as you know the main instrument of women's oppression is the word 'bitch'. it makes me open my mouth in an o and touch the flat four fingers of my tiny right hand to it in apparent shock. i deeply admire the sort of feminist who fears and loathes phonemes, and attributes patriarchal oppression to them. christ, at least they're not holding me responsible for my actual misogyny, which is a big relief, because it's been a struggle. what people don't understand - even though everyone says it all the time and even though it could not more obviously be false - is that words create reality. why are so many women struggling in poverty, sexual exploitation, abusive relationships? the root cause is 'bitch'. i do think it works particularly well applied by men to men, however. at any rate, to avoid saying or writing 'bitch', i refer to it as 'the bitch word'.
lily allen must be banned, because she's using intrinsically bad-for-women sounds.
if that means we must leave the grotesque idiocy and exploitation of hip hop and r&b videos without a response or critique, then so be it. we're too scared of the words to be able to respond at all. now you might think that it takes a bit of courage to do what lily alen did: it's like, faced with an actually oppressive musical world, she stood up to fight. you might think that, if lily allen were properly scared and intimidated by the word 'bitch' and couldn't use it at all, she would be frozen in capitulation in a world she despises. but at least she wouldn't be impolite. the coincidence of magic-of-words feminism with, say, the etiquette of the bourgeoisie circa 1956, is remarkable, and of course speaks to the origin of this sort of feminism. it's going to be amazingly difficult to eradicate the bitch word, of course. we need a sort of logocide that does to words what round-up does to weeds.
alright let me come off my conceit (which i sustained a bit too long. sorry). this whole thing goes for images too. consider, for example, leni riefenstahl's triumph of the will. it was intended to glorify the nazi regime. those images, though, are central in almost every visual presentation of nazism: they don't come pre-interpreted, and now we look with a horrified amazement. those same evil images help us understand, if nothing else, how the nazis wanted to present themselves. if you repressed those images, say under your austrian anti-nazi-propaganda laws, you're just depriving yourself of understanding, achieving a willful blindness. i think that makes the rise of neo-nazism more, not less likely.
now, lily allen's feminism on body image etc is well-(and extremely pointedly)expressed in that song, but it is pretty predictable. what is most interesting is the likewise-pointed critique of the way black women's bodies are depicted, for example, in music videos. now, that there is a bold and questionable move for a white artist. but if you think the nature of the images themselves is inherently exploitative, you really don't understand the way images work. lily has to be able to do that. we have to be able to watch it. and so, i say, the male r&b artist who produces the sort of images that allen is parodying has to be allowed to do it too, because there is no way to distinguish them by the nature of the images themselves. indeed, lily could have made almost as good a video by using actual clips from the sort of thing she is attacking, right? so if those images were repressed, lily's critique would be repressed too. the whole transaction of repression and silence, whether performed by an active censorship regime backed by force or by extreme social sanctions, if you ask me, leaves the culture untransformed or freezes it in place.
but the free circulation of images and words cuts in all sorts of dirrections, makes possible all sorts of critiques, parodies, ridicule, rejection, appropriation, redeployment. see, that video uses the oppressor's own images as a weapon to attack him. in the realm of images and words, that is the most effective weapon, the weapon actually most dangerous to the oppressive use of images etc: she shows you what these images actually mean. but you cannot do that if the images themselves are verboten. they use those images to lie. she uses them to comnfront us with the truth about our culture. this is absolutely typical, with both words and images, and you cannot tell who is going to make what creative re-interpretation. the last thing you want to do is make that impossible in a regime that silences or blinds people.
so the right response to that barrage on bet that so harms our daughters and so on, is not to shut down '106 and park', but to make videos like lily allen makes them. i showed that video to jane last night. and here's why: lily allen makes girls aware of what they're really watching, arms them with knowledge that they need to negotiate this world, gives them a new kind of critical distance, with a good beat. jane was absorbed by it.
now how serious is our situation, really? well thank god for youtube right now, and anything that displays lax enforcement of copyright law. obviously, you will not be seeing anything like that video (i mean the actual video, the words and images as she produced them) on television, which is insanely ironic. not on the radio. i would like to adapt this thing i'm writing right now into a column and pitch it, say, to the new york times. but my column about this in the times would be a complete enactment of mindless, pointless hypocrisy. i couldn't tell you what words i'm talking about. i couldn't link to the video i was writing about. i'd compose an absurd structure of euphemisms, evasions, and jive. i'd have to observe precisely the taboos i'm trying to expose as superstitious nonsense. go to a public school classroom and see if you can pull that thing up on one of the computers. no, extremely safe search is extremely on, like it is in china. by and large, we are trying to protect our daughters from lily allen's message, correct? we are repressing that mesage. not entirely, of course, and what we should do is watch for further encroachments while drawing attention to the braying asininity of basic media unfreedoms we all take for granted.
what sort of woman do i want my daughter to turn out to be? actually, i want her to be whatever she wants to be. but if i were saying, i'd say i want her to be a woman like lily allen: a woman with the guts and the vocabulary to say exactly what she means and to represent herself with truth, and to express that in whatever way seems most effective, most amusing, most creative, or most real.
