Jolene: One Man Away From Poverty

-Dolly Parton-

Dolly Parton’s 1974 release Jolene has been covered, copied, and sung many times since. The song is a passionate plea from one woman begging another to leave her man alone. It is a story that highlights the perils of living in a patriarchal, male-dominated world.

Jolene
Jolene
Jolene
Jolene
I’m begging of you
Please don’t take my man

Many women are economically dependent on their male partners. These women may have children, and may have a difficult time supporting these children without their husband’s financial help. As former chair of the Women and Poverty Task for the National Organization for Women, Beverley McDonald says most women are still one man away from poverty. If your man leaves, you and your children will be poor. Though Parton does not have any children of her own, she understands the threat of poverty. After all, she was the fourth of twelve children growing up, and described herself as “dirt poor”.

In order to avoid poverty, many women must engage in the taxing and thankless task of keeping their man.

What does keeping a man entail?

For one, it means surrendering to the fact that one’s man is free to decide to leave at any time, that he is not committed to the relationship unless it continues on his terms, that he will never permanently decide to stay, and that you and the kids will forever be financially dependent on him.

Keeping a man means catering to him by being his f’k toy, cooking his favorite meals, cleaning his house, and satisfying him in whatever way he asks—regardless of your desires or needs.

Despite all your efforts to keep a man, you may find him desirous of straying anyway, particularly if a p-compliant woman comes along and pays some attention to him, as Jolene in the song does:

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

Jolene’s beauty and submissiveness (as evidenced by her soft voice) are the only qualities she is using to lure the subject’s man away. Hence, those qualities appear to be the ones most necessary for the subject to keep her man.

Since the subject’s man is desirous of straying, keeping him will require a change in strategy. It does not mean asking him to grow up and stop throwing his life away. In fact, keeping him does not involve holding him responsible for his desire to stray. Instead, the best strategy is to convince the woman he desires to leave him alone. She, and not he, is the only person who will be able to prevent him from leaving the subject and the kids financially destitute. As the song says:

My happiness depends on you
and whatever you decide to do, Jolene

This is what life will offer a woman who depends on a man. This is the story that the song Jolene tells– the horrors of total dependency on a man.

Because keeping her man is the only way for the subject of this song to avoid poverty and survive, she must bargain for her sustenance with another woman. Women often have to compete for men, as Jolene and the subject of this song do. When women’s energy is focused on obtaining men, and competing against one another for the crumbs that men drop, women are unable to relate to one another with true gyn/affection. This is a tragic loss for womankind.

Dolly Parton explains writing this song in this interview:

Parton says she got the story for her song from another redhead in her life at the time, a bank teller who was giving Dolly’s new husband a little more interest than he had coming.

Ms. PARTON: She got this terrible crush on my husband. And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kind of like a running joke between us when I was saying, hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money. So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

Interestingly, Dolly Parton downplays the threat of the other woman in her own life. She turns it into a joke with her husband that he is being pursued by the bank teller. She places none of the agency of the flirtation on him, and she does not expect him to shun the bank teller’s advances. As she says, “it’s an innocent song all around”.

This song has been covered many times. For example, Jack White of the White Stripes covers the song here.

I experience his cover of this song as completely ignorant of its meaning. If Jack White’s man leaves, he will not be financially destitute. There is no sex-based hierarchy in the song as he sings it. His version is meaningless.

However, I do quite enjoy this version by Ellie Goulding

Gyn/affection and Dual Vision

A few weeks ago a female acquaintance Sandra (not her real name) blurted out, “I just don’t get along with women very well.” She proceeded to tell me how she always hated the cheerleaders in high school who allegedly pretended to be dumb to get attention, and how women are difficult to work with because they are competitive and catty.

This friend is obviously unaware of a feminist analysis that provides context for these women-hating sentiments. As you all know, when we hold misogynistic viewpoints of other women, we often hold ourselves up as the exceptional woman, who is not like “all those other terrible women out there”. As Ariel Levy says,

It can be fun to feel exceptional – to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But,” she warns, “if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

My conversation with Sandra came at an interesting time, since I was reading A Passion for Friends* by Janice Raymond. The book was recommended by blogger Radfem Crafts, and she did a lovely series (starting here) analyzing it.

Raymond discusses the reasons why some females hold anti-woman sentiments, (p 151)

A chorus of male voices throughout the centuries has echoed Jonathan Swift’s words, “I never knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex.”.. So women disidentify with other women in order to make themselves “tolerable” to men.

In other words, perhaps women hate women because male culture hates women.

To return to Sandra’s original examples. She remembers women in high school as playing dumb and actively conforming to beauty mandates, but she does not analyze the fact that patriarchal culture tells us that women are dumb and are only worthy as beautiful objects. Or to turn to another example, she believes women are difficult to work with because they are competitive and catty, but she does not see that our culture defines aggressive behavior in women as b*tchy, and does not note such behavior in men. In other words, she sees women through the male lens of hatred and disdain.

But Raymond does not believe that we can attribute all women-hating-women behavior and words to cultural brainwashing. As she says,

It would be easy to ignore these voices by saying that women internalize men’s attitudes about them and about their relationships with other women. The problem is that, although this may account in one way for the cause of women’s antifeminist behavior, it does not assuage the awful reality of women-hating-women conduct when it happens in our own and in other women’s lives.

To return to the above examples, Sandra may have hated the young women at her high school because she was jealous of the attention they received from men (due to the fact that they conformed to the f’kability mandate, and performed femininity in male-approved way). Since male-derived power is one of the only ways women can receive power, Sandra may have resented these women for receiving crumbs of attention she would have preferred to parlay into power herself. Or, perhaps the women at Sandra’s work really were catty and competitive with other women because they believed that women are easier targets then men, and that if only so many women were going to be able to succeed, they’d like to be one of them. In other words, perhaps the patriarchal culture that hates women creates women-hating words and behaviors in women.

Sandra was not open to my feminist analysis of her feelings, and she can hardly be blamed. After all, it is easier to see oneself as exceptional than to confront the realities of male power.

The above examples are just a few of the many obstacles to women-centered reality. However, Raymond believes that these obstacles must be overcome if women are going to become Gyn/affective. As she says (p 7-8),

Gyn/affection can be defined as woman-to-woman attraction, influence, and movement.. In many ways, Gyn/affection is a synonym for female friendship.. Gyn/affection connotes the passion that women feel for women, that is, the expression of profound attraction for the original vital Self and the movement towards other vital women.. The basic meaning of Gyn/affection is that women affect, move, stir, and arouse each other to full power.

Raymond believes that a Gyn/affective life is an important step towards women’s liberation, and I agree with her (p 241). When women step beyond the lies told about themselves and each other, we can begin to see ourselves and each other as we really are, and also create a vision of life beyond the current state of atrocity (p 23).

But,

How do women live in the world as men have defined it while creating the world as women imagine it to be? p 205

Raymond suggests that we use dual vision to keep one eye on the horrific and unacceptable material realities of women’s lives (she calls this nearsightedness), while at the same time recognizing “the possibilities of being for each other” now and in the future (farsightedness) (p 207).

As Raymond says,

Dual vision poses a tension but not a contradiction. Realism about the conditions of man-made existence must be illuminated by a vision of feminist imagination that acts. And the feminist visionary task must root itself in the real world or else, as Pat Hynes has remarked, like an electrical charge that has no ground, its unguided energy will disperse in all directions. Virgina Woolf phrased it this way, “Energy has been liberated, but into what form is it to flow?” (p 207-208)

By grounding our vision in our material world, as well as in our Gyn/affection for each other, we can begin to move forward towards wherever our vision takes us. This movement towards women’s freedom, despite the real realities of our material circumstances, has already begun.

Image from here.
*You can find an excerpt from A Passion for Friends here.