Sara Bareilles' song is following me around.
In the last week, I've heard I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song at Subway, in the grocery store, at Wal-Mart, at Best Buy, in the car whilst flipping through radio stations, while I was waiting for The Boy to be finished with work it played on their stereo... It's everywhere.
I can't decide if it's a good song. It's catchy as hell in a not-an-earworm sort of way. It's like, it's like Jewel's Hands. That's another song that followed me around that I've never been able to decide whether it's a good song, or just ubiquitous.
Oddly enough, for all that I've heard both of them, I couldn't sing you back the lyrics for anything much more than the chorus.
Maybe it's because there are so few female vocalists that I like. Loreena Mckennitt, Enya, Bernadette Peters and Jean Redpath are kind of the beginning and end of my collections of female artists- women that I have more than one song by. I think I could appreciate Amy Lee from Evanescence more if she would write and sing a song I like. She's got a beautiful voice, but I haven't found a song by them that I actually like. My Immortal is close, but not quite. Same goes for Lily Allen, who is a huge deal in England, apparently.
In a way, I feel bad about this, because, heck, I'm a girl. Being of the feminine persuasion, shouldn't I like and understand the works of women better than those of men? Shouldn't I maybe even prefer them? The voice of nagging feminism lurks in the back of my mind telling me that I'm keeping my own sex down because I don't appreciate them.
While even I realise that the voice of nagging feminism can go and whistle, it still bothers me the amount of works by women, not just music, that I really don't care for, and the few women role models I actually have.
Sorting through famous people I personally respect and admire (not counting figures like Rosa Parks and Susan B Anthony, whom we're all taught to admire), I come back with Judi Dench, Emma Thompson, and LM Montgomery, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Naomi Wallace. That's the top of my head list; I might be able to concede you a few others if I dug through my movies and books, but I'd hazard a guess that most of them died at the turn of the last century anyway.
Naomi Wallace is the only American woman on the list, and even she spends most of her time in England these days. She is, at 48, also the youngest of the group. For those of you who haven't heard of her, she's a poet and playwright who also wrote the movie Lawn Dogs.
So, now the question is, is this small number because of the few amount of women in the frontline? Given that most of the women on the list are actresses and authors, I don't think so. If I paid more attention to art or politics, this might be the case, but there are plenty of actresses and authors of the feminine persuasion. (Well, I guess I don't know how many actresses there are out there who aren't of the feminine persuasion.)
So, this leaves the nagging feeling that I find more value in the works of men. This is where the betrayal comes in.
Except, if we look at the people in my life whose opinion I value, most of them are women. I think this is probably because I have to work more for appreciation from women. I've never had to try very hard to impress guys.
My poor feminist playwrighting teacher would probably writhe to read this. She's a sweet woman, but I thought she was never going to forgive my argument that feminism is rendered useless by quantum physics; Schr�dinger's cat, essentially. Everyone speaking on feminism is either a female or a male, so no one can be trusted to make an accurate representation of the situation.
I think I need to go listen to that song a few more times to decide if I like it.