Amid calls for the video to be banned, it’s interesting to see how much of the outrage centres on the murder, rather than the rape. Granted, the shooting and its aftermath is shown far more explicitly than the hinted-at assault, but commentary such as that of media watchdog Paul Porter:

“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime…”

appears to be divorcing the shooting from its context, concentrating on Rihanna as the agent and perpetrator of a crime, rather than as the victim of one. This wilfully ignores one of the video’s central messages, which is the ease with which these roles can be merged.

Sex and violence, and sexual violence, as themes in art and entertainment are as old as art and entertainment themselves. To be flippant for a second: maybe it’s just the use of the word ‘Mama’, but the chorus of ‘Man Down’ put me in mind of that certain section of Bohemian Rhapsody where the narrator, having just killed a man, ruminates on how ‘life had just begun and now I’ve gone and thrown it all away’. And while I don’t think Freddie Mercury was ever actively described as a positive role model, neither was he castigated for encouraging cold-blooded cod-operatic executions among 1970s youth.

Is Rihanna coming in for particular criticism because of the publicity previously given to her real-life encounters with violence? Those of you following along at home will of course have noticed that she didn’t respond to her experience of assault by shooting Chris Brown on the concourse of Grand Central Station. Surely no one seriously believes ‘Man Down’ to be advocating that the victims of violence engage in violent reprisals – any more than that was true of Thelma & Louise, or Straw Dogs, or, to really stretch the analogy, Death and the Maiden? ‘Man Down’ is, on one level, a revenge fantasy which relies on the dramatic and the sensational to get its message across.

Roger Ebert wrote of Irréversible, whose backwards chronology ‘Man Down’ recalls, that the film’s structure makes it inherently moral – that by presenting the vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications. Might the same apply to ‘Man Down’? Throughout the lyrics and video, the song’s protagonist may contextualise and explain her actions, but she’s not free of regret, she isn’t gleeful or exultant, and she acknowledges her actions as a crime with implications for the rest of her life. She calls herself a ‘criminal’ and reflects that her rapist and victim was ‘somebody’s son’. The narrative doesn’t glorify murder, but it recognises that we live in a world where this kind of fantasy-vigilante approach might often seem more accessible and plausible than relying for justice on the state or the police.

Art and entertainment don’t exist in a vacuum. Art will be asked to justify itself, particularly when it touches on themes that are an everyday reality for many of us and which feed into issues like the space which women, particularly women of colour, have to express themselves, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes versus the impetus, the desire, and perhaps the moral duty, to openly discuss the conditions under which we live.

The complex intersections of race and gender hardly lend themselves to being cleared up in the confines of a blog post, but ‘Man Down’ has sparked plenty of engaged and informative discussion online – at Crunk Feminist, The Beautiful Struggler, and Hello Beautiful for starters. I’m just glad debate is happening and that we have a mainstream artist who doesn’t shy away from instigating it.

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

QUEEN

To sour your happiness, I must report
The queen is dead.

Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611) V.5.3400

Queen is one of the few Alphabet words with a firmly British origin, but it makes up for its lack of Latinate pedigree by being extremely complicated. So this is the part where the rap breaks down – it comes from the Old English cwen, the proto-Germanic kwoeniz, and (follow it back far enough) the proto-Indo-European gwen (= ‘woman, wife’). Proto-awesome, man. In this form it coincides rather nicely with the Greek gyne, meaning ‘woman, wife’ (thus gynecology, misoGYNy, gynophobia, and indeed gynocentric), and a whole host of other languages that I don’t think we need all up in our grill just now.

My Family and Other Animals

The interesting thing about these origins is their relation to another word: quean, originally a variant form of queen, meaning then ‘woman, female’ but now mostly an ‘effeminate homosexual man’ (cf., er, queen). Its etymology is similar, but with more emphasis on the insults: thus, quean‘s forebears include the Middle Dutch quene (= ‘older woman’), the Dutch kween (= ‘hussy’) and the Middle Low German quene (= ‘woman, wife, old woman’). It eventually gives us ‘a promiscuous woman’ sometime around the sixteenth century.

Anne, later Queen Anne, at the time of her marriage, 1683.

As is often the case, plenty of forebears inevitably only leads to plenty of embarrassing cousins, and many of these roots (cwen and the Greek gyne in particular) have also been claimed as parents to cunt ( =  ‘the vulva or vagina’), spelled quaint and sometimes queynt by Chaucer, just to illustrate the fluidity of ‘cw’, ‘qu’ and ‘cu’. When you know that portcwene ( = literally ‘a public woman’) means ‘prostitute’, the association of quean / quean and cunt may perhaps become somewhat clearer: it’s what you might call synecdoche. This may also throw some light on quean/queen‘s gay associations: inevitably, words that suggest penetration of the female (pussy, bitch) are eventually seized upon to denigrate an ‘effeminate’ man. Queen as ‘a flamboyant homosexual’ is from the 1920s (as is queer, which originally means ‘oblique, off centre’), thus coinciding with a modicum more gay visibility than its sixteenth century usage.

But it’s not all doom, gloom and back to the Unmentionables: let’s talk thrones. English is unusual in giving a queen her own word, and not simply feminizing king (= ‘of noble birth’) – compare the French roi and reine, from the Latin rex and regina. Nonetheless, the first definition of a queen in the dictionary is as ‘a king’s wife or consort; a lady who is wife to a king’ but the second sense, as ‘a woman who is the chief ruler of a state, having the same rank and position as a king’, is Old English itself, so the two definitions are likely to be essentially simultaneous.

The English the English the English are best.

Yes, over here on Albion’s chalk-ringed shores, we’ve had no less than seven reigning queens. By contrast, even pre-1789, the hated French would never let Ringo have a go – lol Salic law – and all their famous female royals were lowly consorts (Margaret de Valois, Catherine de Medici, Marie Antoinette…), although Henri IV was several degrees more awesome than any English king, ever. Look at how pleased with himself he is! But I digress.

However positive the existence of historical female monarchs on this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, the residual physicality of queen in relation to cunt is still lurking around, and the body of the queen has always carried a significance that goes beyond everyday concerns about legitimacy (although those are there too). Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, queens to Henry VIII, were both publicly subjected to a series of intimate questions (and threatened physical examination) about their wedding-bed virginity, genital health and sexual history, and that’s before you get into discussions down the pub throughout history about When The King Is A Queen (thus Edward II roundly condemned for A Weak King and put to an ‘ironic’ death), and the reigning queen‘s menstrual cycle and likelihood of producing a royal heir.

This last was an issue that clearly dogged even those English queens ruling in their own right: in 1554, Mary I was declared to be with child, triggering thanksgiving services and country-wide celebration, until over a year later her belly decreased in size and the ‘pregnancy’ was revealed to be a humiliating ‘phantom’ (pseudocyesis), caused by her intense desire for an heir. After a second false pregnancy two years later, she died (possibly from a uterine tumour) in 1558.

Elizabeth I carrying a sieve, the traditional accessory of the Vestal Virgins. c.1583

A couple of hundred years later, amid some of the most spectacular changes in British history, Mary ‘Williamanmary’ II and her sister, Anne, were competing to be the first to bear a child, and, in consequence, were rarely on speaking terms. Mary had an early miscarriage which may have permanently impaired her ability to have a baby, while Anne (despite being fairly definitely gay herself) had six children who died, eight still-births and four miscarriages. Meanwhile, a few Georges and a William later, Victoria‘s famous fruitfulness was widely seen as a positive statement about British greatness in an imperial age: the truly maternal monarch, whose offspring gave England royal relations in Hesse, Prussia (though post-1914 we didn’t talk about that), and Russia (oops).

Queen Of My Heart.

But, of course, we (along with everyone else, ho ho) have not touched on Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, Gloriana, etc who managed to make a virtue of childlessness by representing the immaculate body of the queen as the symbol of a healthy nation. Bang on cue, queen‘s third meaning is ‘a female whose rank or pre-eminence is comparable to that of a queen; applied, for example, to the Virgin Mary, to the goddesses of ancient religions or mythologies, or to a woman as a term of endearment or honour’. This is the sense it has in Twelfth Night when Viola is ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen‘, in which context it has something of lady about it, just ramped up to full throttle: someone who is also the ‘chief  ruler of a state’ is indeed a mistress par excellence.

It was this tradition that Elizabeth milked till it had no more to give, presenting herself as the adored lady at the centre of a courtly cult of virginity, an age which produced Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Walter Raleigh’s The Ocean To Cynthia, as well as hundreds of portraits depicting Queen Elizabeth as immaculate goddess and virgin. Her fleshlessness was only exacerbated after 1592, when the elderly queen stopped sitting for portraits at all, forcing artists to work from earlier templates of her face, creating an eternal ‘Mask of Youth’.

So queen is a word that fuses sexuality and a microscopic focus on the body (where more so than in its use to attack people for what they like to do in the bedroom?) with a kind of awestruck ‘Glorianian’ respect. Those who sit on this lexical pedestal are perhaps a little wonky: it is unfortunate that queenly success seems attainable only for those rulers who have produced litters of miniature monarchs and the one who maintained a virginal ice-princess sort of deal. But then, looking back over England’s history (and, of course, its present), it is cheering to see that Women Have At Least Done It. Now if we could just fix that male primogeniture business…

NEXT WEEK: R is for Rake