I’m an over-thinker. I’ve always been this way. It’s one of the reasons why I am excellent at problem solving because I’ve thought of literally every possible way that something could have gone wrong and already have an analysed mind map of all the possible ways of fixing it. I have an anxiety disorder that makes me this way. It’s always made me feel abnormal but I’ve been able to capitalise on it in my older years and actually use it for good.
I wrote a blog a while ago about Lana Del Rey and her post about the culture and how other women are allowed to write about certain things but she isn’t, because she gets accused of “glamourising abuse”?
What I did connect with was about being accused of “glamourising abuse”. I don’t intend to go into any detail in this about my own past relationships, but I do empathise with a woman who considers herself to have a “poetic soul”, using her art and creativity as expression of her personal experiences and, ultimately, of herself. I like Lana del Rey’s music, personally, but I can also tell you it is somewhat problematic for feminists because of the way that she details her personal experiences of somewhat abusive relationships, by romanticising them.
I understand the need to do that. Love is challenging and problematic. We all want to be in love and profess love in healthy ways to one another, but it isn’t always possible. Sometimes we love people who hurt us. Sometimes we love people who have been abusive to us. Does that make us anti-feminist? Maybe it does. She details her relationships as a passive muse and of a more demure and delicate feminine passivity in relationships with men. It, can, strikingly, mark out codependent and power-imbalanced dynamics that aren’t always healthy. She writes extensively about romantic relationships with men – that many of us would consider to be narcissistic. The reality of relationships with men, who are narcissistic, is, of course, a constantly draining power struggle, where you are forced to submit to their dominant needs and desires, or else you will be punished: triangulated, stonewalled, gaslighted, abused. In these relationships, women’s own needs are secondary (if considered at all) to these men’s constant demands for attention. These relationships aren’t always empowering – but I admire Del Rey’s attempt to make them so. I admire her for taking these experiences and writing about their messy, problematic beauty. It is perhaps overlooked that writing about these experiences can also empower women deeply shamed by their own similar experiences, comforted by the commonality. But should del Rey not write about such things because they don’t meet our “feminist rhetoric” about how we should feel empowered?
I feel like our creativity and self-expression can sometimes be used against us to silence our feelings and our authentic selves, especially when perceived by others as a form of self-destruction. We shouldn’t be silenced because it makes someone else uncomfortable or because our “feminism” doesn’t fit into someone else’s box. The question is, does Lana feel empowered writing about these experiences?
Art exists in a world of meaning, free from its creator. We only have to look at structuralist theory to know this is true. We can hold creators to account, and of course we should if there’s malpractice, but so often there isn’t. Sometimes people don’t intend the meaning that you derive from art. Del Rey was heavily criticised from this post for mentioning multiple women of colour. Did Del Rey intend to offend WOC by comparing herself to WOC who write about the same subjects as she does? I’d like to think not. But I don’t know Del Rey personally and I have no idea if she is actually racist based on one Instagram post.
But regardless, she was bullied online for putting this post out on her personal instagram and I have to say this bullying “counterculture” has to stop. It’s mob mentality at is absolute worst!
The people who went after Del Rey for her comments and started to bully her because they didn’t like what she had to say were part of the problem. She might need educating on why her comments were problematic to POC, but I don’t think bullying solves that. A female TV presenter committed suicide last year, after she was involved in a domestic violence court case (she’d hit her boyfriend over the head with a lamp). She was bullied on social media and by the British press and in the end she saw no other option than to take her own life. This bullying has to stop for this reason. People’s lives are important. Just because you don’t agree with someone, or you find someone problematic, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be respectful to others.
When someone has treated me badly, I have, perhaps misguidedly, asked myself “What does this mean? What does this say about me?” In glorious hindsight and maturity, of course you know it says nothing about you, but everything about them. And this is the same for art. Artists create but it is up to you how you interpret their art. And that’s based on a lot of factors: what you know about the artist and their intentions, how you feel about yourself, what it means to you. Can you blame the artist for their work that you gleamed meaning from? Maybe, if it was knowingly aimed at you – but how would you ever prove that?
Art is just art. Let’s not cancel everyone who is making it because we’re bringing our own issues to the table.
we dance to all the wrong songs 
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