Female artists are pressured to make anthems about how they don’t need men, but Norman Fucking Rockwell exposes the realities of heterosexual relationships
In 2012, the same summer that Lana Del Rey released her debut album Born To Die, my best friend fell in love with a terrible man. “Doesn’t he look just like my guy?” she asked enthusiastically as we watched a tattooed hand clasp around Del Rey’s neck in the music video for the album’s title track. After several weeks of hearing this friend complain about her man’s shitty stick-and-poke tattoos, his stupid hair, his love, his abuse – her hollow promises that she’d leave him after each violent fight – I felt repulsed by my friend’s eager identification. As a friend, I resented whatever drove these women back into the etiolated arms of their awful, spirit-sapping men. As a lesbian, who has the utmost privilege of neither loving nor desiring men, I was exasperated. My anger began to concentrate itself on my friend (for goodness sake, just dump him) rather than the man who kept convincing her to return. As she withdrew into her vitiating relationship, myself and the rest of her friends grew weary and distant. At the end of the summer, all she had left was Lana Del Rey.
Del Rey’s early critics accused her of pornographising, glamourising, romanticising – all adjectives that were popular on Tumblr at the time – female subjugation and abuse. The pop star’s sexual self-presentation outright disturbed many listeners in a year when female empowerment, resilience and self-celebration seemed to be one of pop’s central concerns. Nicki Minaj likened herself to a starship who was “made to fly”, Rihanna told us to “shine bright like a diamond”, Kelly Clarkson advised “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. As a result, Del Rey’s accounts of late heterosexuality in a late capitalist world were especially abhorred. “You’re no good for me, but baby I want you,” she tersely expressed, relaying an all too common heterosexual experience, while her peers sang about overcoming nonsensical desire, and converting their bad experiences into resilience. In pop, you don’t often hear women’s pain – you hear how they overcame it.
It’s part of (and here’s a couple of eyerolls coming your way) neoliberal postfeminism, the kind that was birthed in the 1990s by conservative feminism, most priniciply by Naomi Wolf’s 1993 work Fire With Fire which argued that women needed to embrace their “power feminism”. It meant that women’s liberation was their own problem – and it came down to their lifestyle choices, the views they espouse, the way they presented themselves to the world – an idea that’s been internalised by pop music today. We need our female pop stars to be autonomous, self-surveilling; we need them to take a stand. The onus is on them to change the world.
“Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique (‘This is what makes us girls / We don’t stick together ‘cause we put our love first’), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are (‘Don’t cry about it / Don’t cry about it’),” Pitchfork wrote disparagingly in their review of her debut album.
Today, many of us still wait in anticipation for Del Rey’s satisfying ‘I don’t need a man’ moment. Personally, I hope it never comes. Unlike any other popstar, Lana Del Rey explains heterosexuality to me, at a time when loving men and being straight has never been more unfashionable. We want Del Rey to be empowered; to unlove men, because expressions of post-heterosexual empowerment deny the struggles and circumstances of patriarchally constructed heterosexuality. Instead of asking why our friends don’t leave their men, we should question what makes heterosexuality so sexy – or, rather, why it causes a morbid dependence. “Male dominance is sexual. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone, sexualise hierarchy,” Catherine MacKinnon wrote in 1989’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. To accuse Del Rey of “glamourising subservience” puts the blame on Del Rey rather than the men who have forged their own dominance. “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” is another Gender Theory 101 slogan that comes to mind as I watch Del Rey pinned to a pinball machine by an older man in the music video for 2012’s “Ride”.
Nowadays, Del Rey is no longer oblivious to the pressure to cohere to an empowerment narrative. For instance, she no longer sings the lyric “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” from Ultraviolence’s title track, as borrowed from the Crystals. On her latest, Norman Fucking Rockwell, she renegotiates the terms of her own subjugation. “God damn, man-child,” she sings on the opening track, ridiculing her man while loving him and sticking by him. It taps into the leading question of straight women’s lives today: men are stupid and embarrassing, so why do I love them?
Elsewhere on Norman Fucking Rockwell, in what is quite frankly a genius move, Del Rey’s cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” could be read as a gender reversal of many of her songs, most notably “Blue Jeans”. As she waited for her liquor-breathed man all day on the 2012 single, on “Doin’ Time” she repeats late Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell’s similar anguishes: “Me and my girl we got this relationship / I love her so bad but she treats me like shit / Locked down like a penitentiary.” She further explores the male position on “Mariner’s Apartment Complex”, as she imagines herself tending to a feminised, enervated lover; assuring him “I’m your man”. Many listeners consider this Del Rey’s most emboldened moment – but in her world, she’s only free to roam within the confines of heterosexuality. The closest she gets to empowerment is trying her hand at male nurturance. It’s an image that many heterosexual women love: their man becoming small and soft and dependent in their arms. “Dominance eroticised defines the imperatives of its masculinity, submission eroticised defines its femininity,” says Mackinnon.
None of this is to say that what Del Rey is doing is truly radical. It isn’t. Hemingway, Nabokov, and Bukowski fill her bookshelves, not Mackinnon, Dworkin, and Butler. Still, I wonder if critics would still refer to her as ‘dull’ and a ‘one-trick pony’ if her music veered away from an addiction to heterosexuality (what alternative are straight women really presented with today?). What critics miss about Del Rey is that her music is simply a way to survive. She turns everything around her into a carnivalesque surface as a coping mechanism. The beach becomes an object. She loves the pier because of its rust and tack. She loves kitsch because it exposes an object’s own objecthood, the way heterosexual men and women turn one another into symbols of sexual difference in order to keep themselves turned on.
It’s why even when your friend assures you over and over that she’ll leave him, she will almost always return. Here’s the rub: you can’t bend desire. Unfortunately, empowerment and unshackling from men only really exists in a Lizzo song. In real life, we mustn’t ignore the realities which Del Rey exposes.