These songs (one for every year of my life) are the panorama of my coming-of-age, and revisiting their meaning has reminded me what troubled times make easy to forget: that womanhood is a language, a shared experience that is often thankless, but always, always worth it in the end. These women taught me how to be a woman, more than anything and anyone ever did, helped me rescue myself from the disappointment life set up up for, and they still do today - because I am far from done learning. ![]() ![]() Hence, as I grew more aware, I found my attention pulled away from the ostentatious glitz of the big screen, as these voices nestled more deeply in my ear. This, because they had something to say, and could not care less about being proper or nice while they were doing it. They were rougher around the edges, less glamorous in some cases, even intentionally off-putting. The women I listened to spoke their truth in their own voices: and what a voice it was. Where cinema dealt blow after insidious blow to what little I knew of self-worth, and literature often pursued that tendency to glamorize problematic characters, it was music that saved me in the end. Instead of being horrified, I shrugged it off, as if to say: and? what’s the big deal? I knew the damage had already been done when, at barely six years old, I got sucked into a documentary about the (often painful) transformations Old Hollywood starlets had to undergo in order to guarantee a successful career. As a child who felt ugly in every sense of the word, the pitfalls of beauty were more than worth it, if it meant crystalizing and elevating oneself to an almost divine status. Never mind that these almost never matched up to the much grislier realities these women endured daily. ![]() Women in film represented, for me, the epitome of what I should aspire to: they were not people, they were ideas, ideals, muses, “It” girls, icons, symbols, emblems. I broke my teeth over the subtle violence directed at women in movies, gorged on the poison we were served in stories, acquiesced in ready acceptance at whatever standards we were to be held to, in the sphere of popular culture: and why shouldn’t I? I, like many other girls, grew up on a healthy diet of impossible expectations and interesting stereotypes that taught me what to expect from society, from love, from success and from myself as I navigated the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |