![]() ![]() ![]() Too often, women are told to be nice, to grin and bear it, to not rock boats. It would take almost twenty years for me to start fully accepting that, but when I finally did, years later, it was Nina’s voice that gave me heart, taught me to stand up for myself and take back my narrative.Īnd set the record straight, set it straight It was my first time hearing that a man’s harmful behavior was not my fault. It also taught me something about myself, and the currency at which I sold my worth. “Blues for Mama”, hence, was a balm to my ears: it illustrated the inexplicable ways some men go about spreading rumors and being cruel to women, because they can. I was left reeling, but this would only be the first of many experiences with bitter, angry men, a lesson every girl, no matter her sexual orientation or gender identity, learns the hard way at one point or another. He became one of my worst bullies (verbal and physical), and continued harassing me until he transferred schools. ![]() A few weeks later, with no warning or explanation, he decided he didn’t like me anymore, and with that, his entire attitude did a 180. So I let myself get swept up into it, reveling in his attention, in the gifts he got me (Ring Pops, drawings, actions figures), in the gossip we stirred up, expecting that it would end at any moment - hell, precisely because it could end at any moment: because as far as I was concerned, in hindsight, attention-starved as I was, it’s obvious I wasn’t remotely interested in him, but in the comfort of being wanted. That anyone could notice me, let alone feel something for me, was utterly inconceivable. It was like a lightning bolt to my senses: I was meek, quiet, virtually a ghost. When I was in elementary school, a very cute boy whom I’d barely spoken to decided, one day, that he had a crush on me. 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. ![]()
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