Grimes Is Small And Has A Vagina And Is Really Sick Of This Shit
Earlier today, Grimes posted a piece of writing to her Tumblr. It was called 'I don’t want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living'.
Canadian avant-garde pop producer and singer Grimes wrote a slightly sad, poem-like rant or manifesto on her Tumblr earlier today. Claire Boucher has a bit of a complex relationship with the blogging platform and with the internet as a whole but as she reaches the end of the album cycle for her excellent breakthrough LP, Visions, she has things to say about what she’s been through as a public figure, as a musician, as an internet icon, as a woman.
“I’m tired of creeps on message boards discussing whether or not they’d “fuck” me”
I don’t listen to Grimes’ music as much as most critics seem to, but I respect the fact that she’s making it, and I especially respect the no-fucks-given vibe of everything she does outside the studio/bedroom as well.
Grimes has created an iconography of and around herself that makes her ripe for emulation and obsession, as it becomes easy to take on small aspects of her image. Vulva-shaped plastic rings on her merch table, Beyonce and anime and pink stuff and that ’90s-inflected tumblr-teen kitsch aesthetic that holds The Spice Girls and Bikini Kill up as equally important — because if you’re in your 20s right now or wishing you were, they probably are.
Her taste isn’t entirely out of reach for the average fan; she blesses your plastic shit and your nice shit and your inner or outer dork who loves Disney, and your impulse to cut your own fringe and look weird. She is the patron saint of liking what you like, and to hell with everyone else.
I don’t know what kind of behaviour or assaults on her space she’s been subjected to to make her write this. But it sounds like her embrace of her feminine side brings out a really unattractive side of certain people.
“I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers”
As a music writer who’s also a woman I’ve encountered a few of those – whether it’s commenters questioning my knowledge (once, I was singled out this way along with an excellent male writer in the same article whose name happens to sound feminine), or random guys just being pleasantly surprised that I “know music” (one was impressed that I knew Dave Grohl was in Nirvana) and think they’re paying me a compliment when they praise girls who like rock and drink beer.
As if the way men participate in a pastime is the only correct way to do it. As though if I hated beer and preferred sipping rosé when I’m up the back judging your band silently, it would make me a less authentic participant in rock’n’roll. (Gaming, an even more dude-dominated business, is full of these stories – check out Rae Johnston’s perfectly proportional recent response to a particularly nasty one.)
Sometimes women are just good at stuff on their own, but there are still people who think we’re just lurching from accidental success to accidental success, hoping a dude will come along and help us out and maybe also want to fuck us. Female musicians are constantly subjected to comments on their body, and restrictions on how their music can be perceived because they are women; being called “songstress” and “siren” as if they’re singing out of their sexy, sexy vaginas instead of their mouths like regular singers.
“im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things i enjoy somehow make me a lesser person”
This attitude comes from a sexist place: one where pop music is for teenage girls and people with no intellectual curiosity, and fashion is for silly women (and gay men) without anything better to spend their money on. Pop music and fashion are multi-billion dollar industries that shape culture; they are focused on images, history, references and signifiers, and both have an incredibly complicated relationship with women’s bodies. Even women who reject them are assumed to be making a statement about them by doing so.
i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized
…
im tired of being referred to as ‘cute,’ as a ‘waif’ etc., even when the author, fan, friend, family member etc. is being positive
Below that line — the last in the “poem” part of the post — are dictionary definitions of “waif” and “cute”: they are not words that suggest strength, agency, self-possession or confidence. They suggest small, sweet, helpless.
No matter what colour or shape Boucher’s hair is, no matter what she wears, no matter how brave or fascinating or critically acclaimed her music is, she can’t escape the body she was born into, and it dominates the way people perceive her and talk about her. It diminishes her, reduces her to the shape and weight of her body, as though it’s amazing someone so insubstantial can have such impact on the world.
It’s sad how lazily superficial much of the coverage of The Grimes Phenomenon has been, how hard it apparently is to talk about her music, her relationship to history, her art, the fashion world’s fascination with her and her image without being patronising, reductive and leery – and it’s sad that it’s made her so tired and sad.
Compare her frustration to this terrific profile of Kim Gordon – a woman who’s carved out an incredibly important place for herself in the music and art worlds, who did so as part of a creative and emotional partnership without losing her own identity in it, who has her own distinct style without letting her image consume her. “Kim inspired me because she tried all the things that interested her,” Sofia Coppola is quoted as saying. “She just did what she was into.”
Grimes, as much as anyone else, is doing that right now, and she’s doing it alone. Let’s all stop treating her like a kitten who does tricks.
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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam. Find her on twitter.
Feature image credit: Tommy Chase Lucas