Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Slytherins
I fell down the stairs again yesterday, the second time this week. I’m not even kidding. Not cute pratfalls with a hair toss. I slipped and landed on my sacrum, crawled to the bottom while my husband worked to deduce that I was not paralyzed, just panicking. Love. Have you heard a country song about a woman like that? I don’t think so.
I feel a conflicted love for country music. I used to like it because I was dumb and I wished that a guy would think about me the way that they sing about women in country songs, tough yet pretty, with easily digestible flaws. Now I like country music because it entertains me, Yes! Compare her to another tiny fuckable object!!!!! Let’s goooo!
Are you a country girl or are you one of those OTHER GIRLS!? First of all I’m thirty two, I am in neither category. Country music writers like to categorize their women. She is either A.) This magic dixie dream girl whose flaws consist of no makeup and hair down. She checks all the boxes; boots, check, from the heartland, check, responds to ‘Darlin’, check. Finally, Pixie dream cowgirl’s most important quality is that she is NOT B.) Like the other girls! Fuck, I think I’m one of those others they keep referencing.
People always make fun of country music for having the same elements to seemingly every song. Boots, dirt, freedom, trucks, tiny, miniscule, polly pocket-sized women. Do me a favor, the next time you’re listening to a country music song and they say a woman is ‘pretty little,’ I want you to picture her as a cowgirl lego mini-figure. In Country Girl (Shake it for Me) just picture little straight lego legs dancin around. Or when Easton Corbin says, ‘it’s hard to concentrate with her pretty little lips on my neck’... just picture that little lego crawlin up on his shoulder to kiss his neck. She’s got her pretty little hand on his knee. Her little C-shaped hand rests on his blue jeans. Doesn’t that bring a warm glow to your heart? Don’t you love the way her pretty little square feet tap tap tap as she walks around?
I used to like the simplicity of country music. This is who I am. Fuck you if you don’t like it. This is our genre! We belittle women and we worship snakes!* I am who I am but I can still learn things, I can still see people with complexity. That alone makes me a bad cowgirl. Complexity is not allowed in the fantasy that is country music.
My favorite songs:
By no means an exhaustive list.
Whiskey in my Water: Country music’s Lady in the streets, Freak in the sheets.
Country Girl (Shake it for Me): a) Don’t tell me what to do. b) He says, ‘Shake it for the squirrels…’ this is at least a by-product of the fact that Disney wrote a character that, until she met a dude, her only friends were woodland creatures. c) What about shakin it for one’s self?
Sunshine and Whiskey: ‘Every time you kiss me it’s like sunshine and whiskey.’ Imagine taking a shot of strong whiskey as blinding sunlight hits your face. Ahhhh!
Honey Bee: This song makes me think of Danny DeVito in Matilda. I’m big, you’re small! I’m strong, you’re dainty! I’m whiskey, you’re wine! And there’s nothing you can do about it!
If I Die Young: This song is just instructions. If it were about me it would be, If I die young, give me a viking funeral, lay me down in a canoe and shoot flaming arrows.
All the drunk on you songs: First of all Tennessee Whiskey is the best of these. Second, I love that you’ve evolved to objectifying women in liquid form.
I keep having to learn this lesson that I have to stop trying to mold myself into something other people expect. Country songs are another bullshit expectation that I took on and failed by being myself. I am not lego-sized, my flaws are human, I can’t do a sexy two step because I just want to dick around. Until there’s a song about a grown woman who falls down the stairs as much as I do, I will keep fucking up being a country girl.
Dear everyone, (but mostly me) I am never going to perfectly fit into your genre because I am more than one thing. I’ll keep listening to country music. Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) remains my go-to karaoke song. I’ll keep wearing my pants tucked into my boots and being a disgrace to the name of cowgirl but this is who I am.
* A footnote/conspiracy: I wish that flag just meant you worshipped snakes. I’d be way more intimidated if you were a snake worshipper. I’d see you as a conniving villain rather than a dangerous and fumbling idiot who might accidentally kill an innocent in an attempt to be a hero. If there’s a flag that means, ‘I assure you, I’ve taken several gun safety classes’ I’d be a bit more supportive of those rights. Speaking of rights. Why is it that the same people who are preaching the second amendment are also the people saying, ‘there’s no such thing as free lunch’? Why are guns somehow more of a right than food?
Do you think the DIA bunker is just Hank Williams Jr’s Chamber of Secrets? HANK WILLIAMS JR is an anagram for NIHL MASK JAIL. Which means that Hank Sr predicted the onset of the novel coronavirus and told no one. Look it up.