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A fallout of feminism: Where have all the emo girls gone?


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Parents have plenty to worry about these days when it comes to sheltering teenagers from evil, danger and bad taste. In a world of instant messaging, Xanga Web sites, iTunes and 150 cable channels, a parent's ability to monitor his kids' recreation time can be insufficient.

Some potential sources are obvious: predators on the Internet; bullies at school or on the Web; TV shows or movies that make sex seem like a game with no rules, risks or consequences; music that glorifies violence and degrades women. Some of that music is patently offensive; some of it is more discreet or subversive in how it offends.

Still, I never figured that even at my most vigilant I should protect my daughters from Fall Out Boy, the double-platinum Chicago band.

The New York Times recently ran a piece about the band that focused on its music genre - emo - and how some of its stars were adopting the traits and fashions of glam rock, starting with heavy eyeliner. It called emo the "soundtrack of white adolescence" and then cited a couple of sources - a book and an essay - that addressed the music in a wider perspective, including its battalions of (mostly) female fans.

The essay cited was "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't," and it was written for punkplanet.com by critic Jessica Hopper. Her thesis, distilled and simplified: Emo degrades and objectifies girls. It casts them either as prizes to be won and then disposed of or predators who break boys' hearts, sometimes for the sport of it. Either way they are one-dimensional and anonymous.

"Girls in emo songs today do not have names," she writes. "We are not identified. Our lives, our struggles, our day-to-day-to-day does not exist. We do not get colored in. We span from coquettish to damned and back again ... We are mysteries to be unlocked, bodies to be groped ... on a pedestal, on our backs."

She goes on to indict everyone from the Stones, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC for the "phallocentricities of the last 50-plus years of music."

Fall Out Boy was not mentioned in Hopper's piece, but it falls squarely into the emo/power punk universe. The band has been together several years, but it first came into my home this time last year, about the time "Sugar, We're Going Down" started getting played about 500 times a day on local radio.

My first reaction: bright, manic and catchy power-pop/rock tunes about romance and breakups. Musically it felt like the natural step in the evolution from Sunny Day Real Estate to Weezer to the Get Up Kids.

My second reaction: great song titles, the humor of which probably eludes some of its younger listeners. My favorites: "I've Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song)," from "Cork"; and "Reinventing the Wheel to Run Myself Over" and "Sending Postcards From a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here)" from the "Take This to Your Grave" album.

Granted, a few of the lyrics seemed risque - "I'm watching you two from the closet/Wishing to be the friction in your jeans" being the worst. But none seemed any more suggestive or sexual or sexist than the lines, scenes and innuendos they get from videos on MTV, articles in TeenPeople or the average episode of "That `70s Show."

Idolatry is unhealthy at any age, whether it's over a singer in a boy band or a NASCAR driver. But this low-grade emo fever takes me back eight years ago to the boy-band occupation (starring `N Sync), and 40 years ago, when the Beatles turned girls (including two older sisters) into shrieking maniacs. And "Yesterday," you could argue, was an emo ballad about a sap licking his girl-inflicted wounds: "I'm not half the man I used to be ..."

No one needs to preach to a man who has daughters about how important self-esteem and sexual identity are to his little girls. Most counselors and family psychologists will tell you that one of the most vital relationships in a girl's life is with her dad (gulp). But they get plenty of other standards and cues from plenty of other places, starting with their peers and including the music they like most.

I've been in the car with my kids when "Dance Dance" comes on the radio, and, as far as I can tell, what they extract from the song is the jackhammer beat and the sweet melody. I've also been in the car with them when they've advised me to turn the station because a certain song (that'd be yours, 50 Cent) "isn't appropriate" - a cue they did not take from me.

If I was missing something, I figured I should know about it. So I went to the source - two sources really. I first went to Matt Pryor, once the lead singer for the Get Up Kids, who thrived in the emo scene for nearly 10 years.

In an e-mail response, he brushed most of it aside: "I think it's a pretty thin argument. I don't think women are objectified in emo like they are in a lot (certainly not all) of hip-hop. Maybe all the guys in `emo' bands are just (wussies) and that's why the girls dump them, inspiring such timeless (ha ha) music. Maybe."

Pryor, however, is a recovering emo-holic, happy to be out of a scene he outgrew. So I asked someone in the thick of it, Fall Out Boy's vocalist, Patrick Stump, what he thought about the notion that emo was sexist and that it put girls in a bad light. He naturally got a bit defensive.

"If that's what emo's about, then we want nothing to do with it," he said. "Yeah, we have some heartbreak and breakup songs, but they have been a part of music forever. Everyone has those songs; it's not genre-specific. Loretta Lynn sings those kinds of songs."

"We've made it very clear what we think about women and girls. They are not disposable. In fact, lately I've been a little disappointed at our shows. We're playing much bigger shows now, and some of the new kids who haven't been with us for the whole time don't realize what we're about and not about. So once in a while someone throws a bra on stage, like we're some classic rock band. That's not us."

"We think there need to be more women in rock bands, more women writing for rock magazines. We think women should be a bigger part of music than just going for the boys."

And with that, he touched upon Hopper's main argument - that there aren't enough role models in music for teenage girls, not enough legitimate underground bands headed by girls or women. Her greatest concern, she writes, is for "the ones who are young, for whom this is likely their inaugural introduction to the underground." Those girls, she says, are almost entirely consumers, not participants, in that world. Point taken.

Still, I wondered whether there was something in the chemistry between the band and its fans that I wasn't detecting, some potentially damaging psychic imbalance.

Recently I was carpooling my girls and two of their friends home when "Dance Dance" came on for about the 800th time this year, and the answer came to me, unsolicited. A voice from the back revealed the primary reason she liked Fall Out Boy so much. Her explanation came right out of Intro to Teenage Hormones, and it sounded simple, relatively innocent, and a lot like my sisters' reason for liking the Beatles so much: The bass player is cute.

"We think there need to be more women in rock bands, more women writing for rock magazines. We think women should be a bigger part of music than just going for the boys."

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(c) 2006, The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.

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