“Oh, it’s Laurie.” She spelled the name. “It’s short for the character’s last name, Laurence.”
He made a face of displeasure, which was my cue to leave. I was halfway out when she called me back. “Actually, Teddy, hang on. We have a question, if you don’t mind.”
I probably should have minded. I had shit to do. Or shit to not do, if I was going to take my sister’s advice.
The point was, I’d signed up to deliver a Laurie, and I had delivered a Laurie. But my body turned, and my mouth said, “Sure.”
“We’re not sure about the music for this piece. We want to set it to a song that has the wordgirlorwomanin it. We came up with a list, and we’re thinking that we want a song that’s emblematic of the female gaze.” My face must have conveyed my confusion, because she said, “Brianna can explain. I didn’t know what it was, either.”
One of the counselors stepped forward. “There’s this thing called the male gaze. It’s a theory, I guess, like a philosophical thing. It’s about how a lot of depictions of women in art or movies or music are through the male gaze. They represent women as seen through men’s eyes—so mostly that means women are depicted as objects of sexual or romantic desire and not fully realized characters in their own right.”
Huh? My first instinct was to get the hell out of there—this was above my pay grade—but I didn’t want to be rude.
Wait. I didn’t want to be rude? Had I met me? What was happening here?
“You know,” Gretchen said. “Like ‘California Girls.’ Everyone loves that song, but it’s about girls as seen by boys, right? Versus, say, this Beyoncé song?”
I ran through the lyrics to both songs in my head, and I could kind of see what they meant, but those were only two songs. “I guess I’d have to think about that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Gretchen said. “We were just chatting about it, and I thought I’d get a musician’s take on things.”
Gretchen led Tristan over to the girls, and everyone—except Tristan—was talking a mile a minute. They formed a circlearound him, and I chuckled to myself. I didn’t know whether to pity him or envy him.
After Anna and I finished our session that afternoon, I asked her about the dance girls’ “male gaze” theory. She was my go-to person here to bounce ideas off. I realized that what Gretchen had said on day one was true—thinking of Anna as a peer was working. Not only in terms of Anna’s development, but also in terms of mine. I was learning to play banjo. From a teenager. It was wild. She had ended up writing a song about the rich but shitty stepfather who’d upended her life, and it was amazing—catchy and vicious. Now she was working on one she said was inspired by Peter, Paul and Mary. She didn’t have lyrics yet—she was a melody-first writer—but it was sounding great so far. I was helping a bit, or trying to—it could be tricky to know how interventionist to be. I was aware of the fact that we were in a student-teacher role. This wasn’t cowriting, like I would do with Scott.
“I think they’re onto something,” she said, after enduring my rambling recounting of what the dancers had said about the so-called male gaze. “All the famous ‘girl’ songs from, say, the 1960s to the 1980s are songs about girls by men. The Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls,’ like you said. Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl.’”
“Foreigner’s ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You.’”
“Don’t know that one, but yeah, probably.”
“Mötley Crüe’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’”
“Gross. Exactly.”
“‘The Girl Is Mine’!” I was on a roll now.
“I don’t know that one, either.”
“A Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson duet. Surely you know who they are.”
“I do, but the idea of them doing a duet is not computing.”
“Well, it’s basically about them fighting over a girl—they take turns calling dibs.”
“Gross,” she said again, and I had to think about what it must be like to be a young woman as talented as Anna and to be surrounded by this all the time.
“So that one’s gross,” I said, “but are they all gross?” The idea was alarming. “What about Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’? There’s nothing wrong with that, right?” I suddenly felt invested in finding a not-gross song from the old days, though I had no idea why.
“I don’t think it’s that there’s anything wrong with that, or with most of these songs, per se.” I could see that she was thinking though this stuff as she talked. “In some sense, a love song is always going to objectify the other person.”
“And a lot of songs are love songs,” I said, thinking about my own catalogue. But also about how delightful I found it that Anna seemed to be developing a “hate song” niche.
“Yeah. It’s just that when men write about women, that’s pretty much all it is. It’s like there’s a spectrum from romantic to creepy, but everything to do with women is somewhere on that spectrum, you know?”
I did know. When she said it like that, I got it. The male gaze. Damn.
“Men aren’t writing about women, I don’t know, starting companies,” she added. “Helming empires.”
