Assignment 5: Playlist

#1, I Kissed a Girl: This is such an obnoxious song, but I have to admit, it was the first thing I thought of when I read this assignment. On the one hand it presents a hilariously casual view of lesbian encounters, with lines like “You're my experimental game” and “I hope my boyfriend don't mind it”. On the other hand, though, it also seems to have some pro-girl and pro-lesbianism undertones, particularly with the lines “Us girls we are so magical/Soft skin, red lips, so kissable/Hard to resist so touchable/Too good to deny it.”

#2 & 3, Marry Me and Miss Lucy: Emilie Autumn is such a stereotypically bitter feminist that I just had to include two of her songs. Marry Me is said to be about Catherine Howard, who was married to King Henry VIII against her will because the marriage increased her family’s power and because there were rumors that she was pregnant with his child. Miss Lucy is about the treatment of women in insane asylums in the 1800’s; in many cases these women were completely sane and had been institutionalized for a variety of reasons from disobedience to menopause.

#4, Mariella: The girl in this song is clearly her own person. She is strong, smart and independent, and would rather have no friends at all and live ‘in her own world’ than try to fit in. I think today’s generation of girls could use more songs like this.

#5, Wet Blanket: A tribute to the ultimate jerk boyfriend. The man described in this song is sort of an everyman of patriarchy—so much so that it would almost be funny, if I hadn’t seen women in relationships like this before.

#6, Rebel Girl: I didn’t think this playlist would be complete without a riot grrrl song. The blatant references to lesbianism give it a similar shock value to I Kissed a Girl, though toned down a bit (it is, after all, circa 1993); instead the focus is more on the rebellious spirit of the singer’s idol.

xXx

The ‘beauty myth’ is a complicated problem. Naomi Wolf talks about a “prowoman definition of beauty” as including avoiding pain, and to me that means working to be as healthy as possible. But is health really a good way to define beauty? What about those who were born with unavoidable health problems; surely they can be beautiful too? Also, the beauty myth includes more than just the state of your body; it also includes how you decorate it. As Linda M. Scott points out, the decoration of one’s body is a basic human tendency, one that is found in cultures all around the world. Perhaps it is just human nature to judge people based on how they decorate themselves—how a person looks is, after all, generally the first thing we learn about them.

Bell hooks advises feminists to take back the fashion industry, but I doubt that any one fashion could ever define all women everywhere. Instead, I think the best thing we can do is seek to define our own beauty for ourselves, and then respect the ways in which other women chose to define their beauty. This is easier said than done, because how can we create a definition of beauty that isn’t influenced by the culture we live in when we’ve been exposed to that culture all our lives?

Tricky business…