Tag: music

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Everything I Know About Life, I Learned from Musical Theatre

Published on by Amy2 Comments

Okay, yes, obviously exaggerated clickbait title is obvious. But I was thinking about this recently, so I thought it might be fun to write about. Anyone who knows me knows that I love musical theatre. I think it’s because it combines two of my favourite things: music and stories. And most of my favourite shows have that one line (or sometimes more than one) that sticks with me because it sums up something I know to be true or sometimes need to be reminded of.

So just for fun, here are nine of my favourite pieces of showtunes wisdom and the things I take from them.

“Forget regret, or life is yours to miss” (Rent)

(I know Rent is problematic, I love it anyway, don’t @ me)

Much of this show is about seizing the day and taking the love you can get now, because you know you don’t have forever. This one reminds me that life can be short, and that there’s no point living in past regrets. Because sometimes now is all we have.

“You change the world when you change your mind” (Kinky Boots)

We are all learning every day, or at least we should be. Sometimes, people might feel as though they can’t keep up with all the changes in society and politics and language. But none of us come to the table knowing everything.

The world doesn’t change in a day. But with every mind changed, we make progress. With every view reconsidered, we get closer to the world we want. Wisdom isn’t about knowing it all. Wisdom is about knowing when to change your mind.

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise” (Les Miserables)

I always think of this one as something that might be said to a hero just as he’s about to give up on his quest. It reminds me that there’s always another day and that even the worst pain doesn’t last forever.

“To seek revenge may lead to hell” (Sweeney Todd)

I wrote recently about why I still hate my abuser and won’t forgive him. I think anger can be a strong and powerful thing. But anger is not the same thing as revenge.

I do not wish to hurt him. My goal is not to cause him harm. In the end, exacting revenge (whatever that looked like) would do more damage to me than it would to him. My goal is to help myself, not to hurt him. Allowing myself to be angry does the former, while seeking revenge would succumb to the latter.

“I am the one thing in life I can control” (Hamilton)

I actually have a print featring this quote framed on the wall of my office. I’ve long known that I have control issues. It’s a safety mechanism and something I’m working on internally and with my therapist. But this serves as a reminder that I can’t actually control others or external situations – and that it is foolish and even harmful to try. All I can control is myself.

“I’m through accepting limits ’cause someone says they’re so” (Wicked)

Most of us have probably been told “you can’t do that” at some point. Any person who has reached the peak of achievement in their field will tell you that they’ve encountered naysayers along the way.

But you don’t have to accept other people’s limitations or allow them to put those limitations onto you. You get to define your own limits.

“Everybody’s playing the game but nobody’s rules are the same” (Chess)

We all approach situations and relationships with our own unique context made up of beliefs, preconceptions, past experiences, and goals. While two people might be superficially facing the same thing, it can look incredibly different. So if you feel as though you’re talking past someone else or can’t come to a place of understanding, consider whether you’re approaching things with a completely different set of rules.

“Nice is different than good” (Into the Woods)

So many of the people I’ve been harmed by in my life were nice people. My abuser was perhaps the nicest, at least to those outside his immediate sphere. He charmed strangers, gave great compliments, even flirted with service staff in a way that managed to be charismatic rather than creepy. He also spent years breaking down my sense of self and my grasp of reality.

So now, when someone tells me they’re “such a Nice Guy,” I think of him and I understand that being nice doesn’t necessarily mean they will treat me well.

“There’s a fine, fine line between love and a waste of time” (Avenue Q)

Yes, even a show that is essentially “Muppets, but wrong” can have the occasional pearls of wisdom. There’s a Fine Fine Line is a surprisingly poignant little song about knowing when to give up on someone even if it hurts.

I know I’ve had a tendency to hang on to relationships for far too long in the past. I felt as though as long as I loved the person, I couldn’t leave. Now I know that sometimes, the greatest act of love you can show to both yourself and the other person is to get out before things get much worse.

Do you have any favourite theatrical wisdom?

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I Need Noise!

Published on by Amy3 Comments

Say something – do it soon, it’s too quiet in this room
I need noise, I need the buzz of a sub
Need the crack of a whip, need some blood in the cut
– K Flay

Something I’ve heard multiple times throughout the pandemic is the assumption that introverts will be fine. After all, we like staying inside and keeping things low-key and not interacting with anyone… right?

Well, as it turns out, not really.

No-one, not even the most introverted introvert, is supposed to live like this for a year or more.

For me, once the initial tidal wave of panic and fear passed sometime in late March last year, the not-okayness has been a slowly rising fog. Some days it’s denser than others. Sometimes I almost think it’s almost cleared, then I’ll realise I can’t see a metre in front of my face. And one of the things that is driving me absolutely crazy is the relentless fucking quietness of everything.

As I recently told my friends, “I want to go clubbing. I don’t even really like clubbing any more, but I want to go.” I want to go to a packed London bar, the kind of place where you have to fight your way through a crowd just to get a drink. I want to dance shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, make eye contact with a girl I’ll never dare approach, accept a drink thrust at me by a guy I’ll never fuck.

I want to be the first on the dancefloor at a sex club, shamelessly pulling my dress off over my head to reveal something extraordinarily black and tiny and lacy underneath. To take a spin around the pole before I’ve drunk enough to render it a bad idea. To blow a kiss to that cute couple and wonder if it’s their first time when they blush. I want to hear the music punctuated by whip cracks and squeals of blissful pain and moans of pleasure.

I want the kind of place where you have to shout to be heard. Where the music thumps so loud and heavy that I can feel it rising through the floor and throbbing in my legs, my stomach, my cunt. I want somewhere I can be anonymous, one of a crowd. Somewhere I can get out of my head. Somewhere that’s such an overwhelming assault on the senses that I couldn’t think clearly even if I wanted to.

It’s too fucking quiet and I can hardly stand it any more. I need noise. I need the kind of noise that silences what’s in my head. Now. Please.

So please check in with your introvert-identified friends as much as you do with the extroverts. Please don’t assume we’re fine. And please don’t make the jokes about how we’ve been training for this our whole lives – we’ve heard them all and they’re not funny anymore, if they ever were.

Who wants to go somewhere BUSY and LOUD when all this is over?

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Anal Doesn’t Hurt at All… The “Cool Girl” Archetype and Sexual Expectations

Published on by Amy1 Comment

I’ve been rewatching all four seasons of Crazy Ex Girlfriend over the last couple of months.

Fair warning, this post contains spoilers for all four seasons of the show, so if you haven’t seen it yet then you might want to skip this one.

Early in season 1, main character Rebecca attends a yoga class taught by Valencia, her love interest Josh’s long-term girlfriend. Naturally, the class turns into a musical theatre style song-and-dance routine which exists entirely in Rebecca’s mind. In this case, the song is I’m So Good at Yoga, a Bollywood parody in which Valencia boasts about all the ways in which she’s better than Rebecca. (“I kiss my own pussy, can you do that?”)

It’s a pretty funny scene that will speak to anyone who has ever had an overactive imagination about all the ways in which other people are judging them. But since this is a sex blog, I want to talk about this one throwaway line I wasn’t able to get out of my head after my rewatch:

“Anal doesn’t hurt at all /
Most times I prefer it.”

Given this show’s razor-sharp, on-point social commentary on everything from mental illness to dysfunctional workplaces to parenting, there is simply no way that creator Rachel Bloom didn’t know exactly what she was doing with this line. And that’s what I love about it – it’s another example of this show’s ability to pack SO MUCH into just a few words.

For me, this is a statement on the idea of the “cool girl”. Remember that expression, we’ll come back to it in a minute.

Sexuality policing and the male gaze

In this scene, we see the extent to which Rebecca’s insecurities are focused on what people – especially men, and most especially Josh Chan – think of her. One of the main ways in which she conceptualises Valencia as “better” than her is Valencia’s seeming willingness to behave like a male sexual fantasy. (Which makes it all the more pleasing when – big spoiler incoming – Valencia both becomes a much nicer person and comes out as queer, settling down with a girlfriend, in later seasons).

Unfortunately, we live in a world where women are judged on how well they service the heterosexual male gaze. We’re taught to judge ourselves and each other on our looks from early childhood. It’s no accident that 78% of girls dislike their body by the age of 17 (including 40-60% of elementary school girls). (Source.)

As we get older, our sexuality is policed, too. Be available, but don’t be a slut. Service male desires, but don’t have your own. Be simultaneously a virgin and a whore. The expectations put on women and those perceived to be women are immense, contradictory, and devastating from a mental health perspective.

The “cool girl”

If you’re a women or perceived to be a woman, you might have been described as a “cool girl” (or wished to be one) at some point.

So what is the cool girl (CG)?

Simply put, she’s a cis heterosexual male fantasy who doesn’t actually exist. The CG is down for whatever most pleases the men around her. She eats burgers without worrying about her figure (but is still a size four, of course.) She’s “one of the boys”, but still wears high heels and a full face of makeup. She’s “sexually liberated”, but only in so far as it pleases men. Her sexuality is about their desires, not her own.

The thing is, going back to Crazy Ex Girlfriend for a second, that when we get to know Valencia, it becomes apparent that she is so much more than just a CG. She’s pretty one dimensional and dislikeable in season 1, but we come to realise that that’s more due to Rebecca’s projection than her actual character. (Let’s be real, I’d probably also come across as a mega bitch if my partner’s ex reappeared in town after ten years with the express intention of breaking us up.)

But Rebecca is so insecure that she conteptualises Valencia as the CG – hot as hell, sexually adventurous, every man’s dream. But the viewer, and Rebecca, later get to see that Valencia is actually just as insecure and just as much a victim of the patriarchy. She has desires, needs, and vulnerabilities just like anyone else.

So about “preferring” anal…

For me, this particular line was entirely about Rebecca positioning Valencia as a cool girl who, naturally, would enjoy the same things cishetero men are supposed to enjoy. Naturally, the perfect CG would not only do anal, she’d prefer it.

Anal sex was a particular point of contention in some of my early sexual relationships. Eventually, I reluctantly did it because I thought I was supposed to do it. Because the women my boyfriends watched in porn did it, the women they read about in magazines “lad mags” did it, the other women they sneakily flirted with behind my back said they would do it.

I was in my mid 20s (and in a much healthier and safer sexual relationship) before I got the chance to consider whether it was something I actually liked. This might sound ridiculous, but that question had never particularly occured to me to ask. Because I didn’t think whether or not I liked it was the point.

Authentic desire vs. mainstream pornification

I don’t have an issue with pornography in and of itself, as long as it’s consensually produced and the performers remain in control and are compensated fairly for their labour. However, I also recognise that the mainstream porn industry has a lot to answer for, and one of those things is the fact that many teenage boys now think that pressuring their girlfriends for anal is normal.

Anal sex should be approached like any other consensual kink. If you’re into it, awesome – have fun. If you’re not, that’s totally cool too! I actually did come to enjoy it after those negative early experiences (much later and with a different partner). But that was only able to happen in a space of safety, care, and zero expectations.

I wish we could think of sex as a vast menu of potential options to choose from, rather than a space where certain acts are accepted. I have a lot of respect for Dan Savage and his work, but every time he says “oral comes as standard” it makes me cringe. There shouldn’t be any standards, beyond informed consent and mutual pleasure!

If we’re into anal sex, we should be able to express that and enjoy it free of shame or stigma. But it should be considered equally fine to say hey, anal actually does hurt and I actually don’t like it. When mainstream, male gazey porn is the first introduction many young people have to sexuality, especially when it’s not accompanied by comprehensive sex education, we end up in a place where young men come to expect a certain kind of “performance” from their sexual partners.

If you absolutely need a certain sex act in your life to be fulfilled, you’re within your rights to (and probably should) seek out partners who are also into that thing. (See: why I won’t date entirely vanilla people. There’s nothing wrong with vanilla sex and I enjoy it sometimes, but I need regular kink in my life to be happy and satisfied). But I really want to do away with the idea that any sex acts – penetration, oral, hand stuff, anal, kink – are expected or standard.

Sexual compatibility matters. But what that means will vary for every couple and every individual. Authentic expression of desire is what we should strive for, not matching some impossible male gaze standard.

Cool Girls don’t actually exist, and I love the way Valencia’s character arc slowly dismantles the idea one piece at a time.

I wasn’t expecting this piece about a throwaway one-liner in a TV show to run over 1300 words, but here we are! If you enjoyed this, you can always buy me a coffee to show your appreciation.