Or, you know, you could get out of your head and help the person in charge of the lemonade lift the five-gallon Igloo dispenser onto the table. You can change into that band shirt that’s a little misshapen, you can watch your VHS-taped Godzilla movies, you can strum two chords and pretend you’re the Velvet Underground. If you’re walking home from the market and two roads diverge, the backyard party or your own house, “come inside, you can do what you like” is a whisper from an angel. Or it could be the neighbors, and you’ve already made up an elaborate story in your mind about them hating you, disapproving of your life choices, the lack of parties you throw that look like theirs. Your best friend could be there, hoping you’ll come join. There are probably potato chips and sterno trays of ribs.
The party outside sounds fun, doesn’t it? It legitimately could be. The lyric is minimal enough to be open-ended. But where the conclusion of “Words” is hard to interpret as anything but an isolationist stance, “It’s Only Life” can be read two ways: acknowledging the comfort in hiding away, hiding away, or taking the arch vocal lilt of “it’s a nightmare” as a cue that this may be cynicism about cynicism. Released six years earlier than the Feelies’ 1988 “It’s Only Life,” the Missing Persons song has a similar premise. “I think I’ll dye my hair blue,” sang Dale Bozzio on Missing Persons’ “Words,” in a culminating moment of frustration, a capitulation to nihilism in a world where everyone’s self-interest wins out anyway. As we’ve seen with the Affordable Care Act fights, change is not linear and we never get to stop seeking it. What do we do? We keep pushing back, since focused daily primal scream is just how we roll now. They need their strength for the trenches the hell with your fainting-couch frivolity. It’s the men who have the important cultural work ahead.
Sometimes the soi-disant woke baes and male feminists, protesting too much.
And sometimes it’s outright shitheels like Donald Trump that we protect, but more often it’s the well-meaning men, the hapless nice boys.
Off the internet, it’s ever harder for women to have full reproductive autonomy, to earn equal pay, to have their campus rape reports given earnest legal consideration because the “rights” of the accused take precedence. Off the internet, Weiner only has to serve 21 months in prison. On the internet, promising Democrat leaders like Anthony Weiner reveal themselves to be repeat-offender pedophiles with a taste for teenage girls. On the internet, women keep their blocking fingers cocked, close their DMs, turn their accounts private: the death threats and violent, violating language are unbearable. Dozens of women with stories of harassment and assault have been coerced into silence in scrappier circles of the same industry, as influential straight male critics and curators have established a culture of fear, of dangling carrots of access, career advancement, prestige, that their victims could only reach by compromising their comfort, consent, safety. It’s this genius that guys like Harvey Weinstein hopped the freight train of later in the century, as independent film increased in critical and financial capital and he amassed the cachet of an industry giant. The Playboy Mansion, where Hef fed women Quaaludes and kept them under his bizarrely controlling thumb, was the cheap punchline of every late-night monologue, but still a glitzy aspirational fantasy for schlubs and celebs alike. I think about how “genius” in the twentieth century was the province of straight white men, how persona could sublimate its problematic depths by sculpting itself as wild, bad-boy, some kind of running joke. I think about this with the death of Hugh Hefner, and how he crafted and marketed his magazine in a way (“I just read it for the articles”) that minimized the smut enough to make criticism of it prudish. Women who said no, whether it was to loosening their bikini straps or letting their bosses corner them at the Christmas party, were “uptight.” This was one of the core messages from Anna Biller’s 2007 feature, Viva, the scam of enlightenment that predatory men in cool clothes could play on women eager to be properly feminist. One lesson I’ve learned repeatedly about the mass culture that built up around women’s lib: the newfound encouragement for women to present as sexually with-it was often driven by a skewed power dynamic that benefited the men more.