Good morning!
Here is the sixth Missing Tooth.
I need to explain.
I wanted to share my Spotify playlist of patronising love songs. But then I decided I needed to provide a little context. Long story short: I’ve written an in-depth study of benevolent sexism in seventies popular music.
But there’s also a poem from Raymond Carver and surreal one-liners from Edie.
I hope you enjoy them.
All best,
N.
PS Comments and corrections—particularly of my spelling, grammar, and overuse of em-dashes—are always welcome. I just like the attention.
Edie’s catchphrases
Edie has hit the developmental stage where she seems to speak only in nonsensical catchphrases. She spits them out randomly like verbal tics, devoid of context.
Here are my favourites:
“I’m gonna marry your butt.”
“Just one more kiss, love!” [in a cockney accent]
“I love you more than a booby wearing a hat”
“Mummy, don’t leave!” [this is just as devasting as you would imagine. Particularly when Bridget is just sitting on the couch with no plans to go anywhere.]
“Your vagina is stinky!” [ironically, she saves this one exclusively for me, the only non-vagina owner in the house.]
“Ça va? NO ÇA VA!”
“But who will keep after me?”
“Do you want me to leave? THEN BE GOOD!” [I can not stress enough that we have never said anything like this to Edie and have no idea where it has come from.]
“I’m gonna take out your throat and eat your eyes” [only said once but it haunts my dreams.]
Sometimes, she stumbles onto greatness. She yelled a poem at me from the backseat of the car the other day. When we got home I wrote it down (and added a couple of words to make it fit iambic trimeter. She’s not that clever.)
One day a girl went nowhere
Her name, it was no one
She was the size of nothing
And her shoelace was undone.
Your Dog Dies
it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you're almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you'd never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you're writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.
-Raymond Carver
Songs To Patronise Women By
(*trigger warning: domestic violence, stalking)
For the past few years, I’ve been curating a playlist of seventies folk/rock songs that are condescending towards women (as well as a few tracks this uniquely patronising subgenre of popular music has inspired).
From Neil Diamond’s age-of-consent-skirting Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon to Elton John asking a Jamaican woman “What you wanting with the white man's world?” in Island Girl there’s something both disturbing and transfixing about these men pouring out their hearts to women while simultaneously trying to knock them down.
These songs don’t embrace the overt misogyny of Rolling Stones’ Under My Thumb or the physical threats of The Beatles’ Run For Your Life. They are sentimental ballads that hide their mansplaining, infantilising, and belittling in a folksy, liberal wrapper.
It’s easy for me to listen to songs like these. Firstly, I like them. They make me nostalgic for a youth I didn’t experience, in a time I wasn’t alive. Secondly, I’ve never experienced the type of misogyny these songs embrace. I am, despite my best efforts, more often the patroniser than the patronisee.
According to music writer and feminist Ellen Willis in her book Out of The Vinyl Deeps, this niche genre grew out of sixties counterculture’s embrace of rock and roll:
Early rock was sexist in all the obvious ways. The industry was controlled by men; most singers and virtually all instrumentalists were men; song lyrics assumed traditional sex roles and performers embodied them.
But beginning with The Beatles and continuing with the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, the idea of what it meant to be a man became less clear. However, rather than making the songs less sexist, it only served to make the sexism more subtle. As Willis points out:
The new musicians are elite dropouts and, as such, tend to feel superior not only to women but to just about everyone. Their sexism is smugger and cooler…It is less overtly hostile to women but more condescending.
Most of these songs take the form of an unsolicited lecture about or directed to a specific woman. For example, in Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are, he tells his then-wife Elizabeth Weber how to dress, wear her hair, and talk:
Don't go trying some new fashion
Don't change the color of your hair, mmm
Billy Joel has several songs in the genre: She’s Always A Woman To Me (also about Weber), Only The Good Die Young (about a high school crush, Virginia Callahan), Big Shot (about Bianca Jagger), and Uptown Girl (about Christine Brinkley, Elle McPherson and Whitney Houston) all warrant a mention.
If the woman doesn’t need ‘fixing’, the songwriter will instead remind the listener that looks can be deceiving. In Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) Peter Sarstedt sings that despite the song’s fictionalised version of his girlfriend Anita Atke being rich, beautiful, and beloved around the world:
I know where you go to, my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
I know the thoughts that surround you
'Cause I can look inside your head
Often, the songwriter justifies his lecture by pointing out how young and inexperienced the woman is. She’s a “baby”, “a child”, “a girl”, or in the case of Yusuf / Cat Steven’s Wild World, she’s all three:
Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
It's hard to get by just upon a smile
Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world
I'll always remember you like a child, girl
Stevens goes to such lengths to infantilise Patti D'Arbanville, it’s hard to tell whether she’s his ex-girlfriend or his teenage daughter.
Willis agrees about Wild World saying: “it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there.” (Hall and Oates came close with Rich Girl: The song was originally about a man but Daryl Hall felt it didn’t “sound right” and change the “guy” to “girl”)
How do these songs get away with it? Why do we not notice or why, when we do notice, do we keep listening? As Rhian E. Jones and Eli Davies point out in Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, while these songs are sexist:
…this hasn't stopped generations of women from loving, being moved by and critically appreciating this kind of music — no matter how that music may feel about them.
Aside from the obvious fact that we don’t always listen to the lyrics, focusing on how the songs make us feel rather what they’re actually saying, there’s also the light touch with which these songs assert their authority over their subjects.
It is hard to get mad about Bob Dylan singing “she aches just like a woman but she breaks just like a little girl” when, at the same time, Mick Jagger is singing about how he’s oppressed his girlfriend to the point that she only “talks when she's spoken to” in Under My Thumb.
Willis, however, isn’t as concerned by Jagger’s outright aggression:
A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test…Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female—in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots".
It’s easy to forget that, unlike Under My Thumb, these are love songs. And love (or the appearance of it) can hide a multitude of sins. These men are singing about their deep understanding of the woman’s soul from a distance that suggests they’re barely in the woman’s lives at all. They’re not singing under balconies bearing roses so much as lurking in bushes peering in the window.
Is it any wonder that so many people take The Police’s Every Breath You Take—a song about obsession and surveillance—for a love song?
The Police helped bring this genre into the 80s with Roxanne. George Micheal did the same with Father Figure (“I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine”). In the 90s, Mr Big carried the torch with To Be With You (“Hold on little girl, show me what he's done to you”) along with the Backstreet Boys’ As Long As You Love Me.
The best modern example of the genre is the triumph of sonic negging that is One Direction’s Little Things:
I know you've never loved
The crinkles by your eyes when you smile
You've never loved your stomach or your thighs
The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine
But I'll love them endlessly
(actually, the best modern example is either Amy Schumer’s Girl You Don’t Need Make Up or Bo Burnham’s Repeat Stuff but they’re both satires.)
So what, if anything, should be done?
After all, as the subtitle of Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them suggests, a lot of women love these songs. Even within the pages of the book and in Ellen Willis’ writing, it’s hard to find anyone completely condemning the music. Is it enough to, as Fiona Sturges suggests in her essay in the book: “love them critically, but love them all the same”?
Perhaps I need to start a new playlist called Songs From Women Who Have Had Enough Of Your Shit…
What I’m Reading
The Best Russian Short Stories by Various
Him With His Foot In His Mouth by Saul Bellow
I Feel Better Now by Margeret Fishback