Through A Woman’s Eyes
In recent years, there has been a surge of the saying “I’m just a girl”. It’s garnered attention and made rounds through social media platforms this day in age through the form of memes, captions and comments on posts. This saying is still of such relevance in part due to the resurgence of the popular song belonging to ska band, No Doubt, “Just a Girl”, where the main lyric in the chorus is ‘I’m just a girl’. No Doubt consisted of four members, with lead vocalist Gwen Stefani and they rose to prominence in the 1990’s with “Just a Girl” coming out in 1995. This song was about Stefani’s experience growing up with strict parents that treated her as being fragile and helpless who was in need of constant supervision and protection simply on the premise of being a girl. It has resonated with listeners for generations because of its timeless lyrics and rhythm that still piques the interest of classic alternative rock ears. Even more interestingly the 1990’s was a transformative time for women in the alternative rock genre, especially that of which was considered the underground scene for the time. Gwen Stefani was not the only woman with a story to tell through music, with lyrics that hit home for audiences everywhere, one such woman coming from the band Hole.
In 1989, Los Angeles, California the band Hole was born. It consisted of four members, including different drummers and bassists throughout its history but was brought to life by its lead vocalist Courtney Love and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson. The band was considered underground music belonging to the noise rock genre in the 90’s but gained popularity for their debut album in 1991 named “Pretty on the Inside”. Love had been in a romantic relationship with lead singer of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, whose talents as a singer, songwriter and guitarist made his band extremely successful. Today, it’s hard to speak about the grunge genre as a whole without speaking Kurt Cobain’s name in the same sentence as he and his band are largely credited with bringing the genre back to life. This was even the case in 1991, when Nirvana released the album that launched them into fame for decades to come, “Nevermind”, featuring their hit single “Smells like Teen Spirit”.
With Courtney Love and her romantic partner both being a part of the alternative rock scene, it can be assumed that it must have been difficult to cope with the other’s success if it was greater than one partner’s. That assumption would be correct, and for Love, that was definitely the case as she had gone on record in Spin Magazine, stating that she needed to top them. She wanted to be better than Cobain, but his talents and the popularity of their style did solidify Hole’s ambitions of developing a more structured style of music. This came in the form of the band’s second studio album “Live Through This”, which as one can assume from its title, includes some tracks that tell a story, to say the least.
The album contained one of Hole’s most successful and popular songs to date, “Violet”. It was praised for its angry, aggressive, and implicit raunchy lyrics, like many of the songs on the album it spoke particularly to female listeners who had lived through the stories told through its words. “Violet” was written by Love herself, along with Eric Erlandson. The song is reportedly about Love’s former relationship with Billy Corgan, member of the band Smashing Pumpkins, and their troublesome time together in 1991. Although this has never been explicitly confirmed by Love herself, her on-stage introduction to the song during a 1995 performance seemed to be enough to convince fans that the song was about Corgan. “This song is about a jerk. I hexed him, now he’s losing his hair.” Even with strong speculation about the song being about a specific person, who it was about didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Love was singing about jerks in general and speaking to women who had been irrefutably framed by the male gaze.
The Male Gaze was a term first used by film theorist, Laura Mulvey. She described the male gaze as a lens in which women are seen by men and therefore portrayed on-screen in a manner that typically caters to the sexualization of women in order to appeal to the presumed male dominant audience. She delves into the forms it takes through cinema in her work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), and explains various ways in which the male gaze influences media depictions. These ways can be narrowed down to three points: directory, story, and spectator. For directory, the direction of the camera is responsible for the angles and shots that are used during filming which tend to capture the full bodies of women in some scenes, and close up shots to accentuate a woman’s physical features in others. Story refers to the characterization of women from the perspective of a man. The stories told would often have their female characters be portrayed as a prize to be won, a damsel in distress, or any other one dimensional fictionalized version of what a woman is or should be according to a man’s interpretation. Finally, the oversexualization of women in film, television and other mediums is all in attempts to please the male spectators and what they are seeing on the screen. Hence, the phrase male gaze.
It should come as no surprise that the male gaze has been harmful in more ways than one for a very long time, to women and how they are perceived in society. One of the many ways being how it continues to strongly influence modern media. Upholding the standard of the male gaze seems nearly impossible to stray from even today, despite the twenty first century progression towards a society based on equity between males and females. There is a strong foothold that the patriarchy holds on many people and the way we function as a society, even more so when women appeal to it, intentionally or not. Courtney Love was not and is not such a woman who cares to conform to the male standard of what a woman should be and she exemplifies that in her music. “Violet” is no exception. The lyrics tell the story while the music video shows the story.
As previously mentioned, the song was assumed to be about Corgan, who had been an abusive partner in his relationship with Love. The lyrics subtly address the injustices of sexual violence by alluding to the fact that it’s the responsibility of the woman to prevent such acts from happening by serving as a sarcastic subscription to victim blaming. This point is introduced with the line, “You should learn when to go, you should learn how to say no.” The words also insist the value of a woman is limited to what she has to offer sexually and when that is taken away she means nothing anymore, “And they get what they want, and they never want it again; Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to.” The line is unique because the anger and aggression that accompanies the delivery of the verse implies exactly the opposite of what is being said. The frustration comes from existing in a world that assumes being a woman is an invitation to take things away without permission. “I want it again, but violent, more violent; Yeah I’m the one with no soul,” is perhaps the most disturbing line, suggesting that the abuse Love endured offered no mercy whatsoever. For listeners who share a similar experience, the message reads loud and clear. It has been considered a song intended to empower women and take back what was stolen from them.
The music video can actually stand alone with the impact that it holds by emphasizing the overwhelming feeling of the male gaze as the camera switches between a mass crowd of men and a group of burlesque performers. This is a tribute to Love’s past involvement in stripping, which to some would be a justifiable reason to assume that Love would be open to anything, in regards to sexual acts or favors. The video makes use of semi nude models that would be used to paint portraits reproducing the ideal works that entice male viewers. The imagery used insists there’s a particular image that men desire, in addition to displaying acts that Love herself has faced. The woman who stage dives in the video is a representation of a real life event that played out months before “Violet” was first performed, where Love stage dived and was violently groped, and had her clothes torn off. She was returned to the stage naked and the event partially inspired another one of Hole’s songs “Asking For It”. There is much more to be said about the video that extends beyond just what is sung and shown. This is where we see some of the harmful effects of the male gaze revealing themselves in the music industry.
Women are generally more harshly criticized in the realm of music and the same proved to be true for Courtney Love throughout her time in the public eye, especially being so tightly compared to Kurt Cobain for the entirety of the relationship and after. Because women have societal pressure to conform to gender norms, any presentation of the contrary illustrates them as an all around indecent individual.
But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men — not because the feminine is different from the masculine — but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. Essay 3, John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
Courtney Love went under scrutiny for her relationship with Kurt Cobain and allegations spread that she was with him for his fame, fortune, and she was even accused of being responsible for his death. However, she was known for being a very outspoken and confrontational character but it was only a facade. Her persona led people to believe that she wasn’t a vulnerable person, but it was a defense mechanism to prevent her from getting hurt. Love was extremely insecure, in addition to believing she needed to top Cobain’s success she also felt like she wasn’t good enough to be with him. Love’s reluctance to offer public vulnerability is ultimately what convinced Nirvana fans that she must’ve been trying to gain something from being with Cobain. He actually addressed the accusations with the following statement:
My wife challenges injustice and the reason her character has been so severely attacked is because she chooses not to function the way the white corporate man insists. A big “fuck you” to those of you that have the audacity to claim that I’m so naive and stupid that I would allow myself to be taken advantage of. Liner Notes, Incesticide (1992)
Kurt Cobain recognized what made Courtney stand out and he supported her rebellious behavior because she unapologetically refused to conform. Although she had his support, it wasn’t enough to strip her of the infamy that was cast on her. Kurt Cobain was heavily involved with drugs, as was Love, but her reputation was deterred more than Cobain’s ever was. As a woman when you make the same mistakes a man does it holds greater weight, and you are not only labeled a bad person, but a horrible romantic partner, a disgusting junkie, and following the birth of their daughter, an awful mother.
During a time of popular culture taking different forms, especially through music it was a big deal that Courtney Love was being judged so harshly. With her romantic partner being a huge contributor to the genre as a whole, he could’ve easily been seen as a musical intellectual, one that was largely responsible for the popularity of grunge thanks to his many talents. Consequently, he and many others built upon contemporary culture that has managed to withstand the test of the time. Culture was not always thought of as something that anyone could contribute to until the explosion of ‘mass culture’, which then followed the concept of the Culture Industry. Michael Denning, who is an American cultural historian, references the work of Raymond Williams in his description of the rise of the Culture Industry.
Far from marking the places outside capital’s empire, culture was itself an economic realm, encompassing the mass media, advertising, and the production and distribution of knowledge. Moreover, it came to signify not only the cultural industries and state cultural apparatuses but the forms of working-class subsistence and consumption, both the goods and services supplied by the welfare state or purchased in the market, and the time of leisure and social reproduction outside the working day. The shape of this new postmodern culture concept — the culture of entertainment industries and welfare states — can be seen in the essays of the 1940s and the 1950s that have lasted longer than those of Eliot or Kroeber and Kluckhohn: Adorno and Horkheimer “The Culture Industry.” Culture in the Age of New Worlds, Michael Denning, Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn (2004)
The postmodern culture concept has only grown in popularity over time due to the excessive commodification of nearly everything. Therefore the idea that the culture of entertainment industries is of substantial importance has only increased in relevance because of mass media. In the 1990’s, although there were less forms of social media, the mediums in which art could be expressed and respected was close to what it is today. Artists were deemed revolutionary for their innovative twists on former genre structures, some which belonged to the underground rock scene. The acknowledgement of additions that were made to music and the industry by artists like Kurt Cobain should just as equally be rewarded to Courtney Love. She withstood constant criticism and physical atrocities that any woman should not be forced to face, and unfortunately, that’s more than could be said about Cobain, referring to his untimely demise by suicide.
The song “Violet” was said to have been written by Cobain when it wasn’t. Hole’s success always seemed to be in the shadow of Nirvana’s when most people you come across who are familiar with that style of music like both bands equally. Hole of course had a slightly different style and target audience that they appealed to but they and Nirvana were both widely regarded and equally respectable groups. Why is it that Courtney Love was faced with so much more negative attention than her man? So many of Hole’s songs tended precisely to uncomfortable situations that only women are capable of understanding since the world around them constantly feels like a threat.
From an anecdotal point of view, being a woman is no easy task. It’s impossible to take pride in who you are in a way that is socially acceptable by some, let alone all of society. What does it mean to be a feminist? Does it mean dressing provocatively to empower the right of choice? Does it mean dressing modestly to empower the same thing? Does it mean appealing to the male gaze on purpose to take back the dignity of our own sexuality? Does it mean to subvert the male gaze by refusing it as a means to declare no one but us can dignify our sexuality? Women are constantly judged, simply for the ways they exist. Men judge women, other women judge women and it is an endless loop of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an independent or strong woman, what it means to be an intelligent woman or a respectable one. Who is to say what feminism is when it is exercised in so many ways. Whether it be to embrace femininity and all it may bring, good and bad, or to reject the societal norms that a woman must be feminine to be empowered, feminism is something that may never universally be agreed upon as being simple enough to fit one narrow scope of what it should be.
Songs like “Violet”, as well as many others from Hole, tell a bold story, and a brutal one at that. From conception to performance, they fill the hearts of so many women longing to be heard and seen because even though everyone battles their own demons you’ve never experienced pain until you look at the world through a woman’s eyes.
