Tammy Wynette is one of the best country singers ever. Something about her voice, which she typically starts out real low and subtle and which eventually climbs to a power and glory that make my heart almost pop from the beauty. Country music is as full of sexism as Rock, most of it tied to the glorification of a woman’s subordinate place serving a man, rather than outright sexual objectification.

But this song has it both ways, and almost questions the status quo in a way that a man can hardly argue with, which it has to, in order to avoid tripping any all-too-sensitive male kneejerk reactions to the slightest threats to their hegemony.

I’ve never seen the inside of a bar room
Or listened to a jukebox all night long
But I see these are the things that bring you pleasure
So I’m gonna make some changes in our home

I’ve heard it said: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”
So if that’s the way you’ve wanted me to be
I’ll change if it takes that to make you happy
From now on you’re gonna see a different me.

Because your good girl’s gonna go bad
I’m gonna be the swingin’est swinger you’ve ever had
If you like ‘em painted up powdered up
Then you oughta be glad
‘Cause your good girl’s gonna go bad.

I’ll even learn to like the taste of whiskey
In fact, you’ll hardly recognize your wife
I’ll buy some brand new clothes and dress up fancy
For my journey to the wilder side of life.

Because your good girl’s gonna go bad
I’m gonna be the swingin’est swinger you’ve ever had
If you like ‘em painted up powdered up
Then you oughta be glad
‘Cause your good girl’s gonna go bad.

Oh Yeah Your good girl’s gonna go bad.

Because it dares to create a possibility of questioning why a woman’s role can be both reviled and glorified for close to the same reasons, I’d call this song almost feminist.

I was about 12 years old when this song was a hit, and it made me feel very nervous about what it meant to be a man. The air of menace is pretty extreme in this song, from the obvious resemblance of the title to the word “rapist”, to the warning, finger-shaking tone of blame it takes toward the women in the world who need to beware of the Rapper, to the description of his techniques in seducing women, which are threatening, manipulative and evil.

Hey girl, I bet you
There’s someone out to get you.
You’ll find him anywhere
On a bus, in a bar, in a grocery store.
He’ll say “Excuse me, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

So, he starts his rappin’
Hoping something will happen.
He’ll say he needs you,
A companion, a girl he can talk to.
He’s made up his mind.
He needs someone to sock it to.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

He’s made an impression,
So he makes a suggestion.
“Come up to my place
For some coffee or tea or me.”
He’s got you where he wants you.
Girl, you’ve gotta face reality.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after

How’s a boy supposed to distinguish between what this rapist is doing and what he’s been taught to do in order to earn the romantic attentions of the girls he longs to love? And it’s confusing to think how menacing and dangerous it sounds to be the prey of what sounds like a fairly non-coercive seduction technique. Then, after all this sinister hinting around, the girl is instructed to simply face reality.

Something I have often thought about but rarely articulated is that men are not only taught how to be men in haphazard and slapdash ways, but also are taught many overtly contradictory ways of expressing masculinity, of varying degrees of evilness and aggression.

I think even the manliest man you have ever met is, at heart, completely uncertain as to just what a man is supposed to do or what is expected of him, and this uncertainty causes a great deal of misunderstood anxiety, which is most handily identified by men as anger and resentment toward women, who he thinks have invented and have sole responsibility for all masculine behavior through the all mighty power of the pussy, before which he trembles in abject fear.

This song does double duty, threatening both men and women with a dark vision of manipulation, coercion and rape.

I got a rare comment from a man who is confused about why I say that men “hate” women:

He notes that men are often kind to women, “…it’s not self-evident – to me at least – such everyday observations of apparent kindness can be reconciled with the view of men as creatures of hate.”

I wrote a long response about men and women not being all one thing or the other, but relative as all things are. And more about the social constructs of masculinity and femininity. But it’s kind of an appropriate introduction to my next misogynist song, wherein the naked, seething hate of a man for a woman he loves is exposed without any filters at all, Jesse Belvin’s doo-wop song “Mess You Up”.

Listen to me, it ain’t fair,
She run around here and there,
I’ll hit her, I declare, I don’t mind going to the electric chair.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Been running round with my friend Joe
Ya’ll didn’t think that I would ever know
Now you no-good so-and-so
You gonna reap just what you sow.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I thought you loved me like I love you
Why you wanna do the things you do?
I saw you grinnin’ at Jimmy and Jack
I think I’ll disconnect your back.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Don’t come messin’ round with me
I’m just about as mad as I can be
I killed a lion when I was only three
Davy Crockett ain’t got a thing on me.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I’ll chain down the lightning and ride the thunder
Pin the wind in a jug and beat it with a club

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

It’s easy to laugh at the ferocity in this song if you’re a man wrapped safely in the privilege of exception from such enmity. But if you stop and consider that women are killed and assaulted everyday in ways just like this all over the world, it becomes too sad to crack a cynical grin ever again.

Here’s a uniquely evil song that charted in the sixties. It turns out there’s a whole genre of songs about being forced into prostitution by your own mother. This fits into my theory about the 1960s in America being the most misogynist culture ever.

I was lucky enough to get a comment about heavy metal songs being misogynist, too. I have to admit that if we start looking into hard rock and rock music in general the shit will get to be so thick that it is almost limitless.

“Well, I remember it all very well lookin’ back
It was the summer that I turned eighteen.
We lived in a one-room, run down shack
on the outskirts of New Orleans.

We didn’t have money for food or rent
to say the least we was hard-pressed
when Momma spent every last penny we had
to buy me a dancin’ dress.

Well, Momma washed and combed and curled my hair,
then she painted my eyes and lips.
Then I stepped into the satin dancin’ dress.
It had a split in the side clean up to my hips.

It was red, velvet-trimmed, and it fit me good
and standin’ back from the lookin’ glass
was a woman
where a half grown kid had stood.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Momma dabbed a little bit of perfume
on my neck and she kissed my cheek
Then I saw the tears welling up
in her troubled eyes as she started to speak

She looked at our pitiful shack and then
she looked at me and took a ragged breath
She said, Your Pa’s runned off, and I’m real sick
and the baby’s gonna starve to death.

She handed me a heart-shaped locket that said
“To thine own self be true”
and I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across
the toe of my high-healed shoe

It sounded like somebody else was talkin’
askin’, “Momma what do I do?”
She said, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy.
They’ll be nice to you.”

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
But if you want out girl it’s up to you
Now don’t let me down,
now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

That was the last time I saw my momma
when I left that rickety shack
The welfare people came and took the baby.
Momma died and I ain’t been back.

But the wheels of fate had started to turn
and for me there was no other way out.
It wasn’t very long after that I knew exactly
what my momma was talkin’ ’bout.

I knew what I had to do.
Then I made myself this solemn vow:
I’s gonna to be a lady someday
though I didn’t know when or how.

But I couldn’t see spendin’ the rest of my life
with my head hung down in shame.
You know I mighta been born just plain white trash.
but Fancy was my name.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Wasn’t long after that a benevolent man
took me in off the streets
One week later I was pourin’ his tea
in a five roomed penthouse suite.

Since then I’ve charmed a king, a congressman
and an occasional aristocrat
and I got me an elegant Georgia mansion
and a New York townhouse flat.

Now I ain’t done bad

Now in this world there’s a lot of self-righteous
hypocrites who call me bad.
They criticize Momma for turning me out
No matter how little we had.

But I haven’t had to worry ’bout nothin’
now for nigh on fifteen years
But I can still hear the desperation
in my poor mommas voice ringin’ in my ears.

“Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Oh, here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Like Wives & Lovers, there’s a strong theme of resignation and surrender in this song. How normal it was for women to feel this way is what I find the most horrible part about these lyrics. The one way out – capitulation to male desires – is all about becoming fully invested in being a member of the sex class. The uselessness of women unless they are objects of desire.

Even as women become more conscious of being worth more than just being used by men, the rise in porn culture attacks from the secret places that men hide their midnight desires, trying to undermine men’s ability to realize the obvious humanity of the women all around them.

It’s the image of patriarchy-pleasing handed down from mother to daughter that creeps me out the most about this song. An obvious male fantasy, yet one that makes twisted sense if you accept your fate as an oppressed and poverty-stricken person in a world of money and men. A simple update to becoming an empowered stripper would make this song as relevant today as it was then.

I know that of all the feminist blogs on the internet, mine is probably the least fun to read. I’m not a gifted humorist at the best of times, being more inclined to meaningless absurdity or hurtful sarcasm than wit or whimsy. When I’m talking about oppression, I get even heavier than ever, since it weighs on my soul and aggravates what Twisty Faster calls the Obstreperal Lobe.

But I love music, too, and have a decent collection of American popular songs of the 20th century. You can’t throw a note far into this collection without smacking some really insulting lyrics for the ladies, either. Some of the very worst of them are almost comic in their bald professions of hate, contempt or patronization of women.

So I’m going to list ten of the worst antifeminist songs I know of, and when I’m done, I’ll rank them according to comments, if I can’t figure out some way to embed a poll in my Wordpress blog (help on this is very welcome).

I want to start with one the worst, and the best. Best, because the melody is by Burt Bacharach, and I do love his melodies, since he is one of the finest composers of popular song around. Hal David wrote a scolding little lyric to this song that so perfectly encapsulates male privilege that you could write a primer on it by simply annotating thes fine lyrics:

Wives And Lovers
Jack Jones
(Burt Bacharach/ Hal David)

Hey! Little Girl
Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try anymore

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you…

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He’s almost here…

Hey! Little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you’d wear to go to the city and
Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Time to get ready
Time to get ready for love

What an air of menace, essential to almost all of the songs I’ll be presenting! It’s not so much a song as a scolding. The idea of a woman as a member of the sex class is right up front here, with no possible way to excuse or sugar coat the concept. In a way, it’s an important song for women to hear in order to confront the idea that this is what men want from them. Whenever a woman you know denies that feminism is about the liberation of women from male oppression just sing this song. You really don’t need to add much else.