Sexy, queer, and brand new book and music club

It’s a day of all things queer and sexy over here at Blogging Molly.  I’m enjoying my new book, Moregasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind Blowing Sex, and my roommate just got the new Magnetic Fields album, Realism. I just heard about Moregasm yesterday while listening to Savage Love, and I went immediately to the bookstore to get it.  For those of you who haven’t discovered it yet, Babeland is a sex shop that is super queer and trans friendly– they run a lot of workshops, and this book is kind of a compilation of a lot of educational info about sex (chapter titles include “love thyself,” “getting off,” and “sticking it in,” to give you an idea.  The book, according to its authors, is geared towards straight women, but it has a lot of great stuff for both genders.  I highly recommend it. 

As for the Magnetic Fields, I just stole the new album from my roommate this morning, so I’ve barely had time to listen.  But based on its first track, “You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” it’s going to be amazing.  First and foremost, Stephin Merritt writes great loves songs, but he also really interesting when it comes to alternative representations of gender and sexuality.  He fucks around with gender roles and pronouns a lot in his lyrics, and he’s somehow able to make a song about cruising and casual sex and devotion and love all at the same time.  For all these reasons, I would call the Magnetic Fields’ music feminist, and I wondered whether anyone else had gone there before me.

I found an article by The Sexist arguing that Merritt’s songs are “pseudo-feminist anthems,” meaning they “provide a false sense of empowerment– without the power.”  The Sexist’s Amanda Hess had developed this concept in a previous article before applying it to Merritt, arguing that such songs as “Single Ladies” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” masquerade themselves as girl power jams, when in fact the characters in the songs embody weakness and passivity.  As sad as I am to admit it, I agree with her on “Single Ladies”– my profound love of that song has always been counterbalanced by a powerful confusion about its message to “put a ring on it.”  I was with you, Beyonce, at “All the single ladies/ put your hands up!”  Why did you have to go and talk about rings?

I can really get behind this concept of “pseudo-feminist anthem.”  But when it comes to the Magnetic Fields, I have to disagree with Hess.  She cites the song “Nun’s Litany,” wherein a nun wishes for all the ways she could express her sexuality:

I want to be a Playboy bunny

I’d do whatever they asked me to

I’d meet people with lots of money

And they would love me like I love you

The song escalates from there, with the protagonist wishing to be a topless waitress, a brothel worker, a dominatrix.  Hess interprets the song as

“a ringing endorsement for expressing female sexual freedom as obtained by sex industry performance.”

The song is hyperbolic, as much of the Magnetic Fields’ songs are.  If there’s one thing Merritt loves, it’s complex, over-the-top, ridiculous metaphors.  Hess’s interpretation is interesting, but to me this song is more about the desire for attention and approval, and the feeling that sex (for women, especially) is the most effective way to achieve these things.  The protagonist continually seeks validation and imagines finding it by being valued sexually (“I’d meet people with lots of money/ and they would love me like I love you”).  If you ask me, this is actually a pretty feminist commentary on the probelematic relationship between girls’ self-esteem and their sexual worth.  But again– Stephin Merritt really loves hyperbole (I could do this all day!).

I’m eager to see what the new album offers in terms of progressive sexual politics.  But what it will most likely offer is love songs.  They might be about hating women, they might be about hating men, but as anyone who has ever gone through a break-up knows, love songs can get pretty complicated.