I’ve been doing more thinking about this (always risky). I’ve got two additional contributions, the first about PJ’s use of humour, the second about the ‘feminism now’ question. It's a bit of an essay, but bear with me.
When Polly started out, she was an angry young woman, and part of that anger was focused on male-female relations. It wasn’t examined through any ideological lens, but through that of stories, emotions and experiences, and she never offered any solution. That meant she was aware, even at that early stage in her development as a songwriter, of the contradictions and ambiguities within any individual human response to sexual relationships. One way of processing these contradictions is through humour (it’s not the only way Polly’s humour functions, but it’s the one that’s relevant to this subject), and so there’s a humorous tone in some of her early stuff, especially, about the way men and women relate to each other. I don’t mean songs that are clearly ‘just’ jokes, such as ‘Claudine’, but more complicated works.
In ‘Sheela-na-gig’, for instance, the speaker both scorns, and desires the approval of, the man who spurns her so aggressively. His response to her entreaties and hers to his rejection are both melodramatic and over-the-top. Her threat to ‘take my hips to a man who cares’ is sneered at by the contradictory, cross-cutting voice claiming they've ‘heard it before!’ (and you can’t tell whether that voice is the man, another woman, or an internal debate within the protagonist). So what you’ve got there is a song which is both serious and humorous at the same time, and it's far from alone. Mind you, it’s a pretty bleak, uncomfortable sort of humour which is why it’s easy to miss. For my part I think this is impressively sophisticated for a woman who was barely into her twenties when she wrote it, if that.
Secondly, I said before in response to Thazi’s original question that ‘nobody knows’ Polly’s attitude to feminism now. Actually having reflected a little more I think the situation is a little more uncomfortable than that. When she took over the Today programme in 2014 she demanded, and got, carte blanche from the BBC to do exactly what she wanted. Unlike her choices about who she performs with, which are constrained in the ways I talked about earlier, in this case she had absolute freedom to choose anyone she wanted to lend airtime to. And, apart from the show’s presenters and one woman who appears in the business news section that Polly had nothing to do with, the only female voice in the whole three hours is hers. Now, there were good reasons for her to select all the men who spoke on the programme, I’m not denying that. But it’s clear that what she didn’t do was to go through her list of possible contributors and think to herself, ‘you know, I really ought to include a woman in this’, when there were plenty of radical female lawyers, journalists and commentators she could have chosen. It’s very obviously not something she thinks about; or, if she does think about it, she consciously rejects it.
Then again, in the last two albums, which are intentionally politically radical and challenging, women appear as individuals to whom things have happened or as representatives of other categories (the Native American woman in ‘Medicinals’, for instance), not in relation to their sex in any way. This is in contrast to Polly’s obvious concern for children and what happens to them as a group. I think we have to conclude, in so far as we can conclude anything about PJ and her work, that sexual politics as such is if anything even less of a concern for her now than it was 25 years ago.
Unless the next album turns out to be exactly about that, and proves me completely wrong!
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