If you are a straight woman (or anyone of any sex/gender/orientation!), I would love it if you would reblog this and snip out everything I said and talk about how your shoulder-avatar dynamics work in terms of songs about sex/love/desire by women, or by men, or whatever, in whatever genre you like. I mean, it’s endlessly fascinating to me, how people choose to position themselves in relation to the songs they like and the personalities in them.
Because he asked for it.
I have an interesting response to this question. I mean, I could write about great Tori Amos songs about masturbation, etc. but what really popped into my head, just now, was the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Which is a song I LOVE despite it being one of the worst of the Stones’ usually-bad creepy-misogynist songs. But I love it.
I love the way Mick Jagger enunciates “Siamese cat of a girl,” somewhere between a purr and a snarl. And when I sing along…well, it’s not entirely a shoulder-avatar sort of situation, but I certainly don’t identify with the girl.
So am I reading myself into Mick’s shoes and words, there? Am I projecting myself back into one of those relationships where I basically called all the shots? The rotten me I know is in there, the one that gloried in telling my ex to kiss my boots, she loves this song and she loves to shake her hips to it.
Sometimes I think, though, that instead of reading myself into Mick I am the girl and I’m laughing at him because he THINKS that he’s got me under his thumb. Oh yeah, he thinks I don’t look at anyone else because I bat my eyelashes at him and wear that dress he likes. It’s in that “Ain’t it the truth, babe?” where he’s not sure, he has to check. Am I really in control, baby? Tell me I’m the man.
The way I turn this song back around on him is 10,000 times more strangely empowering and sexy than anything in “You’re So Vain.”
(See also, my reaction to any number of Guns’n’Roses songs or, let’s face it, a huge amount of the dickswinging rock’n’roll I listen to.)
If we’re going to talk great female desire songs, I have to go with Fiona Apple’s “First Taste,” which is in about 180 degrees the opposite direction, slow and sexy like sweaty morning kisses. She’s begging for a first taste but she knows she’s going to get it, that she’s just speeding up the process. Like that slow smiling moment when I know he wants to kiss me and I’m just waiting for him to get it together enough to do it. Yes. That. Fiona more than anyone is the one I sing along with, the one whose position in the song is almost always my own.
