BY BUST Magazine
Nashville-based singer-songwriter Tristen has unveiled her latest music video, “Partyin’ Is Such Sweet Sorrow,” and her captivating lyrics won’t be the sole element that lingers in your thoughts. During the video’s creation, Tristen delved into a dilemma that has haunted countless women: why our lives, personalities, and entire identities are so frequently shaped by, for, and through a male lens.
Tristen immersed herself in the man-defines-woman viewpoint, reversed the dynamic by selecting a “lover boy” to mouth her beautifully wistful vocals in the clip, and reclaimed authority over her own femininity. She poses the question, “I am a woman writing, singing as a male character about his relationship with women. How often does that happen?” Her answer stands as the ultimate woman-creates-man artistic expression.
Tristen hasn’t merely turned the tables; she’s opened the door to even broader issues: Where are the women? Where are the layered and fascinating female characters? And where are women’s lives and viewpoints depicted by women themselves? Alongside her music video, Tristen released a compelling essay titled “Is Art Imitating Life or Just Limiting Women?”
Read Tristen’s essay below, watch “Partyin’ Is Such Sweet Sorrow” above, and get ready to be motivated to craft your own magic.
Is Art Imitating Life or Just Limiting Women?
For me, exceptional songs are narratives set to music that reveal some uncomfortable truth we can all relate to. I recently composed a song about a barfly who lost his one true love. My Henry Chinaski was coasting through rock and roll’s lowest depths, with only loneliness fueling his addictive cycles. “Partyin’ Is Such Sweet Sorrow,” as I titled it, demanded a music video, and this archetype felt authentic after living in Nashville among artists, shattered aspirations, and inflated egos. For the clip, I recruited a rugged, intoxicated lover boy with excellent hair to lip-sync my song, while the voice remained mine. I’m thinking, I am a woman writing, singing as a male character about his relationship with women. How often does that happen?
I’m on the phone with a friend, feeling like a unicorn in hell’s dick forest, and I recall that I must channel my feminine powers to wedge myself into my favorite place: Encouraging confusion, raising questions, flowing with flexibility, and lingering in the mysterious space of differentiation, identification, categorization, and cultivation of self. I remember how fitting in always feels tough for those attuned to contradiction.
My friend asks, “Who are your favorite female characters written by women?” I pause, thinking. Harper Lee, The Handmaid’s Tale, Meryl Streep in Heartburn, Celie in The Color Purple, “Amelia” by Joni Mitchell, “Jolene” by Dolly. I’m stuck. This is challenging, so I break it down. What are my favorite works of fiction penned by women? I come up with a few more, but mostly I’m grasping at straws. I tell my friend I’ll have to call him back. Why was this so difficult?
So, I seek more data. According to the study Gender and the Billboard Top 40 Charts between 1997 and 2007, women represent only about 11% of all songwriters, yet 37% of the songs featured women contributing to lyrics. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s recent study reported women accounting for 13% of writers. Salon notes that women in literature are faring better, making up about 30% of most publishers’ rosters, and roughly the same percentage, 33%, receive reviews in publications. And we’ve all heard the classic tales of female writers using a pen name to appear male.
Even if I accept the numerical disadvantage of finding female writers, I still must dig for female characters because, according to Gender Bias Without Borders: An Investigation of Female Characters in Popular Films Across 11 Countries, as of 2014, named females account for only 1 out of 3 characters, and just about 23% of films have a female protagonist or co-protagonist at all. Got it. There are fewer female characters being created, but hey, not all men are bad at writing interesting female characters, right?
The walls close in as I read about the Bechdel Test. A little more than half of movies currently pass this test, which requires a movie to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room Of One’s Own in 1929, “It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.” Men have created the few images of women that exist, and about half of those characters aren’t written realistically. Woolf notes, “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple.” Is this why my female relationships are constantly plagued with talk of men and love? Are we only mimicking men’s image of us?
Humans learn to communicate through mimicry. After our parents replicate themselves into us, they impress their unlived dreams onto us. My mother, pregnant and then married at 18, would tell me, “Don’t get married until you’re 30.” Too often living in Nashville, we see musicians grooming their three-year-olds for a life on the stage. A teenager outlines Bob Dylan’s career before he’s ever worked a job or fallen in love. We grow and learn inside the reflection of our parents’ regrets, misfortunes, or expectations for greatness, that even they could not achieve.
We mimic what we see. When my one-year-old niece tried to make my sister laugh for the first time, she strutted around the room talking into the palm of her hand, babbling and laughing. This toddler looked as if she was talking to a little person in her hand. We finally realized she was imitating my sister talking into her phone while on FaceTime. And this little girl is growing up in a habitat of images, instant information, communication, and connectivity. The black mirror now permeates our development.
And it’s so new. Only within the last 100 years, humans have established widespread radio communication, the television, and finally, in the last 30 years or so, the internet, which for the first time allows instant communication between the users of the technology. According to the Nielsen report, each day, Americans are immersed in their screens for about 5 hours of television, an hour on the internet, and three hours of radio. These screens most likely show images of women created in the tradition of men’s fiction. In all of this, sadly, the rare, oversimplified depictions of women, usually in relationship to men, are hypnotic mirrors for men, too.
And as a great leveler and oppositional reaction, I can swear off male artists forever, but this feels like the tool of the oppressor, just further dividing and reacting, and it feels too simple. How can I become the change I want to see while men’s art is within me still? It flows in the conversation of consciousness, my mimicry, and therefore, my creations. The only solution I can see is to reveal the concealed conversations through my work.
It’s called the conquest for truth, because truth is not a trust fund that kicks in when you are eighteen. It is not a gift; it must be discovered. You must perpetually pull weeds from the garden, so flowers can grow. You must accept that when you are sleeping, there is always someone willing to distort, obscure, obfuscate the truth, in hopes of getting a leg up. Regardless of gendering the writer and gendering the characters to establish the numerical meekness of the female writer’s scream, men and love of men are still the usual subject of mainstream women’s art. Just one more truth to survive and thrive in, because right now, as you are reading this, despite all of this, it is still the best time to be a woman. Woof. Or maybe Woolf.
So please don’t bore us, get to a female singing a chorus, where the lyrics are about something other than a man. It’s clear that women see very little representations of their own complexity from their own perspective in art. So before you are eaten by time, catch the wave of reform with your surfboard, and even more so, revere or unearth the untold stories in art. As we distill the human experience into a clever turn of phrase, and as these characters mesmerize the masses, I’m only asking that art imitate life, rather than limit women.
Top photo courtesy Tristen
More from BUST
Dream Nails Fights For Reproductive Rights With Their New Single “Vagina Police”: BUST Premiere
Poet Olivia Gatwood Writes Like Teen Spirit: BUST Interview
Amanda Palmer’s Tribute To The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan Will Make You “Cry Goodbye”
