Categories
disgusting women evil women hate hypocrisy irony alert life before feminism misogyny MRA music oppressed men paul elam princesses YouTube

American Women and Stupid Girls: Misogynistic Lyrics as Faux Social Critique

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: Spokesmen for Clean Living
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: Spokesmen for Clean Living

 

Listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper” the other day, I was struck by how much the lyrics resembled a misogynistic MRA rant. Ostensibly a song pointing out the hypocrisy of suburban squares attacking the drug culture whilst themselves popping prescription pills, the song extends its “critique” to cover such subjects as the evil of women making cakes from mixes instead of from scratch.  (See below for videos of all the songs mentioned in this post.)

So you go from this bit of, ahem, social criticism:

“Things are different today,”

I hear ev’ry mother say

Mother needs something today to calm her down

And though she’s not really ill

There’s a little yellow pill

She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper

And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.

To this:

“Things are different today,”

I hear ev’ry mother say

Cooking fresh food for a husband’s just a drag

So she buys an instant cake and she buys a frozen steak

And goes running for the shelter etc etc

Yep, that’s right. Mick’s as bothered by the frozen steak as he is by the dangers of tranquilizer abuse. By the end of the song, the hypothetical freezer-and-cake-mix-using mother has died of an overdose. Told you so!

Misogynistic rock songs aren’t exactly a rarity – hell, “Mother’s Little Helper” isn’t even the worst offender in the Rolling Stones’ disography.

But unlike more straightforward outbursts of misogynistic nastiness like, say, “Under My Thumb,” “Mother’s Little Helper” pretends to be something nobler: a social critique.

The blogger behind the wonderfully arch I Hate the New York Times blog pointed out to me in a tweet that a surprising number of old rock lyrics play this little trick. Taking the form of a “critique of today’s inauthentic & hedonistic society” they are in fact “directed at [a] specific shallow hussy.”

Along with Mother’s Little Helper, IHateNYT suggested I take another look at the lyrics to Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks.” And, yep, it’s basically the same thing: a critique of drug use in the form of a patronizing lecture to a young woman in search of “kicks,” starting out with this little bit of I-told-you-so, delivered with a sneer:

Girl, you thought you found the answer on that magic carpet ride last night

But when you wake up in the mornin’ the world still gets you uptight

It turns out that the song, written by the songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, was inspired by the drug use of a male friend of theirs – though somehow in the song this specific man became a hypothetical “girl.”

And then of course there is the Guess Who’s American Woman, a sort-of critique of America’s “war machines” and “ghetto scenes” in the form of a long, sneering diatribe against a hypothetical woman:

Now woman, I said stay away

American woman, listen what I say

 

American woman, get away from me

American woman, mama let me be

Don’t come knockin’ around my door

Don’t wanna see your shadow no more

And on and on and on for a very long five minutes and nine seconds.

One of the reasons these songs sound so much like MRA rants is that MRAs like to play the same little game, dressing up their misogynistic sentiments in the form of “social critique.” Thus Paul Elam’s faux-environmentalist attack on female consumers, and all that talk about how single mothers and/or “picky women”  are going to bring about the end of civilization. Heck, some manosphere fat-gal-bashers even pretend they fat-bash out of concern for the well-being of the women they’re ridiculing.

It might be entertaining to transform some of these old woman-hating songs into critiques of woman-haters. “Stupid Girl” by the Rolling Stones might be a good place to start. I mean, seriously?

Like a lady in waiting to a virgin queen

Look at that stupid girl

She bitches ’bout things that she’s never seen

Look at that stupid girl

Those are real Rolling Stone lyrics, not a comment from NWOslave. Have at it.

Here are videos of all the songs I mention above:

 

417 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

@CassandraSays

This. Anything pre-’60s is actually very difficult to source stuff for, so it ends up either parodies of looks of the era or just bad suits-and-dresses and pisses people off for being expensive, and ’60s-’80s-’90s are all vaguely represented in current fashion, which encourages people not to add much more than a nod to the era or to go over-the-top in a cheesy way.

Plus anyone can go down to an op-shop and find something with flares or in brown or with a loud pattern or square toes or whatever very easily, because these things tend not to sell and sit around on the racks getting marked down.

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

What do you mean by “in reverse” with the Iron Maiden thing btw? Sounds like a similar situation.

CassandraSays
12 years ago

I mean that I know tons of normally quite pretentious and wanky about it rockers who will secretly admit to loving ABBA.

CassandraSays
12 years ago

Although I’d argue that it might be the cheesiness that people love in both cases – KISS too.

(Sorry, metal folks. I love Eddie too, but you have to admit that the whole Maiden look is pretty damn cheesy. In a good way.)

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

Same. But weren’t you saying “everyone seems to love Iron Maiden, even if they wouldn’t normally like that sort of music” and then saying the same thing with ABBA?

CassandraSays
12 years ago

Reverse in terms of who likes it and normally wouldn’t, though.

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

I think the harmonies and the lyrics bring the real cheese in the Maiden equation. Eddie’s cheesy, too, but Di’Annio era Maiden doesn’t have the same cheesy appeal as Bruce Dickinson’s stuff. It’s all him and the stuff the band started doing behind him.

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

Right.

CassandraSays
12 years ago

Also I think part of the fun was that Dickinson knew that he was being cheesy and embraced it. When people do that stuff and are wanky about it then you end up laughing at rather than with them.

(Shades of the black metal conversation here.)

Tulgey Logger
Tulgey Logger
12 years ago

Holy shit you guize, I was considering not posting this here but I just found out where our dear friend Tom Martin gets his fascinating theories about prostitution.

Like literally, just listen to Oprah’s first two sentences:

I should have known, but still.

Melody
12 years ago

Why would you want a troll? I personally find them to traumatic to respond to.
I’ll get so fixated and angry that I can’t sleep.
Insanely frustrating.
I had a troll on my tumblr for awhile. Kept using anonymous and calling me names “femnazi”, “whore” ect.
Flashback central.

Hasn’t Steele whined about his mother/teachers ruining his education on other posts?

The Kittehs' Unpaid Help

Also: Tubular Bells. I’ve never met anyone who particularly likes it but it seems present in everyone’s tape/record collections if they have them.

I used to love Tubular Bells when I was a teenager and into my twenties, especially the “Piltdown Man” sequence. Even bought Tubular Bells II (disappointing) and Platinum (because of Moonlight Shadow). (Trivia: the narrator introducing the instruments on TB II is Alan Rickman.)

AC/DC – meh, never interested at all. I did like ABBA. 🙂 Cold Chisel – gah, no thanks. I’d prefer Dire Straits, if it came to that. I like some of Mark Knopfler’s stuff, like Why Aye Man (mostly because of hearing it as the theme from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

I listen to so little pop/rock/whatever these days – really only Bruce Springsteen, whose stuff I’ve got into in the last year-odd. Always knew Born to Run and the better-known Born in the USA tracks, but not his other work. And I don’t listen to current music, as in newer groups/singers, at all. Never heard of most of the ones mentioned here, and I haven’t listened to the radio since, gods, probably the late 80s. I’m definitely middle-aged about music. (Or older … gimme Renaissance and early Baroque any day!) 😉

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

Man, Warren Farrell managed to both be a massive dickhead and beat my ’70s getup.

@Kittehhelp

You’ve broken the Cold Chisel pattern! My worldview is shattered!

The Kittehs' Unpaid Help

Mwahahahhaha!

Carleyblue
Carleyblue
12 years ago

Sorry to be shallow, but those are some hideous clothes in that video…

The Kittehs' Unpaid Help

Anything with shoulder pads is bad news …

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

@Carleyblue

It’s not as if there’s anything there that deserves a detailed response beyond “lol no”, so…

Tulgey Logger
Tulgey Logger
12 years ago

At least he didn’t complain about the chairs.*

*Note: I don’t actually know because fuck watching all that shit.

The Kittehs' Unpaid Help

Tulgey – ditto to that. Flicking through the thumbnails was enough.

Dvärghundspossen
12 years ago

Like LBT I love comic books, particularly superhero comics, and like all of you I get annoyed when I find sexism, racism etc in stuff that I like. STILL… I don’t want to come off as “THIS THING I LOVE HAS NO PROBLEMS AT ALL” but I do want to point out that I think super hero comics are often less sexist than lots of other media. Or at least they were like fifteen-twenty-thirty years ago, and then the rest of media started to catch up.
I mean, the fact that super heroines are drawn with ridiculously sexy costumes lots of the times, and fight in weirdly sexualised poses, push their arses and boobs out constantly for no reason etc do get a lot of justifiable flak. But it’s also the case that super heroines get to fight, and have been fighting, side by side with the male ones for ages. A super heroine can be the one who saves the day. A super heroine can be the one to take down the big bad who everyone else failed to defeat. A super heroine can save a super hero. And so on. I think this is a big reason why I was drawn to super hero comics in the first place. In other media it’s been the case, for a loooong time, that although you can have strong women, it’s rare for them to be QUITE as strong as the men, they often need to be saved by a guy in the end, and the woman would NEVER save the man (well, there’s always been a few exceptions in movies etc, but it’s been extremely rare compared to comics).

Shaenon
12 years ago

“You Belong to Me”? Really? It’s like I’m the only person here taking my man-hating responsibilities seriously.

Shaenon
12 years ago

I took the Steele Challenge, Googled “misandry music,” and got some MRA lists of “misandric” songs. As I probably could have predicted, they mostly fall into the following categories:

1. Obscure songs no one has ever heard of.

2. Sassy pop songs about “girl power” or women breaking up with men. For example, Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”: she’s dumping a dude and bragging about how easily she can get a new boyfriend, ergo misandry! Actually, all Beyonce songs fall into this category. But seriously, guys, she’s right. She can get another man. Fucking look at her.

3. Songs where I honestly have no idea where the man-hating is. In addition to “You Belong to Me,” apparently “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar is misandric.

4. “Goodbye, Earl.”

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”

Which was written by a man, and originally from a male perspective, where it really wouldn’t stick out much in the world of R&B.

lowquacks
lowquacks
12 years ago

Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Rihanna’s “Breaking Dishes” are kinda recent and vaguely misandric, I guess?

CassandraSays
12 years ago

Isn’t Beyonce 30-ish by now? That would explain why she’s being misandric – doesn’t know and accept her place as a woman past her prime babymaking years. Why, she’s visibly an adult! How dare she think she still has value in the sexual marketplace!

1 5 6 7 8 9 17