Athena, I am not

So, it's embarrassing confession time: As a child, I listened almost exclusively to piped-through-the-radio pop country music. Right before I hit my teens, or maybe right after, but regardless – as breasts and hair grew in places where neither had existed before, Pavement, Built to Spill, and The Pixies (and others) began to replace Reba, Garth Brooks, and Shania Twain in my music collection.

Recently, though, I thought I had been returning to my roots, as I have acquired a fondness for good alt-country music, and today, while listening to Neko Case's “The Virginian,” I thought that surely I could stomach the twang of my youth.

It turns out that the twang should have been the least of my worries. The ridiculously over-produced vocals are next in line, but that's largely a matter of to what one grows accustomed, so I forgive even that. What I can't forgive is the lyrical content. Behold, an excerpt from Shania Twain's “Any Man of Mine:”

“Any man of mine better be proud of me
Even when I'm ugly he still better love me
And I can be late for a date that's fine
But he better be on time.”

An alternate title might be "Any Man of Mine (Needs to Have a Fetish for Being on The Losing End of Double Standards)". The rest of the song continues in that vein, with the same formula for each verse – formula being: Lines 1 and 2 = Ok, that's sweet and cute enough, but certainly not a feminist battle cry. Lines 3 and 4 = What the hell? You're a bitch!

I remembered this song as a happy, bouncy, “yay women!” song that I bounced around my room to when I was ten, before anyone ever told me that I couldn't dance. I really wanted to give it a chance today, but I couldn't. Instead, all I could think was, “Why did my parents let me listen to this?!” I firmly believe that this kind of message fucks kids up just as much, if not more, than the expletive used previously. Owning one's dysfunctionality is well and good, mind you, but it's like owning the electrical problems in your house – you're going to fix that, right? Shania owns her dysfunctionality, then throws a square dance in it. The song celebrates the kind of petty, emotional manipulation towards which girls and young women are already inclined to engage, and it tells boys and young men that they need to lie back, accept, and enjoy the abuse.

And I danced and sang along to it when I was ten.

I'm a little bit shocked that I did, if you can't tell. I'd like to believe that, in every moment of my childhood, I was an adult in a small frame, wise-beyond-her-years, and all-knowing – the kind of kid that didn't need parenting or teaching. But the fact remains that I had no basis for knowledge of how to interact with that song. I'd hardly even had a healthy friendship at that age, and I had never seen, up close, a good, strong romantic relationship and known what I was seeing. Maybe a little teaching would have done me some good.

A dialogue

Typical of how I usually write, with a noted lack of characterization, just a “he” and a “she” -- “he,” with palpable life experiences behind him, the capacity to make more, and a few real regrets; “she,” in love with the idea of having had such a life, too caught up to live it.

“What keeps you up at night?”he asked with amused curiosity.

“Guilt,” she answered, as though the very word were made of lead.

“Oh? What about?”

She let his grammar slide, but still thought about how if learned people spoke naturally, instead of trying to make themselves sound intellectual, she would enjoy conversations much more.

He had spoken off the cuff, and without a second thought.

“Everything.”

There was silence.

“Um, like, last night – how I'd promised to write a letter to my boyfriend, but I didn't.”

There was more silence.

“This morning, when he called me, I told him I'd been too tired and sleepy last night to write. That'll probably keep me up tonight,” she told him, trying to sound downtrodden, but unable to keep just a smidge of pride from sneaking into her inflection.

“Did you ever think there might be a purpose to guilt? That maybe it keeps waking you up because you need to fucking do something? And you can do something. It's not like you keep waking up because you want to tell your kid who was never born that you love it, or because you had all the time in the world to write a book, never did, and now you have Alzheimer's. Those folks can't do a thing but keep waking up, over and over again. You can, and you don't. Why?”

“I . . . I don't know.”

“I do. Because people like you are fascinated with those people – you think they're more interesting than us fools who actually do things. You want to be the object of your fascination, so everyone else will think that you're interesting, the kind of person they write books and movies about. But the whole world is made up of people like you, and not one of you takes the time to really look at each other. You don't know if anyone's suffering or not, because you have to keep up the illusion of your own pain. So you pretend to give credence to their troubles, show some superficial sympathy, and never notice the difference when someone is really hurting. And you know, the real ones, the ones who really can't do anything – guess who they look at and want to be?”

She stared at him blankly.

“Good answer. They want to be me.”

It's too bad talk doesn't motivate action anymore.