The world split open: telling the truth(s) about ourselves
One of my favorite female musicians, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, wrote in her blog this week about the BBC’s censorship of her song Oasis, “a tongue-in-cheek, ironic up-tempo pop song…about a girl who got drunk, was date raped, and had an abortion.” The BBC thinks that her lyrics “make light of abortion, rape, and religion.” Amanda, who is herself a survivor of date rape, writes,
our COLLECTIVE freedom to approach situations with humor, with irony, with anger, with sadness, with darkness, with an edge, from a different perspective, from within the situation…it’s ESSENTIAL.
we have to agree about this or we ALL get in trouble….
in the united states in 1996, about 1.3 MILLION women had an abortion. about half those women were under 25.
and i can assure you, there were approximately 1.3 million different reactions, experiences and stories behind those abortions.
countless girls have been raped or date-raped. are we allowed to talk about it, joke about it, turn it over from every side and try figure it our own confused reaction to it?
or is that just too icky, uncomfortable … and shameful?
should we just cry about it demurely and hope that the proper reaction, the one that society deems appropriate, will make it go away?
Her answer is profanely emphatic. As it should be. No one has the right to tell us what is an appropriate, acceptable reaction to what happens to us, to our bodies–to tell us what to feel, what to say, what to hide.
As so often happens, there’s been a story floating around the news piranha tank for the last couple of weeks that has become thematically linked in my mind. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard or read about the infamous octuplets. And you probably also heard some scrap of the reams of judgment and second-guessing unleashed in response to the woman who bore them, already mother to six babies: accusations of selfishness or insanity, suggestions she was coerced by a religious family, shock and dismay and handwringing. Because no woman in her right mind could ever want that many children.
There is a legitimate question for me about the ethics of the fertility doctor (unknown) who implanted that many embryos at once. But I was mostly struck by the level of invective against this woman who wanted so many children, who wanted and felt this unacceptable thing. Here is another woman whose body and reproduction has become an arena for societal expression of disapproval. Sure, this isn’t something I would choose or advise…but who am I or anyone else to tell her what she should want? Even if religious convictions had been involved, does that mean that she doesn’t really want what she wanted?
It made me angry. I argued with a lot of people, a lot of liberal/leftist people, about this last week. Is the concept of choice really that hard?
Finally, in this loosely connected trifecta of Items That Made Erin Think About RJ Lately, I read a fascinating article in Salon Magazine last night titled The Great Girl Gross-Out. In it, Rebecca Traister considers how women writers are becoming increasingly frank and in-your-face about the messiness of our bodies in our daily lives, in birth, in menstruation, in orgasm. Traister seems ambivalent about this trend:
Whether or not you view female excretions as vile, or whether…you view menstruation as “cleansing impurities out of your body,” there is no question that many women find the process of self-revelation, as [Jezebel editor Anna] Holmes said, cathartic. It’s about breaking certain silences, yes. It’s about letting loose with long pent-up questions and anecdotes and curiosities and fears. It’s about laughing about things that might otherwise make you wail with shame or pain or fear.
And at the same time, it can be about getting attention, performing, flaunting and acting out your own vulnerabilities, getting noticed for your willingness to debase yourself or win a gross-out contest that once could have only been dominated by boys. It can be painfully self-punishing to read and self-objectifying to write. It can be liberating, and poignant, and it can also be irritating and crass. All at the same time!
Personally, I think Traister misses the point a bit. It’s not about debasement or self-objectification. Her own article begins with a famous quote from Muriel Rukeyser, and I will end with it:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself?
The world would split open.
Because the truth isn’t easy. Because the truth might make people uncomfortable. Because it’s important that we have the freedom to be irritating and crass, instead of feeling pressured to be “the cleaner, more groomed, less crass sex,” in the words of Jezebel blogger Moe Tkacik. The freedom to express feelings about our bodies, if we want to, that society may not find acceptable, appropriate, or palatable. Seeking attention? Maybe. But haven’t our truths been ignored and shamed into silence long enough?
February 12th, 2009 at 12:31 am
I like the links you make between these situations! A side note: I think it’s interesting that the song was censored because it was considered by the BBC to be “making light” of rape. What would our feelings be if it was a male singer whose lyrics appeared to do this, or we didn’t know the artist’s background story? Would it matter, and why? Context can mean a lot in this kind of thing…
February 12th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Madison, I think context is huge. For one thing, the song is told from the point of view of the survivor of the rape–I can’t imagine a male singer ever writing a song like this in the first place, or being able to “sell” it if he did. (Of course men can be rape victims too, and if a male singer WAS telling a story from that perspective, it would be a different matter). I think knowing background story matters less than the fact that this is clearly a woman’s narrative.
Basically the lyrics tell the first-person story of a girl who has had all these terrible things happen to her, relates them in a matter of fact way, and then says “but I don’t care” b/c she’s excited to go see her favorite band. There’s a lot of layers there–the layer where it’s tongue in cheek, the layer of teenage shrug-it-off mentality, and even a layer of empowerment: yeah, this bad stuff happened, but I’m not letting it bring me down. And it’s clear from the media reaction that this is “wrong.” She’s supposed to be a victim. She’s supposed to be sad about it. Why isn’t she? What’s her problem?
February 20th, 2009 at 5:51 am
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