Published at Popmatters.com, October 31, 2005
http://www.popmatters.com/music/features/051031-lizphair.shtml
It
was a splendid time for a teen girl to become a feminist. The Year of
the Woman, 1992, saw a record number of American women elected to
public office, the riot grrl scene was in full swing, and Bill Clinton
was feeling our pain years before he would feel up his intern.
Influenced heavily by Madonna's merging of sexual display with money
and prestige in the 1980s, I embraced a nascent form of feminism
claiming women could fuck their way to equality with men if we were
just sexy enough. Young women like me were hanging our sexual
self-definition on the fashionable hook of whore chic and called
ourselves "third wave" feminists in ideological opposition to second
wave women's liberationists of the 1970s who rejected sexual
objectification and opposed pornography. It seemed like a good idea at
the time.
What's sometimes known as "fuck me feminism" has been much discussed lately, thanks to the recently published Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,
by Ariel Levy, a third-wave feminist who crashed on the shores of
failed expectations. The book dissects the rotting carcass of modern
American feminism like a CSI specialist and finds a hollow
heart where once pumped a riot grrl love muscle. Amid this shit storm
of criticism aimed at pro-sex feminism comes Liz Phair's new album, Somebody's Miracle.
After
watching the video for the first single, "Everything to Me" and
sampling songs from the lackluster new release, I realize the timing
couldn't be better, because Phair is so remarkably similar to the women
Levy writes about in Female Chauvinist Pigs that I'm tempted to
send her a copy. The video for the single features legs sticking out
from under a guitar and cleavage bared as rain whips the clothes
covering Liz tautly around her body (her hair stays oddly windswept). I
wondered what happened to the brazen third waver poster girl, and I
wondered what happened to the agenda of sincere sexual satisfaction we
young feminists seemed so keen on in the 1990s.
And Phair, smart woman that she is, wonders too. On October 8 she told the St. Petersburg Times,
"I start to look around and it's like, 'God, it's depressing how many
images of scantily clad women are everywhere.' Part of me starts to
think, 'Doesn't this mean something?' "
When Liz Phair's 1993 record Exile in Guyville,
came out, featuring Phair on the cover with wide-open mouth and
wide-open shirt, third wavers like me picked up enough to recognize her
sexual explicitness was different than Madonna's boy-toy shtick. The
music was as sexually aggressive as the cover and slightly out of tune
in charming ways that worked. Liberally sprinkled throughout the lyrics
were mentions of blow jobs, cunts, sucks and fucks, words bluntly used by many third wave feminists to try to reclaim them from their traditional place in guyville, much as queer was reclaimed by gays.
Exile's
paean to abject horniness, "Flower," received particular attention
because of its frankly sexual lyrics ("I want to be your blow-job
queen"), but the album's relevance to young feminists is more properly
found in such songs as "Girls! Girls! Girls!" and "Fuck and Run." The
first chronicles crass power-playing through sex and features Liz
licking the sugarcoating off boy-girl relations as my friends and I had
experienced it. Sex for us was more about ego boosting and
one-upmanship than mutual, pleasurable activities undertaken for their
own sake. Despite shouts of sexual liberation and the rush of
discovered sexual power, the emotional hollowness of one-night stands
-- as captured in the flagship song "Fuck and Run" -- told a different
tale. A veritable third wave anthem for good reason, "Fuck and Run"
combines the yearning for sexual pleasure young women were beginning to
demand with the lack of good sense this burning urge led us to adopt
when conducting our affairs: "I woke up in your arms / And almost
immediately I felt sorry." The song is the female equivalent of the
Jewish saying "A stiff prick turns the mind to shit" and wryly admits
that sometimes promiscuity isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Critics
loved it. Young women really loved it. Liz Phair became an overnight
indie sensation. Madonna had recently released the insanely overpriced
and embarrassingly tacky photo book Sex, but we burgeoning
anti-capitalistas -- starting our own zines, knitting our own clothes,
starting our own bands rather than passively accepting Cosmo,
designer duds and just listening to music -- were seeing through such
slick marketing tactics. It was the new age of grunge and
self-deprecatingly sincere rock music. Phair seemed to fill the void
Madonna left with a new sensibility, and the press was eager to see how
she would fare in the changing feminist and musical worlds. Phair
opened her 1994 album Whip-smart with devastating lyrics sung
monotonously over plodding piano accompaniment: "I met him at a party
and he told me how to drive him home / He said he liked to do it
backwards / I said that's just fine with me / That way we can fuck and
watch TV." Once again Phair chronicled an experience both intensely
personal yet bizarrely common to myself and other young women I knew. I
was in college at the time, going to strip clubs and engaging in sexual
adventuring that usually seemed a hundred times sexier in drunken
theory than in drunken practice. My friends and I knew we liked and
wanted sex, but the power games and awkward, disconnected rubbings that
made up the bulk of our sexual experiences weren't fulfilling our
robust desires.
The
confessional, intense singer-songwriter women of 1994 helped young
women find their way to third wave feminism. They embodied the feminist
slogan "The personal is political" and gave it a fresh rereading. Tori
Amos sang about masturbation and humped her piano, Ani DiFranco bent
sexual orientation and gender rules, and Sarah MacLachlan sang about an
obsessed stalker. The zine scene, led by Bratmobile's Girl Germs
zine, showed us sisters doing it for themselves whether "it" was being
in an all-woman band, writing a magazine photocopied at the library or
otherwise butting in where musical and political alternaculture
dominated by men usually told women to butt out.
But
it wasn't long before such earnest singers and zines were supplanted by
the more sexualized feminist culture cropping up, notably the
hypersexualized zine-turned-glossy Bust. It became a rule, for
example, that every other article about the band Le Tigre had to
mention singer Kathleen Hanna's stint as a stripper. From these
swirling pop culture waters "fuck me feminism" properly arose, and
those feminists who presented themselves and feminism most sexually,
like Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle, were crowned by the media as new
heirs to the feminist throne.
In the four long years between Whip-smart, and Liz Phair's next album, the underrated Whitechocolatespaceegg,
we third wavers sure could have used her sisterly advice. Britney
Spears was leaving Lolita in the dust as she raced to be the most
masturbatable girl-woman in the world, and the Internet made every home
computer an outlet for hardcore pornography. During Phair's hiatus, she
got married and had a child. Phair's new album was more polished, but
it was undeniably Liz. Yet nestled between the upbeat, catchy songs
"Baby Got Going" and "Ride" was the off-putting, S&M-themed "Johnny
Feelgood". I would always raise a brow at the lines, "I hate him all
the time but I still get up / When he knocks me down and he orders me
around / Cause it loosens me up and I can't get enough." I consider
myself an experienced, sexually educated woman but something about
eroticizing abusive imagery didn't sit right me. All the postmodernism
and deconstruction I cultivated in college couldn't make that song all
right, and I often skipped to the next track, "Polyester Bride,"
because I was much more onboard with drinking for free because the
bartender thinks I have pretty eyes.
As
Phair had a few years earlier, I moved from East to West and settled in
Portland, Oregon. There, in the thick of alternative culture, at the
birthplace of riot grrl, I lived across the street from a strip club,
where I would watch prostitutes turn tricks in the parking lot from my
living-room window. I had moved my porn collection with me but found
myself not wanting to watch them for reasons I couldn't quite explain.
I became a serious activist for women's reproductive rights, first with
Planned Parenthood and then as leader of a local sexual health activist
group. I read the third wave essay anthology Cunt by Inga Muscio like every other young feminist at the time and waited patiently for the next Liz Phair album.
Liz Phair,
released in 2003, literally laid bare what was going wrong. The cover
image of a mostly naked Liz straddling a guitar with windswept hair
made her look like every other bleached blonde sex kitten saturating
the music scene. Scorn for this Waterworld of an atrocity has
been heaped on by many before me, but I'm not going to point the finger
at Liz or even the producers who helped create this album-ination. Liz Phair
needs to be plugged into a larger cultural context in order to figure
out what went wrong for both female musicians and the young feminists
who used to attend Lilith Fair.
Madonna
made a comeback in the new millennium with a song whose video featured
her as a pimpette stuffing bills into bras at a strip club, and
Britney's 15-minutes of fame didn't fade but revved into a 24-hour
downloadable porn loop. Punctuate that last sentence with the painfully
publicity-minded fake lesbian kiss at the 2003 MTV music awards.
Formerly earnest Jewel bared her midriff on the cover of her
forgettable 2003 album, and suggestively named artists Peaches and Pink
were singing about sucking on everything they could get their mouths
around while putting on stage shows with stripped blow up dolls,
dominatrixes, and lap dancing. I can't fault Liz for trying to keep up
appearances with the repressively commercial sexual atmosphere at her
workplace, but the air of resignation in the lyrics of Liz Phair I can't abide.
In
"Love/Hate," Phair sings about giving up the quest to understand the
war between boys and girls. She decides there's no point in trying to
change anything so "you might as well get on the train." More often
thrashed in the media was "H.W.C." (Hot White Cum), a simple tune that
praised sperm as a beauty product and completely lacked any of the
self-effacing complexity of her earlier work. "Fuck and Run" expertly
merged casual sex with vulnerability and the alienating feelings that
accompanied fucking when you didn't really want to, and it even managed
to toss in a hopeful yearning for a boyfriend "who makes love cause
he's in it." "H.W.C." replaced the fleshed-out range of conflicting
emotions surrounding sex with a facile ode to splooge. Like Phair, I
grew up and found a delightfully fulfilling sexual partner too, but the
joys of sex I'm experiencing these days are more profound than a
fixation on fluids.
Is
Liz Phair a female chauvinist pig? When Levy writes about young women
being female chauvinist pigs, she's not necessarily pointing the finger
at them for pro-sex-industry feminism gone awry. She is simply not
taking their word that stripping is beneficial for women just because
it's marketed as being feminist. When Phair sings in the new song
"Table For One" that "I want to bring down all those people who drank
with me / Watching happily my humiliation," I hear the women
interviewed in Levy's book question the binge fucking that hasn't made
them happy but don't know who to blame for feeling degraded. I hear
myself at the strip clubs I used to visit, joining with men in
humiliating other women on sexual display, happy to not be the target
of such judgments for a short while. I believe that Phair, like many
women, cut the best deal with patriarchy a talented, attractive woman
can make, and she shouldn't be cast off as a sexed-up sellout any more
than other women forced to navigate the choppy, pornified currents of
our time.
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