Hormone Rock (an extract)

Rock’n’roll is the musical embodiment of maleness. It’s one of the reasons women get penis envy — it looks a lot of fun. It’s about vanity, anger and nihilism (unless you’re Bono); it’s ugly things like a gas-guzzling car, a pub fight, a one-track mind. Women who play rock’n’roll are often sexy and aggressive, but, ultimately, are not representative of their sex in general. Is Courtney Love like your sister? Is Patti Smith like your mum?

Hormone rock is rock with the cock taken out, and it’s what a lot of women want to listen to right now. Women left alone with their more tormenting attributes don’t start wars. They moan, cry, bitch, go shopping; they’re anxious, neurotic, put-upon, argumentative, manipulative, analytical and brooding. These are all aspects to femaleness that none of us feels enamoured of, but they are unquestionably an essential aspect of ourselves. Rachael Yamagata’s Worn Me Down inspires thoughts of yellow rubber gloves and tired women with hollow eyes, let down again by a feckless man, on their knees scrubbing the kitchen floor of their minds. Beth Orton sings, “I’ve been reeling home, A broken shopping trolley” and Amy Winehouse, on What Is It About Men, casts herself as the passive victim: “I’m nurturing, I just wanna do my thing and I’ll take the wrong man as naturally as I sing.”
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