Lacrosse ugliness at U.Va.

There's not a damned thing wrong with the lyrical content or the message of "How Will I Know."

 

It sends a bad message to young girls - you are defined by whether a cute boy likes you or not. Compare to Madonna - a feminist pariah in different ways - who would have never ceded control like that.

I'm a weird breed of feminist, Double J: A (largely) pro-life male.

 

A teenage girl wondering if a boy likes her is anti-feminist?

 

Like a virgin?

 

It's really not even worth talking about, guys. I made the point on the Whitney thread, and you can go there if you'd like to read further. It's not something I've thought long and hard about. It's just that while her songs were being played after her death, they seemed pretty shallow to me, particularly in this way. No big deal. Nothing worth talking about here, on this particular thread. I brought it up here just to make the connection to Rihanna, and in fact to diminish my Houston complaint in comparison. Please don't sidetrack this discussion on my account. I'm serious.

 

Pretty much none of your contentions are ever worth talking about, honestly.

Absolutely asinine.

 

Why make it personal?

 

It's not like Whitney Houston ended up entering a destructive marriage or anything. Why would we ever question the messages she was sending about male-female relations?

 

Oh my God, one has nothing to do with the other. She also sang "Greatest Love of All" and ended up married to the same guy. Explain that, genius.

As for your question, I'm not making anything personal. I'm stating a fact. You are the biggest know-it-all, yet you actually know very little. Point.

 

Look, on the scale of 1 to 100 that is the continuum of media that is corrosive to a girl's psychological development, 100 being Max Hardcore gonzo porn, "How Will I Know" barely rates a 1. But that doesn't make it utterly harmless. I don't like the message. I don't like adolescent girls basing their self-esteem and self-image through the prism of a boy's attention/affection. And that's the song's message: "There's a boy I know/He's the one I'm dreaming of." I feel like Houston - well, her lyric writer, but she bears responsibility for belting the lyrics - puts the male on a pedestal and sets herself up prostrate to him. In a song that uses words like "boy" - meaning the narrator is probably under 18 - I think that's a destructive message. Now, is listening to "How Will I Know" going to lead to stripping and blowing bums for crack money? No. But media's effect is cumulative. And the lyrics are another piece, however slight, of a message I don't feel is particularly helpful to a developing self-image.

 

Yeah. Like no prominent male artist ever sang devotional lyrics like these on a recording early in their career, barely out of their teens:

"If there's anything that you want
If there's anything I can do
Just call on me, and I'll send it along
With love, from me to you."

It was only the biggest hit the Beatles ever had in their homeland. Didn't impact any of their relationships going forward that I know of.

You don't like the message of a particular song? Don't listen to the fucking song. Problem solved.

 

I think that what is different in the two equations is the power structure of society that is in place. That's the framework you have to analyze it within. I don't love boys getting that message, either - and studies have shown that adolescent boys can actually fall harder in "love" than adolescent girls. But for most of history, men have held the collective power in society. So it's more troublesome when a girl is receiving than message than a boy, simply because the message for the girl is reinforced by everything else in society's power structure. The presidency. Congress. CEO's. Advertising frequently sends the message that women are objects. In other words, looking at two songs with similar messages, one does not equal one. Plus, I would like to think that our understanding of gender and media had advanced a little bit from 1964 to 1987. There was a so-called sexual revolution in between.