{"id":14661,"date":"2018-07-02T05:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T09:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bullmensfiction.com\/?p=14661"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:13:47","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:13:47","slug":"cigarettes-after-sexism-the-shy-boy-misogyny-of-indie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/creative-nonfiction\/cigarettes-after-sexism-the-shy-boy-misogyny-of-indie\/","title":{"rendered":"Cigarettes After Sexism: The Shy-Boy Misogyny of Indie"},"content":{"rendered":"
Whispered something in your ear<\/em>
\nIt was a perverted thing to say<\/em>
\nBut I said it anyway<\/em>
\nMade you smile and look away<\/em>
\n– Cigarettes After Sex, \u201cNothing\u2019s Gonna Hurt You Baby\u201d<\/h5>\n

A week after the earliest allegations against Harvey Weinstein emerged, I heard the band Cigarettes After Sex on the radio for the first time. A song called \u201cSweet\u201d drifted onto a Nashville indie-rock station one night, while I was driving home down a string of highways that were still new to me, and I felt like I\u2019d been lifted into a pretty foreign film. The band\u2019s gauzy sound\u2014molasses-slow drums, vocals drenched in reverb and delay\u2014seemed made for the scene that slid by my windshield: streetlights, skyline, anonymous American highway. It was could-be-anywhere music, sad-and-dreaming music, night-driving music of the highest order. It reminded me of teenage summers that I spent driving my parents\u2019 car back and forth to my crush\u2019s house, never telling her a thing about my heart.<\/p>\n

The brainchild of songwriter Greg Gonzalez, Cigarettes After Sex released their first full-length record in June 2017 to glowing reviews. Much was made of the music\u2019s popularity as a balm for sleep anxiety, and critics heralded the band as modern inheritors of the legacy of shoegaze-influenced artists like Beach House, the Cocteau Twins, and Slowdive. But what almost no one seemed to be talking about, in those summer months before Weinstein and #MeToo, was the blunt eroticism that cut through the sonic haze and the current of sexism beneath it. In Gonzalez\u2019s songs, graphic lines about sex bleed seamlessly into childlike declarations of love and longing, so that the smut and the sweetness seem intimately connected. On \u201cYoung and Dumb,\u201d for instance, a nameless woman is called \u201cthe patron saint of sucking cock\u201d; on \u201cOpera House,\u201d another nameless woman is trapped in a venue of the narrator\u2019s creation, \u201ccrying through the night\/with no-one else for miles.\u201d These are songs are about the pleasure of quietly crossing lines, about watching women from afar until they agree to be yours forever, and about knowing it\u2019s a perverted thing to say and getting to say it anyway. They\u2019re love songs, yes, but like so many love songs, they also embody and invoke male fantasies about unlimited sexual permission and the right to possess. They conjure a dream world where shy boys get to whisper the creepy things they\u2019ve always longed to whisper, where their innuendoes are met not with rejection but with sweetness and an iPhone striptease, where obsession is elevated to something like nobility. This fantasy might be soothing, but for whom?<\/p>\n

The striking thing about the whispered come-ons in CAS\u2019s songs is that you can listen to them over and over again without realizing they\u2019re there. The lyrical equivalent of the guy who seems nice until he has a couple drinks and gets handsy, they encapsulate a phenomenon that is bigger than any one band: a stuttering, shy-boy alternative to the brand of misogyny that parades through pop, hip-hop, rap, and punk. The kind of soft-core misogyny that suffuses so many indie rock lyrics may be less brazen, but it\u2019s no less confident in its presumptions about women\u2019s desires and bodies. These lyrics speak to, and for, a quieter side of sexism that seems particularly relevant to recent conversations that have grown out of the #MeToo movement, which are addressing not only our country\u2019s normalization of rape and sexual harassment but all the quieter, more surreptitious ways in which men are socialized to dehumanize and mistreat women and women are socialized to accept this\u2014to tread lightly and appease, to say any word but \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

My point is not to level an attack on Gonzalez or his band\u2014I wish them all the consensual sweetness they can find\u2014or to imply that men can\u2019t sing about sex in affirming, beautiful ways. My point is that this package\u2014straight-guy fantasy sheathed in softness\u2014was so familiar to me that, in spite of myself, I did find it soothing. As I listened to the album on repeat, I told myself that I was trying to articulate what I found so sinister about it all. But then I caught myself singing these songs in the shower, and I knew a more complicated truth: they reminded me of the songs I grew up singing, of the boys I used to know and the boy I used to be. They reminded me of how us boys used to talk about the girls we longed to love while we sat in our parents\u2019 cars, drinking those songs down as fast as the cheap whiskey our brothers had bought us with our mothers\u2019 money. They made me wonder about us\u2014about myself, my old friends, and all the other shy boys raised on sad songs.<\/p>\n

Like many people, I peaked as a music listener in high school. I was one of those secular kids for whom music was the closest thing to religion: a source of moral and spiritual instruction, of information about the world and models for living in it. Back then, I think my friends and I believed, on some level, that our music taste set us apart and defined us. We thought music could make us dirty when we were actually innocent, experienced and world-weary when really we were privileged kids who knew little and had experienced even less. Unlike the pop stars of the day, our so-called indie heroes sang about real, ugly, fickle feelings, about getting old and getting lost and feeling low for no reason. In basements and messy bedrooms, I strove to write that honesty and rawness into my own fledgling, three-chord songs. Because my friends and I listened to bands we considered uncommercial (though many of them were on the same major labels as the pop stars we disdained), we let ourselves think we had something on the well-adjusted kids who liked Top 40 songs about how good it was to be alive. Our imagined advantage was a shifty, nebulous thing\u2014call it a knowledge of the true state of things, a willingness to know dirt, a store-bought teenage lucidity.<\/p>\n

As a genre label, indie is also notoriously nebulous, more marketing term than signifier of a particular sound; in 2018, it is slapped on everything from dancefloor synth-pop to the wispiest of folk songs. Although no essay could possibly claim to speak to the glut of interwoven scenes and styles the term has come to connote, there are a few common denominators. In \u201cThe Unbearable Whiteness of Indie,\u201d one very good essay on a topic that deserves many more, critic Sarah Sahim writes, \u201cIn indie rock, white is the norm.\u201d To this I\u2019d add: in indie rock, disaffected white masculinity is the norm, and it always has been. (Back in 1995, a Rolling Stone<\/em> reviewer was already writing about the genre\u2019s \u201cobsolescence due to politically incorrect Caucasian maleness.\u201d) Indie taught me that you could be alienated in the city, like the leather-and-t-shirt boys in the Strokes, or all across the plains, like the Americana nerds in Wilco or Okkervil River. You could sure as hell be alienated in Athens, Georgia, which gave the scene such luminary weirdos as R.E.M., the B-52s, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Of Montreal, and you could be alienated if you were rich and white, like the Ivy League darlings in Vampire Weekend, or poor and white, like The Replacements or Nirvana. And yes, you could be alienated you were a woman or a person of color, but your voice was often drowned out by the plaintive cries of all those different varieties of white boy.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that all these artists trade in thinly-veiled racism and misogyny, but rather to emphasize what I was imbibing every morning on the bus was mostly white male disaffection. What I didn\u2019t realize in high school was how that seductive disaffection had been carefully marketed to boys who looked like me. I also didn\u2019t realize that political and social disaffection often came freighted with sexual frustration and misogyny. When I sang along to songs like Weezer\u2019s \u201cNo Other One\u201d (\u201cI want a girl who will laugh for no one else\/When I\u2019m away she puts her makeup on the shelf\u201d) or The Decemberists\u2019 \u201cWe Both Go Down Together\u201d (\u201cYou wept\/but your soul was willing\u201d), I barely gave a thought to the ways these songs depicted women, just as I barely gave a thought to the genre\u2019s unbearable whiteness. If I thought about the gender politics of music at all back then, I likely thought that indie was elevated above the crude sexism of more commercial genres. But if the message of Dr. Dre\u2019s \u201cB*tches Ain\u2019t Shit,\u201d Motley Cr\u00fce\u2019s \u201cGirls, Girls, Girls,\u201d or Robin Thicke\u2019s \u201cBlurred Lines\u201d is that women are nothing unless they\u2019re sex objects, then the message of a lot of so-branded indie music and film\u2014see the aforementioned Weezer song, most other Weezer songs, most Woody Allen movies, and films like Garden State<\/em>, 500 Days of Summer<\/em>, and Elizabethtown<\/em>\u2014is that women are nothing unless they\u2019re willing to be everything to a man: eternal lover, sex object, consoler, and font of existential purpose. Instead of the phallocentric polygamy often sold in mainstream pop and hip-hop, the indie male gaze tends towards myopia and obsession, selling a vision of monogamy oriented around the man\u2019s existential salvation from a fucked-up world that doesn\u2019t get him (or his weird music).<\/p>\n

In 2007, the critic Nathan Rabin summed up this romantic ideal with the now-household term \u201cManic Pixie Dream Girl\u201d: a fictional woman who \u201cexists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.\u201d Rabin has since renounced his own term, expressing dismay that many readers (including the director Cameron Crowe) had missed the critical edge of his original essay and adopted Manic Pixie Dream Girl as a convenient way of describing the kind of woman they liked. I was undoubtedly one of those men who missed the point. Like many of my male friends, I thought Natalie Portman\u2019s character in Garden State<\/em> was more or less the perfect woman\u2014cute, game for adventures, sexy in an unintimidating way, and into The Shins. My whole concept of love was a carefully crafted illusion built on the carefully crafted illusions of the artists I loved. It was, in short, unreal.<\/p>\n

I spent most of high school wearing hoodies, reading guys like Salinger, and thinking about a girl called Laura, whose name is not really Laura. She was a good friend of mine, and she still is. But from the moment I met her at orientation\u2014she wore Fender sneakers that day, with bright, mismatched laces\u2014I harbored a shy crush, projecting the longing I\u2019d learned from songs onto her. I imagined that if I could only find the right words to say, the right Smiths song to play with one earbud in my left ear and one earbud in her right, she\u2019d my indie girl, the solution to all my problems. But Laura wanted to be a doctor, not some guy\u2019s indie girl. Once or twice, we argued about the roles that actresses like Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansen played in films like Garden Stat<\/em>e and Lost in Translation<\/em>. I didn\u2019t know how to articulate why I liked those characters so much, why their combination of passivity and spunk appealed, but Laura already knew exactly why she couldn\u2019t stand them. \u201cI don\u2019t get it,\u201d she said one afternoon. \u201cThey don\u2019t really do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

In our junior year, I found the courage to ask her to prom. After years of anticipation, the night landed like an off note. In the vast function hall, under strobe lights and the weight of years of expectations, all the ease between us faded. I couldn\u2019t think of the right words to say, so I spent the night sitting at a table along the side of the hall, listening while my male friends kept asking me whether, when, and how I was going to make a move. This is your chance, man, they said. It\u2019s now or never. Meanwhile, Laura danced with her friends in the center of the floor, laughing and smiling, and I wondered why I couldn\u2019t laugh with her, couldn\u2019t make her smile. Afterwards, in her car, with my friends\u2019 voices ringing in my head, I put a hand on her shoulder. \u201cYou looked beautiful tonight,\u201d I said. It was the best I could do. She smiled, looked away, and drove me home.<\/p>\n

Kristen Roupenian\u2019s short story \u201cCat Person,\u201d which came out in The New Yorker<\/em> last December, made a larger pop-cultural splash than (arguably) any piece of short fiction has in the last decade. It chronicles a brief relationship between 20-year-old Margot and 34-year old Robert, which develops over text, flares into one unpleasant (for Margot) but consensual sexual encounter, and ends with Robert hurling the word \u201cwhore\u201d at Margot after she doesn\u2019t respond to his texts. Several critics have argued that the story resonates with young women because it effectively dramatizes the toll that casual, atmospheric sexism can take\u2014the microaggressions, expectations, and slights that women deal with on an everyday basis. \u201cIn this #MeToo moment,\u201d Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic<\/em>, the story \u201cwent expectedly viral, by revealing the lengths women go to in order to manage men\u2019s feelings, and the shaming they often suffer nonetheless.\u201d See: Laura turning away, saying nothing. See also: the couple of times I complained to male friends that I didn\u2019t understand why she was flirting with me for no reason.<\/p>\n

In the story, Robert does not physically force himself upon Margot, but his behavior demonstrates a general disregard for her preferences. Margot\u2019s demure responses, in turn, illustrate how she has learned to ignore those preferences in the interest of safety. As Lisa Bonos put it in a Washington Post article, \u201cThe entire interaction reads as if Robert is acting out a\u00a0masturbatory fantasy rather than interacting with a live human with her own desires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of \u201cCat Person\u2019s\u201d chilling resonance has to do with the fact that Robert doesn\u2019t fit the dominant societal archetype of a misogynistic man. Instead, he is a slightly loserly 34-year-old who goes to the movies alone and can\u2019t kiss or spell properly. He\u2019s the kind of guy who puts on a movie with subtitles after sex because he thinks it\u2019s a sophisticated thing to do. In high school, he probably wasn\u2019t the cat-calling jock, but it\u2019s easy for me to imagine him as an indie kid, wondering why the girls he knows don\u2019t act like the girls in songs. I can\u2019t read the ending of \u201cCat Person\u201d\u2014the part where Robert keeps texting Margot after she\u2019s told him she\u2019s not interested\u2014without hearing the Cigarettes After Sex song \u201cAffection\u201d in my head:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s affection, always<\/em>
\n you\u2019re gonna see it someday<\/em>
\n My attention for you<\/em>
\n Even if it\u2019s not what you need.<\/em><\/h5>\n

Eventually, goes the logic of the song, this nameless woman will understand. She\u2019ll realize that the narrator\u2019s\/Greg Gonzalez\u2019s\/my\/our fucked-up, unpredictable behavior is actually love\u2014real love\u2014and even if it\u2019s not kind of love she needs, she\u2019ll eventually accept it. Who cares if \u201cI get mean when I\u2019m drinking\u201d or \u201ctell you to go fuck yourself,\u201d as Gonzalez\u2019s narrator boasts he\u2019s done\u2014all of this is forgivable within the fantasy of the song. It\u2019s affection, always. I get that women and men don\u2019t always treat each other perfectly, and that forgiveness is worth cherishing and celebrating, but in the context of the rest of Cigarettes After Sex\u2019s discography, the narrator\u2019s assuredness\u2014you\u2019re gonna see it someday\u2014conjures the very depths of male privilege. (On YouTube, \u201cAffection\u201d is the band\u2019s most popular song by far, with over 40 million views to date.)<\/p>\n

In Gonzalez\u2019s seductive songs\u2014as in so many songs written by men\u2014love, sex, and possession blur together. Crucially, tenderness is not forgotten here\u2014the longing for everlasting love is as omnipresent in Cigarettes After Sex\u2019s music as the desire for a blowjob, and distance and media are folded into the fabric of intimacy in a way that feels distinctly modern and distinctly male. X-rated selfies merge with the idea of sweetness until the two seem inseparable, a lover is at her best when she\u2019s \u201clike a dirty magazine,” and the best sex is like a scene from a movie. Even the band\u2019s name is telling\u2014it conjures not the mutuality of two bodies moving together but the solitary exhale that follows, the memory of sweetness as recalled alone. Not the messy specificities of human love but the archetypal image of self-satisfied pleasure. For so many of us, men and women alike, the dream of togetherness is first encountered in private, in front of a screen.<\/p>\n

Sexism in indie rock and pop (and the music industry more broadly, as the Grammys recently reminded us) is nothing new. But the poetics and aesthetics of art that is largely made for and marketed to disaffected white males can offer a starting point for conversations about a kind of sexism that is still struggling to recognize itself as such. It might help us talk, for instance, about what it means when the music we fall asleep to is about girls who are young, dumb, and hot as fuck, or about how when male artists make art about their mid-life crises or their battles with depression, the blame for their pain often gets displaced onto a woman. By looking at the songs and movies we love and have loved, we might learn to recognize some of the ways we\u2019ve failed women in the past and the kinds of thinking that informed our actions. And by acknowledging that the misogyny that pervades Western culture extends to the products of that culture that have been branded as alternative or independent, we might gain a better understanding of how the art we consume has informed and reflected our ideas. Through that understanding, we might reaffirm our commitment to being better, to hearing and making songs where nobody gets imprisoned in an imaginary opera house and nobody is titillated by the idea of keeping them there, songs that celebrate gloriously mutual love and sex, rather than the lonesome, impeccably stylish cigarette that comes after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent most of high school wearing hoodies, reading guys like Salinger, and thinking about a girl called Laura, whose name is not really Laura.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[115,1666,361,14],"class_list":["post-14661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","tag-growing-up","tag-indie-rock","tag-masculinity","tag-sex","writer-john-shakespear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14661"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14750,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14661\/revisions\/14750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}