First off, I thought the chorus was actually “I just met you
/ And this is crazy / But here’s my number / So call me, baby” which is much
more assertive than the actual lyric: “So call me, maybe.” I liked the mental image of a young woman
seeing a young man she liked, giving him her number and telling him to
call. It was straightforward, confident
and refreshingly lacking in relationship game-playing.
Instead, the song falls more into the traditional mold of a
young woman trying to find a happy medium between society’s two
expectations. She’s expected to be sexy,
confident and appear available but not advertise being available. I call it the “look him in the eye and wait
for him to ask you out” approach. And
frankly, it’s not a surprise girls have so much emotional turmoil. No matter which way they turn, they’re
bumping up against society’s expectations.
Further listening to the song takes it even further from
self-confidence. From the verses, it
sounds like the boy she’s interested isn’t interested in her. She likes him and is obsessing about being
with him. We’ve all had unrequited
crushes and they’ve been the subject of many songs, but it wasn’t what I was
hoping for.
Personally, I think this is one area where feminism has
failed young women. They fought long and
hard to get society and the courts to recognize that we had the right to say
no. But we haven’t been taught how to
say yes. And until that happens, there
are going to be a lot of misunderstandings and lack of potential realized.
According to most reports, young women in university who
want to hook up almost invariably get drunk first. Logically, it makes no sense. Alcohol makes it harder to have an orgasm and
if sex is your goal, then why risk making it lousy sex? But it removes the vulnerability of having
made a choice. The next day they can
blame the alcohol and retain their “good girl” privileges. The fact that alcohol makes it harder to
protect yourself from unwanted advances and make smart decisions should tell us
how important it is to remove responsibility from the equation.
Further problem, it makes things more confusing for guys who
know the girl was enthusiastic the night before but the next day, they hear her
saying she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been drunk. It makes the issue of consent even murkier
and can play into the not-quite-dead stereotype that she says she doesn’t want
to but she actually does.
It’s a mess, no question about it. And I can’t blame young entertainers for not
taking a stand. They’re not political
and social agents for change. They’re
entertainers whose job is to sell records.
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