On Divas, Culture, Change, and Butthurt Snowflake Men
Chappell Roan is in the building! Well, kind of. There’s been a few notes of Chappell Roan floating through the Soriano apartment, brought here by Susan, who was turned onto Roan by a friend. While I have no easy ear for pop balladry or dance pop, Roan’s synth-pop throwbacks are entertaining enough to make me wonder how deep Roan’s cultural impact will be.
Roan is a lesbian and isn’t just out about it. Her queerness informs her music, performance, style, and message as much as Lizzo’s entertainment career dances with Blackness and body image. No doubt that Lizzo has had a profound cultural affect on how the mainstream views bodies, not just aesthetically but socially, politically, and culturally. Roan just hit the Big Stage, so there is no knowing whether her “living her queerness” will have the same impact as Lizzo being her proud self. Nor do we know if the impact Roan and Lizzo are having present day will be long lasting.
For Lizzo, Roan, or any other pop star to have a profound, lasting social/cultural influence they must jump from star/influencer to diva/icon. Become as successful as Barbra Streisand, Cher, Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, Madonna and Lady Gaga, and Beyonce and Taylor Swift, and the currents you tap into can inspire people to create change. Too early to tell whether Lizzo and Roan are Gaga and Janet Jackson or Brittney and Jessica Simpson. If Lizzo and Roan do make it to diva/icon status – something that takes time to accomplish – their cultural impact will be more than a passing trend. They will have helped make and support progress that can survive the inevitable right-wing backlash.
Every diva or would-be diva has challenges that go beyond putting on a great show. Barbra, Aretha, Tina, and Cher pretty much created the role of modern diva, entertainers that are much more popular and powerful than the average female pop star. Madonna and Janet Jackson built on the progress of Barbra, Aretha, Tina, and Cher by aggressively owning their careers and making themselves Big Business. Lady Gaga pushed things further by playing with image, not just through fashion but by stressing the ambiguities of sexuality and gender. Beyonce shed any reluctance to make Blackness and race central to what she does and has done it so impactfully that the power ranking of Black American Women reads, 1) Michelle, 2) Oprah, 3) Beyonce, and 4) Kamala.
As with Lizzo and Roan, every diva/icon mentioned has had to deal with more than the everyday shitstorm pop stars endure. Misogyny, racism, misogyny, homophobia, body-shaming, and misogyny have been additional obstacles to not just their success but their power. So, when one of these women rises from pop star to diva/icon, they don’t take it for granted. They know exactly what unnecessary bullshit they had to shovel through and they will, often quietly, work to make sure that those who follow don’t have to endure the same. They also know that the shoveling can be harder work than anything on the performance and promotion side of things.
In December 2023, Taylor Swift’s promotional team blitzed the media with stories and images of Swift preparing for her Eras tour. We learned Swift’s prep for her three-hour show included her singing the whole damn concert while running nonstop on a treadmill. Scour video sites and you will find hundreds of clips of Swift practicing and working out for her concerts. Her music videos reference and sometimes feature her prep. The work that goes into honing a Swift stage show is severe. Swift also has to work on song-writing, arranging, and recording; style and fashion; promotion; and trying to live life away from the spotlight, while maintaining her mental health. That’s a lot of work, all under the extreme pressure and constant attention.
Now realize that Taylor Swift has it easy compared to Roan, Lizzo, Beyonce, Gaga, and some of the other diva/icons. Swift doesn’t have to deal with racism or homophobia. While she, like all women, deals with body shaming, unlike Lizzo, she isn’t subjected to body hostility. What Swift doesn’t have to deal with does not take away from her success or lessen the obstacles that she faces, especially misogyny. Swift has worked hard to get where she is and dealt with a lot of bullshit to get there. And so did Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin, who also had to deal with racism and abuse, and Madonna, who had the extra obstacle of homophobia, as well as not being taken seriously as a businessperson.
No question that if Tina, Aretha, and Madonna were starting out today, they’d have a bit easier time of it, just as Swift and Celine Dion has/had it easier than Cher and Barbra did. That’s because the people before them fought cultural battles that have destroyed past obstacles, just as Roan, Lizzo and Swift are fighting battles today, battles over expressing gender and sexuality, battles over body image and race, and battles over what it means to be a successful woman in America today, battles which will destroy even more obstacles and hopefully continue to bolster and build a foundation for change.
According to the US Department of Labor, American women make 84% of that of their male coworkers. Factor in race and the percentage is even lower. A woman with a master’s degree or PhD is likely to make less than a man working the same job, a man with a just bachelor’s degree. It’s worse than that: USDL reports, “Were it not for the fact that women attain a greater number of degrees than men, the gender wage gap would be even larger.”
Another screwed-up tidbit: “The wage gap is larger for mothers and results in employment-related losses of more than $295,000 over a lifetime. This results in women having lower average incomes in retirement and less financial stability in old age.”
No matter how much money Taylor Swift or Beyonce have stuffed in their mattresses, their success does not negate how hard women have to work to earn 84% of what men do or the stupendous amount of time and energy women have to expend to equal or, gasp!, exceed the average male’s success.
Right now, we are being told by Trump, Vance, Republicans, and the right, that men are under attack and that we are in some crisis of manhood and masculinity that will lead to “the extinction of the male race.” As with most claims from the right, the data suggests otherwise. As reported above, women make less than men working the same job, with the same experience and credentials. This gap is not only age-old, it is also structural, something that is hard-baked into our system and supported by laws (or the refusal to eliminate wage inequality through legislation, a legislative system dominated by men).
On the job, women also have to deal with persistent sexual harassment and abuse, unwanted touching, assault, and even rape. Almost all men don’t have to deal with that shit. Hell, some men will respond to what I just wrote with “I wish I had to deal with unwanted touching,” a quip which shows how blind a lot of men are to this stuff.
The cold, hard fact is men have it pretty good when compared to women. While a lot, maybe most, men have severe economic challenges, it is not due to women or women gaining equal rights or women having bodily autonomy or women refusing to fuck horrible men or lesbianism or trans or whatever boogie woman the right-wing uses to shrink men’s weenies.
Men deal with economic challenges because we all deal with economic challenges and will continue to do so as long as we live under an economic system that allows the uber-rich to monopolize wealth, access to resources, politics, and power. Again, I am not dismissing one person’s struggles because another group has more to deal with. I am simply doing a reality check based on verifiable facts not just butt-hurt feelings.
The right-wing refuses to acknowledge reality because once they do, they have nothing. If men – as a class – have it economically better than women (or Whites better than People of Color, native-born Americans better than recent immigrants), the right-wing has nothing to back up their claims. If men have more representation in and greater access to power than anyone else, the right has no argument. If men create and enforce the laws that women have to abide by, the right’s argument has no foundation. If the system is designed to favor men over women, Whites over everyone else, and so on – the status quo since America’s founding – the right has absolutely no basis for any of their claims, and no justification for their existence. The right-wing cannot deal with reality. They need fantasy to survive and that fantasy is threatened by people like Lizzo and Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Madonna, which is why these women take a lot of incoming from the creeps. Powerful women scare the shit out of right-wing men and that is good.
So, let’s sing along with Roy Harper,
And while a crazy whiteman, In the desert of his bones, Lies as bleached as the paradise, He likes to think he owns
And I hate the whiteman, In his doctrinaire abuse, Oh I hate the whiteman, And the man who turned him loose...