By J. Coronado
Last weekend my nephews visited my sons while their parents went out on a date. After feeding everyone dinner and letting them play awhile, I sat them in front of the TV to watch a cartoon movie we’d rented earlier. While the four boys, ages ranging from 4 to 7, watched the move, I sat on the floor surfing the internet on my laptop.
Mostly I paid very little mind to what they were watching, but one brief episode did seize my attention. The group of young protagonists was in its formation and among a small group of boys was one girl. As events of their encounter played out, at one point the girl hit one of the boys, who angrily declared:
“Hey! Why’d you do that?”
“Because I like you”, she answered.
“That’s how I tell people that I like them”.
At this, all four boys laughed in unison. It was a deep belly laugh and like the laugh of any small child of such an innocent age, it was entirely sincere. They really thought this was funny.
This seized my attention and I reflected on it at some length. At this very early age the culture and media have already succeeded at socializing these young boys to think that when a girl hits a boy, it’s funny. Such is the power of culture and media. These lessons are deep and difficult to uproot, because they being so early, and they are absorbed without question by so many (creating a reinforcing groupthink), long before they have a capacity to examine, reflect and be critical. They are brainwashed: girls hitting boys—funny.
So it was with a mind still soaking in this power of culture that I was driving later in the week, with my car radio on “scan” and it happened across a sappy Ricky Iglesias song, “Hero”, and certain words of the song gripped me so that in spite of myself, I stopped the scan and listened.
Much of the lyrics are boilerplate sappy that we’d expect from pop:
Would you dance if I asked you to dance?
Would you run and never look back?
More of it makes hyperbolic romantic promises, also fairly boilerplate:
I can be you hero baby
I can kiss away the pain
I will stand by you forever
But then there was this—this which grabbed hold of my attention, bothered me, and wouldn’t let go:
Would you cry if you saw me crying?
Would you save my soul, tonight?
“Would you save my soul?” The lyricist, the musician, he asks, of a woman: “would you save my soul?”
These are incredible words really. And let me add, they are incredible quite without respect to whether or not one believes in God, gods or souls.
Let’s digress for a minute and consider what we can all agree that we can reasonably ask of each other:
Sappy or not, we can ask if we will dance
We can ask for a kiss when it hurts
We can ask for (though we may not receive) a promise of lifelong fidelity
We can ask for these things and for much more, for these are things which belong to the purview of what it is to be human. To use the language of Stephen Jay Gould as he tried to demarcate rules of mutual acceptance between religion and science, we can say that these things: dancing, a kiss, a commitment—these are part of the Magisterium of Humanity—we can ask these things of our fellow human beings, because the faculties required to give them are indeed within the scope of human capacity.
Perhaps that’s being a bit too pedantic. When it gets down to it, suffice it to say:
Humans, men and women, can dance
Humans, men and women, can kiss
Humans, men and women, can make commitments
Humans, men and women, can feel powerful emotions
Humans, men and women, can offer one another compassion and warmth
And, true to the spirit of Iglesias’s song:
Though it is rare—humans, men and women, can be brave, and be heroes to one another
But Iglesias’s lyrics were not gripping for what they say that is true and possible of the Magisterium of Humanity, for these were all things which are either asked of or implied as faculties of the man, by the lyricist. These lyrics were so gripping on account of what they attribute to a woman, which they attribute ubiquitously to a woman, and which one must guess, most listeners hear without so much as a speed-bump’s worth of cognitive dissonance:
Would you save my soul, tonight?
Why would the lyricist ask a woman to save his soul? Why would listeners, millions of them, across languages and cultures, hear these words and accept them, accept them as one might accept that the person answering the phone number one has just dialed says, “hello” upon answering?
How can a woman save a soul?
Humans feed the hungry, God can stop poverty. Humans can resist war, God can stop war. There is a metaphorical and metaphysical point at work here that is true at the level of a basic, humanist property—there are limits to the faculties of humanity. In other words, this truth holds without respect to whether or not one believes in a deity, the deity exists as a mere metaphorical counterpoint of a theoretical infinite, if only to put the focus on the reality of what it means to be human, to be finite.
We are not deities, we are human.
We are not infinite, we are finite.
We are not omnipotent, we can be brave
We cannot save souls, we can offer human comfort
And, must it even be said?: women, too, are people, not deities
What’s more, the incredible sentiment of this song, attributing to women the power to save a man’s soul, this isn’t limited to sappy pop songs. It was within seconds of being so bothered by this that I immediately mentally connected with other songs from music of a harder variety, which essentially asks the same of women.
Staind, for example, in “It’s Been Awhile”, writes as a broken man in the grip of a heroin addiction reaching out for his girlfriend, to save him from the hellish pit of his own making:
It’s been a while
since I could say that I wasn’t addicted and
It’s been a while
Since I could say I love myself as well and
It’s been a while
Since I’ve gone …
But all that shit seems to disappear when I’m with you …It’s been a while
Since I could look at myself straight
and it’s been awhile
since I said I’m sorry
It’s been awhile
Since I’ve seen the way the candles light your face
And if that were not disturbing enough, Nine Inch Nails in “Closer”, referring in the most explicit manner to coitus, identifies himself as a literally wrecked soul, desperate for oblivion, and cries out to his girlfriend to “get me closer to God”:
Help me, I broke apart my insides
Help me, I’ve got no soul to sell
Help me, the only thing that works for me
Help me get away from myself
…
My whole existence is flawedYou get me closer to God
However strained or explicit the metaphor, all three songs convey a belief, indeed what can be described as a religious conviction, a faith possessed and shared by the songs’ lyricists and accepted as conventional truth by the masses that popularize them. The faith holds that women save souls, transcend the Charonic grip of addiction and assist (through sex) the most lost and depraved on their tortured pilgrimage to the divine.
All of this is, in two words, utterly ridiculous.
Women can no more save a man’s soul, or anyone’s soul, than they can flutter their eyes, blink and apperate your house pet to Neptune.
And no, it is not a mere romantic notion, this idea of women saving men’s souls. In less than two words, in just one: it’s bullshit.
But the troubling thing about it is that however obvious it is that it is bullshit, it is bullshit that is accepted, without question, on a daily basis, millions of times, every single time someone, somewhere, listens to one of these songs, and is not in the least bit bothered by it.
In the same way that my sons and their cousins were not bothered by a girl hitting a boy, but laughed as they have been acculturated to do at this earliest of age, millions of people listen to these songs, are not bothered by them, and even share the religious faith these songs express.
Women have the power to save souls. Let us beg and supplicate to them through music and poetry, that they would deign to save ours.
We often hear at an early age that beauty is only skin deep, but it seems evident that male and female alike, we do not accept this truism and whatever power the genuine truth holds, it is undermined at an early age by a barrage and steady stream of images and messages that uniformly and uncompromisingly state the opposite. Brainwashed, we can almost be said to hold the truism in contempt.
We appear to be as impetuous children in the way we respond to the non-relationship between beauty and virtue. We believe that beauty is virtuous, especially feminine beauty.
In this religious system, not only is beauty virtuous, but it is imbued with special powers: spiritual, angelic powers—powers that exceed our own primitive male faculties by unimaginable orders of magnitude.
With a faith system such as this, can the state of society and relations between the genders be any wonder?
Women are taught, and largely believe that men’s souls are depraved, and in dire need of saving—and that they are endowed to grace men with that salvation. Men are likewise taught that their souls are corrupted, that they require repair, and that salvation is available through supplication, to female beauty.
It is a spell, a spell with a vast culture firmly in its grip: female beauty covers all manner of vice and is a substitute for any deficit of genuine virtue; female beauty is in and of itself virtuous and not merely virtuous—angelic.
Of course this is false and nonsense, but we can only resist the falsity and nonsense if we first recognize it. Female beauty is desirable, and an object of painful desire experienced by men everywhere, but female beauty in and of itself confers no inherent virtue.
Men, to be able to have reasonable relationships with women, must first disabuse themselves of the notion that women’s beauty confers any virtue upon them or, more importantly, that women possess virtue in any excess of men. However a man understands spirituality, he must understand that whatever spiritual corruption he attributes to men, women share fully in that corruption.
This is not at all to put women down. Far from it, it is the most humanist thing we can say of them. Women are people—they are every bit as flawed as men. They are at least as flawed as men. They are in no sense any better than men. All of this should be obvious, but that it is not obvious is evident from the popularity of music that assumes of its listener a religious conviction that women possess mighty spiritual power.
This is not a new religious faith. Ricky Iglesias is not the first to call upon a woman to save his soul, and he won’t be the last. The next popular anthem attributing divine potencies to woman is probably on the production block now as you read this article.
But faith does not change men into gods or women into angels. Men and women, alike, are people.
