Ariana Grande’s sweetener and the soft resilience of women

Grande’s new record is a homage to women and the divine feminine — it provides joy I didn’t know I needed

Nicole Froio
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read
sweetener by Ariana Grande

(Trigger warning: mentions of misogyny, sexual assault and harassment)

My work can be really difficult; sometimes I will spend week after week reading descriptions of sexual assault, only to be told online that there should be a way for abusers to find redemption when survivors have barely been compensated or heard nearly enough for that to be a priority.

We are currently living at a time where sexual harassment and assault seems to be everywhere. The #MeToo movement has fast tracked us here, but the truth is that feminist and womanist women have been working for decades to have these conversations, protect survivors and stop sexual violence from happening altogether.

It is within this context, one of willingly looking at things that are hard to look at and of unwillingly being confronted with abuses of power daily, that I have become obsessed with Ariana Grande’s latest album, “sweetener’, a bubblegum pop album that echoes 90s tunes and tackles deeply personal topics. The songs are sticky, catchy, and beautifully arranged. Grande has characterized the project as one to sweeten her fans’ lives, which is something that feels necessary after the Manchester bombing that took place at her concert in 2017. And it certainly does that: it’s a tender but fun record that often feels like a warm hug.

It’s also quite clearly a celebration of the divine feminine. More specifically, I read “sweetener” as a homage to the resilient softness that has enabled women to survive terrible structural conditions for generations.

Grande starts this celebration with “God is a woman” which is the principal single of the album. Grande is celebrating women, but the lyrics also reveal in which conditions she believes women become divine; through bodily autonomy, through liberation of our expression and bodies, through sensual exploration and love of ourselves. Grande gets a lot of flack for being very girly — she is often infantalized for it, her art considered unimportant and superficial, and demands are made of her that are not entirely fair — and this celebration of feminine womanhood rejects those (misogynistic) contestations. “God is a woman” is not only sexual, but sensual; it links divinity to sensuality, a soft understanding of a woman’s body autonomy and desires.

Grande’s performance of “God is a woman” at the Video Music Awards.

The songs “sweetener” and “successful” echo the intense confidence Grande feels in her own (girly) skin and (sometimes goofy) art. “no tears left to cry” isn’t merely a radio bop, Grande literally takes a hated expression of femininity — using the word “like” in the middle of a sentence: “right now i’m in a state of mind / i wanna be in like all the time”, a deliberate feminization of the lyrics — and makes it into art.

Grande loves herself and her femininity, that much is clear. Yet, she doesn’t shy away from showing how she can falter, especially romantically: in “everytime” and “better off” she struggles to stay away from a love interest that harms her, always putting self-love first but mourning the romance she lost as a result. I do always associate this type of heartbreak with femininity — specifically, the phenomenon of women having to protect their own hearts against men who continuously hurt us with their selfishness and callousness, a phenomenon that means our softness needs hard edges to exist. In “goodnight n go”, Grande struggles to open up to new love after hurting, trying to find permission for her own vulnerability in the practicalities of knowing a new lover.

While she has always spoken about her struggles with anxiety, Grande has recently said her mental health became unmanageable after the Manchester attack. In “breathin”, her anxiety is broken open to her listeners: “Some days, things just take way too much of my energy / I look up and the whole room’s spinning /(…) Feel my blood runnin’, swear the sky’s fallin’ / How do I know if this shit’s fabricated? / Time goes by and I can’t control my mind.

This is the song that broke me. Why do simple tasks feel so daunting when my heart is at my throat? Why can’t I talk myself out of panicky thoughts when I know they don’t match my reality? Just breathe and we can get through it together, Grande concludes in “get well soon”, a song where she references not being in her body but realizing that, despite her own troubles, her community needs to be comforted nonetheless.

“Get well soon” is the song that makes me think this album is about the resilient softness of women. The vocal layering is done with Grande’s voice only — no back-up singers — which invokes the (often lonely and strenuous) work of emotional labor, where women stretch their comforting words and emotional space throughout communities and families. This is a resilient softness strengthened through solidarity; being unwell but recognizing your community, your friends, your family, are also unwell, afraid and anxious, and needing to provide that emotional space because your softness requires it.

At the end of her “God is a woman” performance, Grande honored the women in her family onstage at the VMAs.

Do we honor women and women-aligned people who are the emotional backbone of our communities enough? Do they feel supported and are they taking care of themselves, their bodies, their minds? Or do we shame them for arbitrary, sexist standards when they try to express themselves? These are the questions I found myself asking when, in the midst of being obsessed with how Grande celebrates femininity, how she tries to elevate it, she was groped by a pastor during Aretha Franklin’s funeral. All the while, people on Twitter were saying her short dress was disrespectful and inappropriate.

The very softness Ariana Grande seeks to celebrate is what makes many women vulnerable to violence, it is interpreted as an invitation, it is interpreted as a fragility that is more likely not to make a fuss. Of course, women who are not feminine also suffer violence, being put through abuse and suffering exactly for deviating the gender norm. Whatever we do, we cannot win. We were given these bodies, this gender, these rules that make no sense, in this world that oppresses us.

And Ariana gets that, I can hear it in her record. She knows we are struggling to breathe because this world is trying to choke us, but that being soft is not a flaw in itself. This record honors a resilient softness we have learned to survive, but allows lets us be human, create solidarity and care for others. “Sweetener” feels like the fresh breath I needed to take after not breathing properly for a long time.

I am a self-funded researcher and journalist based in the UK. Most of the writing I do is unpaid. If you learned something from my writing, please feel free to tip me some dollars at paypal.me/NicoleHFroio

Academica Feminista

Feminism, pop culture, books and politics.

Nicole Froio

Written by

Women’s Studies PhD student in UK. Writer, reporter, thinker, feminist. Views my own. #Latina Tip jar: www.paypal.me/NicoleHFroio

Academica Feminista

Feminism, pop culture, books and politics.

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