There are no male groupies

Ruth Padel on writing I'm A Man

(Published in The Guardian, May 2000)

The sound men most want to hear, says the Marquis de Sade, is a woman's cry when you're inside her. It tells the world you have this shattering power to make her feel. When Duke Ellington was twelve, he and his mates took girls to the reservoir-banks, in hearing distance of each other, to see "who did the greater job as a man". The marker was girl noise. "If the girl's reaction was loud, he was a great fucker because the chick was hollering 'Baby I'm coming', all that shit." Competition was hot: "some cats pinched the chicks to make them holler. One slipped his chick quarters."

For centuries, men turned that cry into music by writing love-songs women sang. Across the board - pop, rock, opera, blues, folk, from "ma man don't love me and he treats me oh so mean" to Mozart's Countess in Figaro lamenting her husband's faithlessness - men have written, produced, and directed songs that defined the female voice as vulnerable. Hurt by a man, longing for him. Abandoned. "The problem with operas", the Glyndebourne director Graham Vick told me, "is they're written by men full of notions that women can't live without them." Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Piaff did write songs, but till the Seventies (give or take trailblazers like Janis Joplin), women mostly sang men's songs, and sounded how men wanted. The difference between women's lovesong and men's was that women's was by the people it was about. (continue reading...)