Peaches
In which I attempt to write a women's studies term paper three years out of college
Peaches. Do you know her? Her album cover is her crotch in a pair of hot pink hotpants. Her website is peachesrocks.com. Go check it out now so we can finish this conversation. I got into a fight with a friend of mine about her recently, with him saying she was putting some sickening neo-feminist spin on women using their bodies to sell records and me saying she was breaking new ground in showing that women can be sexual without conforming to mainstream society’s ideals of "beauty." I didn’t like being called a bad feminist (although he never said that, it’s what I felt was the subtext), so I started thinking about the whole peaches thing and how I could win this argument with my both politics and mp3s intact.
I think both of us were wrong. But in order to get into that I have to get into my ideas on this 3rd wave feminist thing we’re seeing these days.
I work at this restaurant that’s unapologetically old-skool feminist, and I won’t tell them I like peaches. That’s sorta sad. I’m caught in this feminist limbo, half in the second wave/bra-burner school and half in the 3rd wave/push-up bra school. Basically, I’m a bra burner all the way, but I just like the music of the 3rd wave so much more! (If this was a real women’s studies paper I would have to stop here and talk for a million years about how "second wave" and "third wave" are really not accurate distinctions and how the term "bra burning" to describe 70’s area feminists is mildly insulting. Luckily I can forgo all that crap here and insult merrily away!)
Perhaps the s/m thing is the heart of it. There is a "sex positive" feminist belief that basically says that whatever turns you on is OK. I'm all for allowing everyone freedom to express their kinks, and I fiercely believe that whatever people do in their bedrooms (or kitchen tables, or wherever) is their own business.
But I do think people should come to their sex life with some brains. Sex can never be taken out of the political realm. The personal is political - whatever turns you on is a product of the world in which you live, and if you're turned on by violence, don't you think that means that even your sex life has been invaded by the misogynist forces all around us?
As I see it, this one point has divided the feminist spheres into "2nd wave" and "3rd wave" and now the old generation is seen as vaguely hippie, unsmiling, hairy armpitted angry crones. The new generation thinks they have such a wonderfully complicated idea of feminist sexuality just because they think it’s feminist to want your boyfriend to spank you.
Happily, there are overlappings between the two feminisms, however – both the Bloodroot women and my 3rd wave friends believe in vibrators and the like, and naturally we all agree on basic things like the right to abortions and that women should get paid as much as men for the same job, blah blah.
It’s the new thing – indie sexuality. My friend says electroclash seems to bring out these women. (you know electroclash: techno-meets-house-meets-'80s new wave! [What? You don’t know what any of those words mean? Neither do I! But if you keep pretending to know I will too. When I think electroclash, I think The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and that’s good enough for me.]). The electroclash era is when we started seeing all these MFA-type girls wearing deconstructed dresses and looking like they wanted to rape you or be raped themselves (disclaimer: I have been known to wear hot pink fishnets once in a while myself. But since I don't shave my legs, I wear tights underneath them - look! My very own body
It’s all very postmodern.
My argument is that once you think selling your body is a feminist act, the anti-feminists have pervaded our society to such a deep extent it’s absolutely shocking. It’s the greatest mindfuck of all time.
The one saving grace is that this neo-fem-sexuality is not exactly the same as mainstream patriarchal ideas on the usefulness of women in the sex world because it consciously creates an aesthetic based on real diversity. The thing about Kathleen Hanna was that she consciously (not self-consciously) didn’t fit the skinny model body type, that’s why it was supposedly so
awesome that she was selling herself. Fat people, hairy women, disabled people -- this new aesthetic fetishizes them all, to a certain extent.
And Peaches epitomizes all of it, seemingly. Her music certainly falls under the category of electroclash. Her songs are overtly about sex. Her website has a section of "crotch shots" taken by fans at shows. Clearly, she operates at the intersections of neo-feminist sexual politics, avant-garde noise performance and radical queer gender politix (do I get an A for that sentence?).
The reason I like her instead of being annoyed by her is that so much of her "work" on the "idea of sexuality" (real academics are always putting random things in quotes, don't you know that?) examines issues of what women should look like. She has that 5’oclock shadow armpit hair women get when they don’t shave for a few days, and she is all out-there about wearing her hot pants with a little belly roll. This is all so great! I know this is the new thing in certain circles, the teeny tummy roll and hairy pits, but I’m just so happy about it I don’t care that it’s trendy – this a good trend!
One peaches video shows her growing hair from all areas at an alarming rate – an obvious commentary on how much people have written about that little armpit hair, but also, I think, a commentary about what it feels like to want to be sexy on your own terms. Can hairy
The thing is – I don’t think Peaches is, even after all that, political. I’ve done some research on her all around the web, watching interviews, videos, reading interviews and articles and basically everything I could do short of actually buying her CD (which I absolutely would do if I could even pay my rent this month, I promise!). The main conclusion I’ve come to is that, unlike Kathleen Hanna, I don’t think Peaches is really political. I mean, she is in the sense that everything is political, but I don’t think she has ever really articulated her politics. We all know vaguely what it is, but I think she consciously avoids spelling it out so that she doesn’t fall into any pigeon holes. Or because she’s just lazy.
So, here it is in a nutshell: I love Kathleen Hanna, but I disagree with her on some major stuff. My love affair can withstand that, though. I like Peaches OK, and I don’t disagree with her on anything because I don’t think there’s really anything there to be disagreed with --- there’s not that much there under the pulsating beats and sexy, sexy hot pants. I’m OK with that.
The best quote re: Peaches I read was this, from some dude on popmatters.com: Peaches’ album "The Teaches of Peaches" is
"The world’s funkiest new wave album, a porn soundtrack without visuals, a feminist tract with no politics."
Exactly. Other people have done the feminist theory behind the things she seems to stand for, she’s probably read it or at least heard of it, and she uses it in some vague way without making any real contributions of her own. Once again, I’m OK with that. I read this interview with her where she said something like "Nothing I do is a huge statement, it’s there...as far as the hair, it’s there, why can’t I show it? I’m too lazy to shave it, we’re women, we have hair, who cares?" On one hand I wanted to jump up and shout "yay!" when I heard that, and then I thought: why does it make me so happy to hear someone say something so obvious? Are my beliefs really so weak that they are only validated when I hear some pop musician (OK, electro-pop) say them? And how sad is it when you want to hug someone just for saying in public that we’re here and we have hair? It's just that she was refusing to participate in the huge lie that women are forced to swallow every day.
My sweetheart Jacob has been touring with a bunch
of bands and is all in the music world, and the one thing his little brushes with musicians I like has done for me is taken away the mystique around musicians. Just because you like some music doesn’t mean you would necessarily like the person behind the music. And it doesn’t mean the person making the music understands you, the things you’re about, or the politics you think they are putting out there.
I don’t think Peaches or Kathleen Hanna are the *best* feminists I’ve ever met, but I do really like and appreciate the fact that I can listen to their music and know that at least they are thinking about things and they don’t have the politics of, say, Ted Nugent.
If forced to split hairs, I’d say that the most dangerous thing about Peaches is that she seems to have this attitude that sex is just fun and we’re past politics. I don’t agree, but since this is just something I’ve inferred from her vague statements, I can’t argue with her on it. On the other hand. I like Kathleen Hanna and I like riot-grrl, I just disagree with some little political points they make, and since she’s more overt about her politics it hurts me a little more to disagree, but in the end it’s OK. In the end, the good of both of them out weights the bad, and I think that’s just lovely.