Everybody scream: when love is scary and women are unhinged

I’ve been listening to the new Florence + the Machine album, Everybody Scream, and it’s soooo witchy and intense and majestic that I wanted to know more, so I read this interview in the Guardian. There are many nuggets in the piece that I’m obsessed with, like, “I had a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen,” and, “I was very interested in the Bible and Greek myths and Goosebumps.”

It was a shock to discover there’s a ghost in Florence’s Machine. I genuinely thought the Machine was a band. It turns out both Florence + the Machine are one. She has band members she plays with regularly, but the only truly eternal part of the Machine is her.

“In the mid-00s, many of her friends were in bands, and she would go to indie nights in London, claiming to have a band, too. Drunk in the toilets of a nightclub, she belted out Etta James’s Something’s Got a Hold on Me, for the woman who would go on to become her manager.”

What an origin story.

This album turns overthinking into a work of art. No skips.

I’m curious about the lies and omissions we serve up as truth in order to make the right impression. Florence made up her Machine. What have I done over the years to hit the right note with the right audience? I have this belief that there’s an emptiness at the heart of me where my ‘self’ should be. I don’t mean I’m lacking personality or I’m morally void or anything dramatic like that, I just mean that who I am has never felt static. I’m a chameleon — colour-changing as the moment requires. Does that make me spineless, or empathetic? I’m not sure. Is that a weird thing to think, or does everyone feel the same? I know my husband does, but he’s my lobster.

I have a work colleague who always wants to talk sci-fi with me because ‘sci-fi geek’ is in my LinkedIn bio, and when we first met he was very deliberate about whakawhanaungatanga (the Māori concept of taking time to connect and find common ground with a person before beginning to work with them.)

I had a feeling on that first zoom that it wouldn’t be safe to talk about all my favourite sci-fi books with this guy, so I left some out. I can never tell when these feelings crop up if my spidey sense has actually been triggered or if I’m simply overthinking every interaction because I’m me. But the upshot is: I didn’t feel like explaining that I fell for the genre in my tweens because of Anne McCaffrey, and The Rowan and The Crystal Singer are still among my favourite stories.

So instead I started with Asimov’s Foundation Series and traversed the sci-fi spectrum all the way to Andy Weir. We settled on Dan Simmons’ Hyperion as our common ground. It’s definitely in my top 5 list — not just because of the depth and complexity of its universe-building or because it mimics the structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but because it kicks off the timeline that results in one of the most compelling love stories to ever traverse fictional time and space: that of Raul and Aenea.

I didn’t name any female authors, I realised later. We have discussed some since, like Naomi Alderman and N.K. Jemisin, so this isn’t on him.

Neko Case is my spirit animal

Why is my sense of what’s acceptable for sharing in the realm of sci-fi gendered? Why didn’t I have the moral fortitude to proudly state one of the formative authors of my youth?

Here’s a memory that just surfaced: I’m 15 years old and I walk into a bookshop searching for my next hit. As I stand in the Fantasy section weighing my options, a male employee of about 18 comes to stand next to me. He asks me if I like fantasy. I say that I do. He asks what my favourites series are. I consider for a moment and then say: Raymond E. Feist’s Magician, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles. He draws back as if in shock and says: but you can see the world building in Carmody is nothing compared to Feist, right? I nod, suddenly feeling embarrassed and dumb.

My 39-year-old self would like to say on the record that Isobelle Carmody is a genius. The way she flipped traditional fantasy tropes by embedding an advanced technological past into her medieval dystopian future? The way she built a magical system that felt real enough to touch? The way she allowed her characters to grow and learn and love whilst keeping them emotionally grounded in their traumatic pasts? A genius, I tell you. I think I can safely conclude what that guy didn’t like about Isobelle Carmody.

Are the worlds that female artists build less objectively good than those of their male counterparts?

I give you, Florence + the Machine:

But I've really done it this time, this one is all mine
I'll be up there with the man and the ten other women
And the hundred greatest records of all time
It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan
You're my second favorite frontman
And you could have me if you weren't so afraid of me
It's funny how men don't find power very sexy
So this one's for the ladies
Do I drive you crazy?
Did I get it right?
Did I get it right? Do I win the prize?
Do you regret bringing me back to life?

Here's another memory:

So far an excellent book, guaranteed to make another blog appearance.

I’m in a small aircraft with my flying instructor. I’m 18. I have my commercial license and have been flying for two years — longer than I’ve been driving a car. We’re taxiing toward the runway when a private jet crosses in front of us.

“It’s so beautiful!” I exclaim.

My flying instructor laughs. “And that’s why girls shouldn’t fly planes. It’s sexy, not beautiful.”

Once more, here’s Florence + the Machine:

Breaking my bones, getting four out of five
Listening to a song by The 1975
I thought, "Fuck it, I might as well give music by men a try”

I had a work dinner last week and just before I left, my sci-fi-loving work pal piped up with his usual, “read anything good lately?” I told him about Question 7, of course, but then I showed him a book I’ve just started called Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

"A love story?!” He said with a derisive little smirk that made me feel prickly.
“It’s actually about space.” I replied.

… Men aren’t scared of love stories, right?

Maybe they’re just afraid of ones written by and marketed to women using words like, “a love story”. Maybe being seen to consume art ‘for women’ makes them feel exposed, as if seeing their reflection in it might dismantle their sense of self. (It isn’t just me!)

Exhibit A: a song about heartbreak that I used to scream sing alongside my aviation dude bros at the pub on Thursday nights when I was pretending to be a cool girl.

After all, it’s not just women who write about love. Your favourite song is about love. Your favourite book has a love story locked in its pages. Your favourite film is all mushy in the centre. Love isn’t an emotion reserved for women, obviously. Love is science. Love is neurotransmitters and hormones in our bodies that support our evolutionary urge to mate and procreate. Love is the foundational pattern of human existence, a layer of meaning built upon a societal norm built upon a basic instinct.

I think I can conclude that my workmate’s knee-jerk reaction to Atmosphere wasn’t really about the 'love story' part of it. He likes Hyperion, after all: a book about a human woman who falls in love with a cyborg replicant of the poet John Keats and births the next messiah. No, I think it was the way he saw the words ‘a love story’ on the cover and felt othered. If he’d looked a little closer he might have seen the endorsement from Andy Weir on the back and been reeled back in.

I’ve seen plenty of discourse saying that men denigrate female-coded genre fiction like romance and romantasy because it features female protagonists who are empowered, free, happy, and always come first. Hah. I think the rejection is more instinctive and less cerebral than that.

Exhibit B: what do you mean the main character in your favourite film was motivated by love/loss the whole time?

It’s more likely that when something is coded as feminine it marks it as unsafe for men to enjoy, and that’s a cultural construct that’s very difficult to dismantle.

It’s easy: Sex and power are for men, love and pain are for women. These are the fundamental binary narratives, story equivalents of blue and pink. The men we work and live with have been raised to feel safe consuming ‘male’ coded stories, but their lack of interest in seeing how confining that narrative space is has the unfortunate side effect of minimising female artists. Because patriarchy. Their unconscious bias makes easily shamed people like me feel like I can’t talk about my favourite authors for fear of being made to feel like the 15-year-old version of myself in that bookshop all over again.

I find gender politics so boring because at heart they’re just about taxonomy. Codes. Categories. Our brains love them, need them, hunt them down – but reality continues to reject them. Lust and love are on the same spectrum of feeling, they can’t be owned by a gender any more than a gender can be owned by a body (that ones for you, J.K. Rowling).

I give you, Rosalía:

This album is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

I'll fuck you till you love me
I'll fuck you till you love me
I'll fuck you till you love me
Till you love me
Till you love me
Till you love me
Till you love me
Till you love me
Love me
Till you
Till you love me
I'll fuck you till you love me
I'll fuck you till you love me
Love me
Love me
Love me
Love me

Right, I’m off to watch Season 5 of the Witcher cos a friend told me he’d heard the franchise has been ruined by female writers, but let’s have one last word from Florence in the Guardian first: “the closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death… and I felt like I had stepped through this door and it was just full of women, screaming.”

How is it that we’ve been fooled into living in a cultural landscape filled with stories that minimise the miracle of women?

I am mystified.