Making our Kickstarter reward playlist of “Songs We Love But Find Problematic,” and, um, “My Girls” kinda doesn’t pass the Willis Test, huh?
There actually does exist a ‘Willis Test’ version of this song, by Taken By Trees. It’s…uh…complicated. “With a little cat” instead of “with a little girl,” etc. So yeah.
I had totally forgotten about this! Maybe it’s just me being gender normative or whatever, but it’s funny, because when I hear “four walls and adobe slats for my boys,” I picture two kids or a kid and that cat or something. It’s hard to imagine a grown man as the object of those kinds of protective urges in the same way that you can’t quite see a woman singing “Wild World” to her male lover. There’s a (very literal, in this case) paternalistic tone.
