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Changing gender roles throughout history have led to revolutions in all kinds of art, from cinema to visual art to music. The sociology of gender roles is a well-studied and fascinating topic—one which Lawrence itself teaches. Time and again, historical events and shifts in the predominant economic modes of production allow for the role of women—their relationship to men, their defining characteristics, their acceptable behaviors—, and gender in general, to be re-examined in the context of the “modern” conditions of society. For example, in the United States during WWII, when all the men went to war and the women had to take up more industrial, “manly” work, it became acceptable for women to become the financial providers for their own homes, at least while the men were away, because that was what the material conditions of the period required. Then, in the 1970s, as causes like the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement and the Gay Rights movement all caused political upheaval, women, too, took the opportunity to change their conditions by becoming more involved in politics and protests in order to win more control over their marriages, their finances and their own medical procedures, among other things. Along with these changes in material conditions, the representation of women in the media changed as well.
Whether it’s to make women heroes in order to encourage them to work like during WWII, or to villainize women in order to keep them from advocating for themselves like during the feminist movement of the 1970s, tropes in media have depicted women in very specific ways, and often without the control of woman creators. Masculine stories and experiences have dominated mainstream art for many, many decades, if not centuries. This is the case all over the world, but for the sake of staying within my own expertise, I’ll specifically be referring to conditions within the United States. Control over whose stories are told, specifically within mainstream artistic media, has frequently been denied to women throughout history. Now, however, as material disparities between the sexes become less and less egregious and our culture becomes more conscious of immaterial disparities, such as internalized misogyny and the more subtle remnants of rape culture, women telling their own stories is becoming more and more of an everyday occurrence. Women taking up space is no longer novel. As for women existing as complex, odd, obtrusive, sometimes unappealing creatures with not only the agency to make their own decisions but also the agency to make poor, strange decisions? That is new and, frankly, deeply refreshing, and it is exactly how women in a variety of art forms are beginning to represent themselves.
The simplest example of this exists in music. Bonkers women (said in the most endearing manner) have existed for at least as long as recorded music has been commercially available to the everyday ear. Eartha Kitt wanted to be evil (“Want to Be Evil,” 1953) long before Carrie Underwood took a Louisville slugger to both headlights (“Before He Cheats,” 2005). And in the meantime, and even since then, Fiona Apple will disprove your faith in man (“Fast as You Can,” 1999) and Mitski always wanted to die clean and pretty (“Last Words of a Shooting Star,” 2014). But not only is it the intense lyrical content that makes these women so out of the ordinary as far as “ladylike” behavior, but also the vocal techniques and instrumental accompaniments that occasionally make their music obtrusive, furious, lustful, spitting, or whatever other emotional elements make a song raw, obscene and deeply vulnerable. Fiona Apple’s dolphin-like vocals at the end of “I Want You To Love Me” (2020), Ethel Cain’s screams of pain in “Ptolemaea” (2022) and Regina Spektor’s terrifying gasps for air in “Open” (2012) convey raw emotion not given by lyrics alone, energy that taps into the primal need of every girl in the 21st century to scream at the top of their lungs, to be odd and gross and angry because they have the legal rights and cultural courtesy they’ve been asking for, but they still don’t have the right to be unappealing. This is not to say that there are not still legal disparities between men and women; occupational disparities, medical rights and other things still pose active threats to equality. However, in the modern culture of social awareness, women are at an all-time high in the U.S. in terms of social standing compared to men. As much as it is socially acceptable for women to live with more agency than ever before, women are still held to a standard of what is “ladylike.” Women are still consistently represented as flat characters with flat relationships. We have been taught for decades to fear gaining weight, to fear ugliness, to fear age. So when women are given the platform to create art with complete creative control over not only the narrative, but also the means of communication, the assertion of the ugly, the loud, the angry is also the assertion of humanity and complexity.