Research into song lyrics about sexual violence reveals that they both support and empower women

Posted on December 7, 2009
Filed Under Domestic Violence, England, Media, Publication, Rape and Sexual Assault, Reseach, Violence Against Women | Comments Off

Back in 1962, the Crystals released a song called He Hit Me (And it Felt like a Kiss). “If he didn’t care for me,” warbled one of the most popular American “girl groups” of the day, “I could have never made him mad. But he hit me and I was glad.”

Deborah Finding has recently completed a PhD thesis entitled Give Me Myself Again – Sexual Violence Narratives in Popular Music. The first part of that title is taken from a song by Tori Amos, whom she describes as “the patron saint of sexual violence”, having written a song about her own rape.

Finding has spent a lot of time travelling to gigs in the US and the UK with Amos’s fans and carrying out online surveys into how they respond to her music. “I expected 50 or so responses to my questions,” she says, “but received over 2,000. Some 98% of the respondents said that they used her music as a means of emotional support.”

What prevents many more women from “opening up” is a fear they won’t be believed. “It’s very difficult to tell a story of what’s happened to you if it doesn’t conform to what people expect,” she points out. And she’s critical of television dramas that perpetuate the myth that most assaults and rapes are carried out by strange men lurking in dark alleys.

Most assailants are known to the victims. “I’ve found a diversity of narratives in pop music that I haven’t found in other sections of the media.”

Around the end of the 80s and the early 90s, she says, domestic violence was being seen as a social as well as an individual problem. “So there were quite a few songs reflecting feminist consciousness about things going on behind closed doors.”

Tracy Chapman sang about hearing screaming Behind the Wall and the police coming late if they come at all. Then there was Suzanne Vega’s My Name Is Luka (“Walked into the door again; if you ask, that’s what I’ll say”) and the Beautiful South’s Cry Freedom for the Woman in the Wall. She’s wailing and crying but “has no voice at all”.

And, says Finding: “Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crowe wrote songs about grey areas of sexual exploitation, where young women were being exploited by older men.”

These are female artists for the most part. But what about the men? What about “gangsta” rap and hip-hop, and their alleged encouragement of aggressively misogynistic attitudes? “That’s been written about elsewhere,” she points out, “and it worries me that there’s usually a racist element to these discussions. Black artists are condemned, while white bands like the Rolling Stones and the Stranglers get away with deeply unpleasant lyrics. I was more interested in analysing the way that women were narrating their own experience of sexual violence or how they imagined other women’s experience.”

The Crystals singing about hits feeling like kisses – at least they don’t write them like that any more. Or do they? “We’ve gone full circle in the post-feminist era,” Finding says. “Florence and the Machine, hotly tipped for this year’s Mercury prize, recently came out with A Kiss With a Fist is Better Than None, equating violence with passion in a way that sounds depressingly familiar.”

Part of a longer article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/24/sexual-violence-pop-lyrics-empower

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