This current advert/meme is about how "like a girl" is used as an insult, and therefore insulting to girls. Which is true, naturally, and horrible.
But on the flip side, I found this song from 1896 (lyrics and cover art only) while looking for something to be heard in a music hall during an RP, about how great being a girl would be.
"To be a girl a week, if it were mine, I'd give the world"
Originally sung by a girl dressed up as a boy, of course...
Haha! There’s a somewhat similar poem from the same late-Victorian age, by Verner von Heidenstam, a Swedish poet of those heady days, quite influential in his day and in his own country (he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1915 by his peers) and also a famous womanizer. Heidenstam had travelled around the Balkans and the Levant in his twenties and taken in the local oriental cultures, landscapes, stories...and their vibe of romantic ruins of a glorious past and budding dreams of national liberation from the Turks (Lord Byron being an obvious role model), and in the poem I’m thinking of he used a story of how the men of a city would stand atop the roofs of their houses every night at sunset and praise Allah that they had not been born women. Our poet makes one of the men instead beg God’s forgiveness that he really would have wanted to be born a woman, despite the indignities, in order to – this is saved for the last line, of course – “let me serve the man as he deserves”.
ReplyDeleteIt was meant as a nip in the butt of what the writer felt to be an over-moralistic, drearily political cultural climate and early "womens' rights debates" – today you’d have said “PC-ness”. You can’t help wonder what his wives thought about it… ;)
And some of us do just wish we had been born women, to serve men as they deserve.. ;)
DeleteMmmghhh, don't we...?
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