bad person. i don’t think that doing something that hurts people indicates an active desire to see those people hurt. and beyond that, i dislike the reading of robyn as unrepentant bitch for much the same reason, i guess, that jonathan prefers not to think of her as nice: i find it dull.
i like kieron gillen’s post on the song a lot, but the more i think about it the more i’m bothered by his characterization of the song as being about women “(basically) fucking over other women,” along with jonathan’s reading it as a “marvelous piece of passive-aggressive bitchslapping” about “robyn taking a man from another woman,” because to be frank, i fucking hate the man-stealing narrative, and not even because of feminism. i am of the mentality that if he can be stolen, he was never really yours to begin with, and thus robyn wasn’t fucking anyone over; if the dude ever does man up and call his girlfriend, he’ll be doing her a favor, though she can be forgiven (to say the least) for not seeing it that way. wouldn’t you rather be dumped than have someone stay with you out of habit or cowardice? (perhaps this is my idiosyncrasy; my relationship nightmares center not on break-ups but on the idea that someone would stay with me after he had fallen out of love.)
and this doesn’t even get into how actually he was only ever his and his own, responsible for all of his choices. men are not helpless creatures powerless to resist the temptress’s siren call. i count like four cliches in that sentence, because this narrative is one of the oldest and most persistent cliches in both fiction and real life. the idea of a man being “taken” from another woman manages to deny men agency in order to place the blame squarely on women’s shoulders, and furthermore casts women’s motivations in an automatically suspect light. it precludes the possibility that maybe, possibly, this woman had actual feelings for this man, and perhaps he developed actual feelings for her, and they both handled it exceedingly poorly but it was a thick painful situation, not some powerplay in which women are conniving bitches viewing men as status symbols, and wow, don’t we see THAT everywhere, too? women are materialistic, women want to show up other women, women are gold-diggers or at least status-diggers, women live for and crave the attention of men and see other women as competition, a non-sexual objectification which within this construction is basically accurate, because women are not real people. i mean, boyfriend-stealing: that is some regina george shit.
so tell me again: what, exactly, is still interesting about girl-on-girl nastiness? how often do we see cultural depictions of women being anything but callous and calculating to other women? how can this story — flimsy from the start — possibly hold any fascination at all, at this point?
louise gluck has a poem in her collection meadowlands called, interestingly, “siren” in which the narrator does want to relish in the business of misery, though she doesn’t get to; she speaks of wanting his wife to suffer, wanting her life to be like a play in which all the parts are sad parts. but look at how the poem opens: “i became a criminal when i fell in love.” and look at her self-reflection: “i think if i felt less, i would be a better person.” (which, wouldn’t we allllll.) she is granted genuine feeling, something usually denied the Other Woman. it’s not about sex or power; she really loves him, and thinks, twistedly or naively, that if his wife loved him too she would let him be happy. and maybe that’s true. there are ways to be selfish and hurtful in relationships that do not involve sleeping with another person. maybe it’s not true. maybe it doesn’t matter because if he really loved this siren, he would leave of his own accord. this is the realization at the heart of rilo kiley’s brilliant does he love you, introduced by jenny lewis when i saw them live as “a song about a homewrecker,” which manages to grant its narrator pathos — not the same as sympathy — through its story — cross-country letters aren’t something you do for a fling — and through the utter anguish in her voice on the final “your husband will never leave you for me.”
but maybe he does love her, and he’s scared, or maybe he loves her and also his wife, like the narrator in ani difranco’s school night, who leaves her lover because “i stand committed to a love that came before you, and the fact that i adore you is just one of my truths.” that line blew my mind the first time i heard it, because i always assumed the idea that someone could find themselves with genuine feelings for two people was bullshit, but who is more sincere, even speaking fictionally, than ani difranco? no one, is who, and that song is fucking heartbreaking. it would be nice if emotions were parceled out in little ribbon-wrapped brown paper packages, if life were always that simple and clear-cut, but it’s not, as ani lays out in this gorgeous verse:
but then what kind of scale compares the weight of two beauties,
the gravity of duties, or the groundspeed of joy?
tell me what kind of gauge can quantify elation?
what kind of equation could i possibly employ?
i think it’s possible to do bad things, even really shitty things, as a result of failed strength, not malice. that isn’t an excuse, and man, if any of this ever happens in my own life i will be a fucking mess for a while, i can go ahead and tell you right now. but it’s love, and it’s life, and i look for stories that acknowledge these inner truths, even the ones that might not matter to the people living them.
and yes: i think it’s possible to want to be with the one you love and regret how much pain that would cause the one he’s with — or, if you’re the one making the call, how much pain it will cause this person you did and maybe in some ways still do love and care about. one interpretation of call your girlfriend i haven’t seen is that it’s not an impromptu set of suggestions but a response: “i just don’t want to hurt her,” which can be total bullshit or genuinely sincere or both at the same time. “well, then you let her down easy,” complete with talking points to get you through it.
will he make the call? sometimes i listen to the song, which enaek once described to me as “the sonic equivalent of a hug,” and i think, of course he will, how could he not, when their love is so clear, and robyn’s even coaching him through it. other times i think, probably not, this probably isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation, and what started as a way to make sure he didn’t have an excuse has degenerated into thinly disguised begging.
should he make the call? i think so, even if he doesn’t get facebook official with robyn yet, or ever. i think if he really has, as robyn believes, seen something that he never even knew he missed, he owes it to his girlfriend to let her go find someone who will see that same thing in her. and i think that thing was missing before robyn, and at most she accelerated the process of discovery. in amnesia, my favorite britney spears song (unjustly relegated to a bonus track on circus while FUCKING MMM PAPI MADE THE ALBUM PROPER), she meets a guy who makes her not only melt like butter, stop and stutter, but forget her name, her telephone number, her address, and that her boyfriend was the one that had bought her this rock — ouch! poor boyfriend! but britney wasn’t “stolen” away: “didn’t know it was over till you came on over and told me that you just, just can’t forget about me.” not that it wasn’t over — that she didn’t know. the relationship was already broken irreparably; it just took a catalyst for her to realize it. britney acquits herself honorably, promising to tell her boyfriend he should just effing go.
we don’t get to see whether robyn’s boy she just just can’t forget about will do the same. we just see robyn asking a question that could hide a dozen different things beneath its surface, and i too prefer to pick the one i find interesting. assuming every story has a villain — that is boring. assuming every villain in a story about love, sex, and the thrilling terrifying powerful intersection of the two is a woman — that is boring. a story orbiting the twin suns of desire and hurt in which everyone gets to do both of those things — that operates from the radical notion that women are people, not catfighting whores — that treats its characters not as overfamiliar archetypes but as people struggling with what louise gluck, in that same collection, calls “the insoluble dilemma of the human heart: how to divide the world’s beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves” — that, to me, is interesting.
