By David Futrelle
The Federalist — the tradcon clickbait site with the oddly wonky name — has won itself a vast audience of hate-readers by posting some of the most ridiculously backward crap on gender you’re likely to find outside of Return of Kings. Federalist posts regularly go viral on the sheer strength of their stupidity.
Well, it looks like they’ve got another potential hit on their hands, a post with the lovely title “How Acting Like A Feminist Can Ruin Your Marriage.” The writer, a self-described “homeschooling mother of four [with] a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America” named Carrie Gress, is worried that feminism is making women too girl-powery to be attractive to men.
“Women today are supposed to ‘be bold and assertive,'” she writes, “but could all this girl-power actually undermine our best efforts at finding marital bliss?”
You can probably guess how she answers this question.
Feminism has ushered in a near-universal trend for women to “just one of the boys” or to be better than the boys. It is reflected in our sarcasm, sexual habits, attire, and goals. A recent study found that women are now dropping the f-bomb more than men.
“Fight like a girl,” “Strong is the new pretty,” and “Find your fierce” may sound nice, but we have to ask if they have led women to happiness or an endless fluctuation between ferocity and victimhood.
It’s fairly familiar stuff so far, but Gress breaks new ground with her suggestions on how women can learn how to be the traditional “country girls” of every man’s alleged dreams. It involves Italian poetry, the Grateful Dead, and … Sting. Yes, that Sting.
You can learn a lot if you listen to men when they don’t know we are listening: poetry and music.
From the dawn of time, men croon about particular attributes especially found in women: loyalty, sweetness, a calming presence, kindness, thoughtfulness. Looking past lyrics dripping with lust, a pattern emerges. Dante, the Beatles, Elvis, James Taylor, Sting, The Grateful Dead, Tim McGraw, and on and on—all speak of loving a truthful, kind, loyal, soulful woman who brings them peace. There has been no love song dedicated to a nagging, angry, self-absorbed woman.
Well, none that I can think of offhand. Can any of you think of some? If not, well, there’s literally nothing stopping anyone from writing songs like this and maybe posting them here hint hint nudge nudge knowhatImean?
Also, I’m not quite sure that Mrs. Gress has been listening all that carefully to Beatles lyrics, because if she had been she surely would have noticed that, in addition to writing assorted silly love songs, the Beatles also wrote songs about:
- Setting a woman’s house on fire because she says no to sex
- Murdering a woman for being unfaithful
- Randomly murdering one’s date because why not?
So I’m not sure Beatles lyrics are necessarily the best guide on how to live a happy life as a woman.
Oh, and the worst bit in the Beatles’ Run for Your Life — “I’d rather see you dead, little girl/ Than to be with another man” — was ripped off word-for-word from an Elvis song, so I don’t think Elvis is necessarily the best guide either.
I would say something about Sting’s lyrics as well, but, come on, there’s no way I’m going to voluntarily go and read a bunch of Sting lyrics. Every Breath You Take is pretty creepy, though. Don’t base your life on that.
I’m with you on “Run For Your Life” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (as well as Elvis and Sting.) But if you really think “Norwegian Wood” is about “Setting a woman’s house on fire because she says no to sex”, then I think you may be showing signs of having read too many Eliot Rodger wannabes. It’s actually a good counter-example to Gress for other reasons.
The song is about a sexually aggressive woman (*extremely* so for 1965) whose advances are consistently rebuffed by a guy who acts more ace than the pre-Riverdale Jughead Jones. She leads him to her bedroom, and asks him to sit down. There are no chairs is the room, so his choices would be to sit on the bed, or on the floor. He chooses the latter. At two in the morning, she subtly states “It’s time for bed.” He demurs and sleeps in the bathtub.
There’s pretty much a consensus that Lennon wrote “I lit a fire” because he couldn’t just come out and say he smoked a bowl. Again, this was 1965. But even if that’s not true, fireplaces are a thing. There are also some who’ve speculated that he made the male protagonist chaste so as not to piss off his then-wife Cynthia, and that in real life he was less resistant than he would have been willing to express publicly.
Lexicon, Paul McCartney told an interviewer it was about burning a woman’s house down.
That’s from the wikipedia article I linked.
More detailed quote from McCartney here.
@Nobody Special
There’s also the fact that in muscle powered society (human or animal), transportation by water is orders of magnitude easier and more efficient than by land.
At least Sting doesn’t think “Every Breath You Take” is romantic. And he did sing, “If you love someone, set them free” a couple of years later.
I will sound like horrible now but i like sting – English man in new York. Its funny because before i thought he said ‘im a little alien’ – actually he said ‘im illigal alien’. This is what one British officer correct me before ))) But i didn’t listen to his other songs. British music doesn’t interesting to me.