the beatles – Bad Reputation A feminist pop culture adventure Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:49:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6 37601771 Musical Chairs: “It Hurts Me Too” /2012/10/30/musical-chairs-it-hurts-me-too/ /2012/10/30/musical-chairs-it-hurts-me-too/#respond Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:46:34 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=12604 Previous Musical Chair: Super Sexy Woman by Sufjan Stevens, picked by Hodge

This song was brought into my life a few years ago by my Mum, a reliable source of excellent music. It’s a blues standard, but my preferred version is Elmore James’ 1962 recording, with his incredible voice and slide guitar.

While It Hurts Me Too is superficially about a man’s love for a woman who loves another (highly unpleasant) man, to me it could as easily be about platonic love as romantic love. I’m bringing my own experiences to bear of course, but to me it sits on the same shelf as Strawberry Switchblade’s Let Her Go or the Dresden Dolls’ Delilah. It’s about watching from the sidelines, furious and helpless as someone you care about gets hurt, over and over again. For me it is inescapably about abuse.

While the song is old and has been re-interpreted time and again, when Elmore James recorded his version he made some lyrical changes to the hit version recorded by Tampa Red in 1949. Comparing the two there’s a subtle shift from a reasonably upbeat song imploring an object of desire to leave a cheating no-gooder, to a heartbreaking lament for the trap in which a loved one has been snared.

For example, Tampa Red sings:

That man you love, darlin’
He don’t want you ’round
Whyn’t ya make love with Tampa, darling?
And let’s jump the town
When things go wrong, so wrong, with you
It hurts me, too

And James sings:

He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you
It hurts me too.

What I like best about it is that unlike many other blues standards (and plenty of mainstream pop songs – see Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, The Beatles’ Run For Your Life, Tom Jones’ Delilah), It Hurts Me Too is a song about empathy, not jealousy. The singer claims no ownership over the woman, it’s her suffering that pains him, not the fact he can’t have her. For me, it works as an antidote to the musical tradition of the jealous murder of women by men. I believe it’s a song about love in the truest, broadest sense: what you feel, I feel.

 

It Hurts Me Too  by Elmore James

You said you was hurtin’, you almost lost your mind.
Now, the man you love, he hurt you all the time.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

You’ll love him more when you should love him less.
Why lick up behind him and take his mess?
But, when things go wrong, whoa, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

Now, he better leave you or you better put him down.
No, I won’t stand to see you pushed around.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

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An Alphabet of Feminism #15: O is for Ovary /2011/01/24/an-alphabet-of-femininism-15-o-is-for-ovary/ /2011/01/24/an-alphabet-of-femininism-15-o-is-for-ovary/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:00:47 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=1950 O

OVARY

Oh! Darling.

Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?

Hartsoeker's drawings of sperm containing miniature adults, prior to implantation in the womb.

Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)

Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.

Oh My God

With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.

So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.1 The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.

However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).

But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.

Oh! You Pretty Things

But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.

It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).

An engraving depicting Zeus opening an egg, out of which flies all creation.

Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/

Oh My Gosh

After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.

It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.

O is for Ovary

Further Reading:

  • Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).

NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy

  1. Yes, menstrual blood.
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