Miranda,
I was talking on the phone with my sister today about music and it hit me that the reason I took the time to google the songwriter on "Girl Crush" way back when I got LBT's album and heard it for the first time was because I couldn't quite put my finger on why I didn't just go onto the next track.
I live in a world with gay folks all around me. I've been to gay bars, gay weddings, shared holidays with gay folks and didn't think a thing about sending my preteen son across the country on a church trip with a male gay couple and a gay youth minister Like I said, hubby's old church had a high percentage of gay folks in the congregation.
Way back in the early 80's, I worked at a business college and we had two students who had formerly been male who had surgically transitioned to female. It wasn't that we told the other students about their change (high school transcripts were in their former names) but some of the other students had gone to high school with them when they were male so they knew. Bathroom use became a controversial issue and I stood, without a second thought, with the two students who had had sex changes.
This is an old, old, old issue.....been around for so many decades...and I was standing up for people 35 years ago without a thought.
Today it hit me though....and your right, I heard what was most commonly put in front of me in the media so often these past years...but that's not it.
What's "off" about it for me is the whole jealous of another woman's lips thing. We've all had relationships end and there are a lot of different emotions with it. Never once, ever, ever has it even remotely crossed my mind to think about what my ex is physically doing with a new woman. Personal privacy is personal privacy.
...and to superimpose myself over images of them....reminds me of a girl I used to work with who told me one day she laid in bed at night picturing what our co-workers looked liked having sex with their spouses. Ewwwww, ewwww, ewwww.
But then I don't listen to mainstream radio, didn't even know it was a single and certainly never called anybody anywhere about this song.
It's not the gay thing. It's the voyeuristic thing. I don't go there. It goes against my personal views that some things are private.
...and I guess I really don't understand why, after a break up, you'd bend yourself all up in a pretzel wanting to be someone else. There's nothing wrong with being yourself. Sometimes we all lose. Doesn't mean you should give up on yourself or who you are.
So I guess there's really two things bothering me about this song. Submerging yourself and giving up on yourself. This is so much an anti-women's lib song....from my generation, not the current generation. From mine though, when we were all taught to be submissive and submerge ourselves for our man and for men...and that's what we fought so hard against for so long...and so much of it was self-inflicted, reinforced by our families and culture.
Let me give you a personal example. When my oldest sister was a senior in high school and engaged to her future husband, she went over to her fiance's house one day, skipping school, and found him in bed with his neighbor. She came home crying and my mother told her that men have needs and that good girls didn't provide those needs so men were going to get them filled somewhere else. My sister wanted to break it off. My mom told her that was foolish. They got married a few months later.
We know how this story ends with my sister. Three years later, she was dead...but that's not what I'm saying here...or maybe it is. My generation fought so hard to break free of the cycle of submerging and submitting and it took me years myself.
Yet, here it is again...a woman I like ...in LBT...singing about submerging herself ...and it's self-inflicted.
Yeah, that's it for me. The whole gay thing is talked about so much that I didn't dig deep enough to figure it out.
