Over the weekend, I went to (and took part in) a conference dedicated to [Ellen]Willis' work as a music critic, feminist, and thinker, writing in The New Yorker and the Village Voice and more. [...] That's when one participant, Molly Templeton, took a line the writer Rob Sheffield and others kept praising, and called it the Willis Test. (Irin Carmon for Jezebel)In a 1971 essay called, "But Now I'm Gonna Move," Willis suggests taking a song written by a man and flipping the gender:
A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like [the Rolling Stones'] "Under My Thumb" is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens' gentle, sympathetic "Wild World"; Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female—in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots" — but it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there.Despite having aging record nerd taste in music, I tried this. It's actually an addictive little game with some pretty surprising results. It works the other way, too. A number of comments mentioned that Taylor Swift's "You Belong to Me," sounds downright creepy and stalkerish when imagined being sung by a man. It kind of reminds me of one of my favorites songs from childhood, Cyndi Lauper's "I Drove All Night," (which, incidentally, was written by a man), which give off an icky stalker-vibe if sung by a man.
Disappointing, but not surprising, some of my favorite highly-acclaimed songwriters, from Tom Waits to Richard Thompson to Ryan Adams, fail the Willis test. (Not always, but a lot more than I'd anticipated.) That these guys have a ton of respect in the music industry says volumes.
More on the Willis Test:
Finally, a way to evaluate music for gender bias (What Tami Said)
Some people work very hard/But still they never get it right (Pandagon)
I too enjoyed playing around with the Willis Test after that Jezebel post.
ReplyDeleteI think the Willis Test has a slightly different function than the Bechdel Test. While the Bechdel Test is meant to reveal how often the "default person" in a story is cast as a man, the Willis Test reveals how we've internalized gender roles.
But as with the Bechdel Test, passing or failing the Willis Test doesn't make something "feminist"/"non-feminist" per se. Rather it's the collection of how many things pass/fail that reveal how pervasive sexism is in the society that produces these songs/movies/stories.