Is there something that discourages women from being directly aggressive toward the men? Power dynamic, maybe? Patriarchal hangover? Men could (and maybe still can) get away with de facto polygamy, and women sometimes lack the physical, economic, and social leverage to enforce their objection.I'm not sure there's one answer to this. In part, perhaps, it's because girls aren't supposed to be suitors (as the women doing the dialogue that Amber's writing about point out), they're not supposed to pick and choose: but once there's a man in the picture, we're all supposed to go into lioness mode to defend our right to him. It's as if the purest assertion of femininity is in keeping a man, a la Loretta Lynn (about whom I will never say an actual bad thing, but still):
You prove you're a woman in that powerful sense not to a man, but to other women. I mean, I love The Donnas, love them in that big, wild, uncontrolled sense that they represent a part of me, but even in "Take It Off," their fabulous hookup anthem, they can assert desire, but the mandate is still for the guy to make that definitive move:
There are those competing urges again: "I'm trying hard to think / And I think that I want you on the floor...I get what I want / And I like what I see" is that great, uninhibited expression of wanting, but the action's actually both crude and demure. The singer demands "stop staring at my D cup / Don't waste time just give it to me / Come on baby, just fill me up." It's direct, but she's not going to make the move and unzip his Levis.
Obviously, I'm far beyond Taylor Swift and "You Belong To Me," beyond Brandi and "This Boy Is Mine." But I do really think that line women walk in pop, between being fully realized human beings with desires, and demands, and needs, and between being supplicants, is important. In the songs, we want to get chosen, to get taken, to be desired by a guy, but we want him to be the right guy. We want to choose, without having to cross the dance floor, to drag the guy to the floor, to the bed, to the altar. It's a horrendous position for us to put ourselves in: it's dishonest, it is an equation for failure and humiliation. But it's true. Putting yourself out there is so horribly risky. One of the reasons I love UGK's "International Players Anthem" (please, please watch this, if only for the sight of Andre 3000 in a kilt declaring, in response to the question "Why you dressed like Roddy Piper?" "I got Scottish in my family.") so, so much is because it's one of the only songs I've ever heard where a man is negotiating that desire to be selected, but by the person he's picked out in advance. Bun B has this phenomenal (and of course totally problematic verse) verse:
Baby you been rollin' solo, time to get down with the team
The grass is greener on that other side, if know what I mean
I show you shit you never seen, the Seven Wonders of the World
And I can make you the eighth if you wanna be my girl
When I say my girl I don't mean my woman, that ain't my style
Need a real street stalker to walk a green mile
We pilin' up the paper on the dinin' room table
Cuz you able to realize that I'm the truth and not a fable
We rock the freshest sable, keep that 'chilla on the rack
What I look like with some thousand dollar shit up on my back?
I'm a million dollar mack that need a billion dollar bitch
Put my pimpin' in your life, watch ya daddy get rich
It's easy as A-B-C, simple as 1-2-3
Get down with U-G-K, Pimp C, B-U-N B
Cuz what's a ho with no pimp? And what's a pimp with no ho's?
The wordplay's fantastic, as is the delivery. But it's how the verse ends that kills:
Don't be lame, you know the game and how it goes
We tryin' to get choseTruer words never spoken. If only we could stop playing these games.