{"id":12283,"date":"2012-09-13T17:09:21","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T16:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=12283"},"modified":"2012-09-17T08:16:28","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T07:16:28","slug":"guest-post-this-is-love-pj-harvey-pop-music-and-female-sexual-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2012\/09\/13\/guest-post-this-is-love-pj-harvey-pop-music-and-female-sexual-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"[Guest Post] “This Is Love”: PJ Harvey, Pop Music, and Female Sexual Desire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a guest post from author Delilah Des Anges<\/strong><\/a>. If you have a guest post brewing in your brain, you know what to do: pitch us at badrepeditors@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In terms of consumption and emotional language, the pop song occupies a similar status to the sonnet. Well, not exactly, but certainly for the purpose of romance or desire, pop lyrics are an absolute boon for the tongue-tied (a group which includes “most of the English population”). They’re used to express whatever happens to be lurking unformed in the minds of the listener, and as a point of identification when the lurking stuff has been given a concrete identity.<\/p>\n

Reams have been written about the depiction of women in pop music by male songwriters and the presentation of women by the music industry, but recently I was having a wee listen to PJ Harvey (while drunk in someone’s living room in Portsmouth on a Saturday night, because I am very cool) and it occurred to me that I’d not seen as much on the subject of how female desire’s presented in pop songs BY WOMEN.<\/p>\n

This thought came up because This Is Love<\/strong> felt like an anomaly: it presented desire as active on the part of the female narrator. PJ Harvey’s persona for the song has sexual agency, and longings that do not centre around waiting for someone else to make a move. She uses the phrase “I want” and backs it up with action: “to chase you round the table, wanna touch your head”, and in that “wanna touch your” she rather casually and without fuss flips the entire common model of heterosexual desire on its head by pointing out that women also want to touch, as well as being touched.<\/p>\n