Feb 06 2012
∞
“ Phair’s overall point appears to be that she’s happy to see women expressing themselves whatever the quality of that expression, just because it evens out the divide between women and men a little bit more. After watching a Super Bowl where people had to apologize over a word that means “poop” but nobody had to apologize for making gazillions of dollars on marketing messages reinforcing the repulsive notion that the world revolves around male chauvinists ages 18 to 34, we couldn’t agree more! But her argument falls apart in a couple of places. First, when she talks about “the true voices” of women “self-expressing,” isn’t Phair pulling us back into that whole horrible “authenticity” morass? Second, as far as we understand the harshest criticism of Del Rey, it’s not that she’s “wanting and taking like a man,” it’s that she’s “wanting and taking” just like a stereotypical, anti-feminist conception of a woman: That is, she isn’t wanting at all; she’s existing only as an object of desire, completely in thrall to the male gaze (an argument David Letterman creepily underscored last week when he fawned over her as if she were one of his female employees).
— This is only one of the fantastic paragraphs in Marc Hogan’s Liz Phair-on-Lana Del Rey post.
