Feminist Fred

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.

Comments about prostitution take place in a sphere of human thought that assumes that sex is without any kind of importance, like any other kind of work. When the radical feminist attempts to ascribe a definite weight to the act, by establishing the political atmosphere it takes place within (patriarchy, oppression), there is considerable resistance to this contextualization.

I hear nothing but confusion whenever I read comments defending prostitution. The basis of the confusion comes from the insistence that women are not prostituted, that they are simply selling a service like any other, and that denying them this ‘freedom’ is unjust.

It’s not about degrading the act of sex to the point where it nothing more than a service for men. It’s about freedom!

Nobody wants to look at intercourse as a huge battlefield. Oppression and cultural bias are so firmly ingrained that it renders us incapable of treating the act of sex as a simple service. Many women would love to believe that intercourse is implicitly disconnected with issues of male privilege, the beauty myths, and oppression. Then they can claim it truly is a service conducted in some fantasy land where oppression doesn’t exist, and therefore, can’t be considered rape.

If you try to point out that no woman has the ability to have sex without the healthy crutch of denial, a denial that assures us that sex is completely devoid of politics, some would claim that this is to infantilize the woman. But it is the male culture that infantilizes the woman, not the act of pointing it out.

Feminism is a way of looking at sex that, unlike any other philosophy, assumes that there is much importance to be found in the sex act, and the sexual separation of human beings. To defend the idea of prostitution by lowering our views of intercourse to the point where it can be happily bought and sold is to also accept just as happily the idea that a woman is an object.

I don’t understand why it’s OK for men to objectify and use a woman as long as he pays for it. It should never be OK.

Where feminism fears to tread is idea that intercourse is something far more important than a mere service to be bought and sold freely. You can argue it back and forth forever and never get down to the real issue: Do men hate women, or do they love them? And what do we mean by hate and love?

If love is possession and control, then men do love women. If love is to wish to nurture and cherish, maybe they don’t. A man who truly loves women would never pay to have sex with them, because the idea would mean that he nurtures them in exchange for sex. No matter which way I look at prostitution, it’s nothing but men oppressing women, and I’m astonished so many feminists see it any other way.