At about 11:26 Sunday night, several of my friends suddenly became very, very angry. As the culmination of the …
Before posting, please read our blog moderation guidelines. The comments below begin with the oldest comments first. Click on the last comments page to jump to the most recent comments.
singing about partying, having sex and being famous = woman, and singing about dating, growing up, and learning important life lessons = child. seriously? while i don’t listen to either artist and subsequently will not comment on their musicality your reasoning here seems pretty flawed. hopefully, you realize that it is just as much a feminist choice to abstain from sex as it is to have sex. i would hope we are past the era where we need such false dichotomies to describe who is and isn’t a feminist.
Johannah Cousins
3:39 am on
February 9th, 2010Of course having sex in clubs is not the only way to be a grown woman. I wrote that Gaga’s lyrics reflect the real lives of many of her peers, not the lives of all of them or the only acceptable model by which they should live. If Swift were singing about what it is like to be a twenty-year-old attempting to find true love, that would be an equally viable adult narrative. But she’s not, she’s singing about what it’s like to be a young teenager, in a way that promotes the old and damaging idea that teenage girls do not have sexual desires and are automatically making a mistake if they have sex. There are ways to sing about choosing not to have sex that don’t glorify it and demean others who have made different choices.
This is the first time I’ve heard about either singer, and I have no interest in listening to either one’s music. However, as a therapist who works in the addiction recovery field, what you write about has little (if anything) to do with feminist choice, and a lot to do with sexual acting out. There is nothing “grown up” about having sex in clubs. Responsible and put together adults (whether feminist or not) do not go to bars or clubs to have sex with people they barely, if at all, know. Both singers seem to be young women trying their best to find their ways in turbulent and confusing times of their lives, and singing about it along the way.
Johannah Cousins
3:55 pm on
February 9th, 2010The more people tell me that they are completely unfamiliar with the music of arguably the two biggest pop acts out there right now, the less I understand their motivations for commenting on my pop culture blog. Considering you’ve never heard Gaga’s music, I find it rather bizarre that you’ve chosen to interpret my mentions of having sex and going to clubs to mean that her music is entirely about random one-night stands and public sex acts. I also find your complete dismissal of a one-night stand as a viable sexual choice offensive. The main point, however, is not that being very sexually active=grown-up and being celibate=childish, but that the way Swift chooses to write about sex as an option paints the issue in an unnecessarily child-like light. But perhaps one would have to listen to one of the many songs I’ve linked in the post to understand.
Good topic. It’s important because the Grammys aren’t about the music but about our culture and creating icons. What irritates me (and lots of things irritate me) is that I’m not sure who is doing the picking. Not me or anybody I know. As media further “conglomerates” itself, it becomes increasingly difficult to opt out and discover our own personal icons. Thank goodness for college radio stations and PBS.
Before posting, please read our blog moderation guidelines.
Post a Comment:
Copyright © 1992-2012 Psych Central. All rights reserved.
Site last updated: 24 May 2012
|
