I was also fourteen the very first time I hurt myself. I remember wanting to escape. Run away from it all but mostly from my own body. A body I was repeatedly told was “wrong”. I was tragic in the awkward way that young girls can be tragic. The details of that day are hazy, but the pain remains with me, no matter how long ago it happened. Had “Born to Die” existed, I would have probably turned it into a personal anthem. Like many girls that age, I was in pain, and music was a respite. I would have also sung “Swinging in the backyard/ pull up in your fast car/ whistling my name” if such song had existed. Because I liked boys. Boys who hardly ever even noticed me, more preoccupied with other girls, you know, the cute ones. I wasn’t unpopular, oh no. I wasn’t hated either. I was just an unnoticed loser. The girl who makes an arse of herself in public because she cannot dance, because she is not naturally graceful, not attractive in the right ways. So now, I listen to Lana del Rey, not because I still want to be her, but because I have not yet learned to love the fourteen year old I once was. And Del Rey sings for that girl, for her desires, for her longing. She sings for some of us who could not fit in the right ways no matter how we tried, those who grew up wishing to be noticed, to be saved, to be taken away. I know I did. It was a lonely world and I did not have words for those feelings. I just knew I didn’t fit.
I have all kinds of problems with this Tiger Beatdown piece. For one thing, the author doesn’t mention any women’s criticisms of LDR, despite the fact that there are lots of those pieces worth reading.
But what really gets me is the portion above, in which the author describes how she would have idolized LDR as a teenager. It seems to contradict her defense, because what it really acknowledges is that Del Rey embodies a standard of beauty and romance that teenage girls simultaneously identify with and then beat themselves up over being unable to attain. She’s not “singing for” girls like the writer (as a teenager) because she represents them — but they are her audience, because she’s playing into a fairy tale that will only make them more dissatisfied with their own lives. Why is that kind of false consciousness something to be celebrated from a feminist perspective?
