I was thinking Annie Get Your Gun. Annie Oakley – who laments “But my score with a feller / Is lower than a cellar / Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun!” – is a better sharpshooter than her love-interest Frank Butler – which riles his male ego, to the point where he goes off with a different Wild West show. When they meet again they’re butting heads – “Anything you can do, I can do better! / I can do anything better than you!” In the end, Sitting Bull talks Annie into throwing a shooting match with Frank, and she wins him and is happy. The story subverts sexism by making the woman tough and independent and even superior to the man, but reinforces it by sending the message that superior women are better off hiding it, because, after all, what really matters is pleasing your man and a woman needs a man to complete her.
Precisely. Mrs P overheard just the title lyric and snorted about this song but as you say, it’s actually about a lonely man kidding himself that all he needs is a maid, when actually he knows he wants a relationship.
Ah! That explains a less-known song of Stevens’ – “My Lady D’Arbanville.”
We are going around in circles at this point. But I think you need to consider more deeply what it would take for the cultural factors to change. I would suggest that for that to occur, women have to be treated more equally. And that has to involve *changing away from *the chivalrous model that underpins your views. One side of chivalry is being very kind to women. The other inherent side is that this results in women being seen as people to whom one has to be especially kind, ie less robust.
IMHO, you are part of the problem you decry, you just don’t realise it.
But it isn’t reasonable. It’s actually ridiculous. Art mines certain rich veins of human emotion. Sex, love, relationship breakdown, poverty, loneliness, alienation etc. There are musical genres that have developed focus on particular things. Blues for example tends historically to be about poverty or relationship breakdown or both. You just can’t have blues which is about having a decent income and being in a stable relationship with someone you are very comfortable with. It would be boring as fuck and it just isn’t what the genre is about. Blues, and heavy metal are acts.
You know the actors who have a reputation for playing bad guys in movies are actually just regular guys who you’d probably quite like, right?
WBB seems to be unapologetically ageist.
Also, his discomfort with the words make love and lover is bizarre. He needs to take it up with a therapist.
Of the stuff I’m familiar with, early Beatles is rife with cringe-worthy misogyny. More so than the Rolling Stones.
Man, I dunno, seems like hair splitting to me.
Can you really be serious?
Have you ever heard songs like “Under My Thumb”, about how great it is to have a woman totally emotionally dependent on you, or “Yesterdays Papers”, about the worthlessness an old girlfriend (not because there is anything wrong with her, just because the singer has had her, and she is now discarded)? How about “Midnight Rambler,” a celebration of violent rape? There are many, many more Stones songs that are overtly and often quite extremely disrespectful and objectifying about women.
By comparison, The Beatles are, with the one exception of “Run For Your Life”, well, not really misogynistic at all. If you are trying really, really hard you can probably detect faint hints of it in a few songs, some of which touch on themes of possessiveness or jealousy, but that is going to be true of practically any male artist from any era. (And probably quite a few female ones too - and yes I am talking about misogyny, not misandry. Set your standards too absurdly high and everyone who is being remotely emotionally honest will fail them.)
Don’t forget, Brown Sugar.
@xizor: “Early in his career Eminem was considered extremely sexist and misogynistic. Now he is rap royalty.”
Those were his good songs though. Of course they were utterly horrible but in a comedic way.
Did you see the *Onion *satire article: “Eminem Terrified As Daughter Begins Dating Man Raised On His Music” ? 