Happy International Women’s Month! Let’s talk about female rage through the lens of Paris Paloma’s “Labour”
There has been a popularization of female rage in the media. Its pivot to popularity could be for many reasons, including the continual threats to progress with political legislation, the continual restrictions on women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, the rise of online spaces to openly converse, or media that is rejecting the quiet version of angry women for a more unrestrained portrayal of emotion. For example, while on a press tour for The Menu, Anya Taylor Joy talked about how she approached the director to change a scene to make it more authentic to women’s impulses saying, “I get a lot of men [on screen] doing really terrible things and women sitting silently whilst one tear slowly falls, no, no, we get mad and angry.”
The song “Labour” by Paris Paloma captures these feelings within the lyrics and its ritualistic production. Her target audience agreed, and the song went viral.
THE LYRICS
“Labour” is a song about the emotional and physical strain that women experience in their lives. When she began promoting her furious and harrowing lyrics on TikTok, it easily reached one million likes. Many people used this sound on TikTok to share their own experiences with misogyny, double standards, generational abuse, and abusive relationships.
Here is a compilation of stand-out lyrics worth taking a closer look at:
- Who tends the orchards? Who fixes up the gables? / Emotional torture from the head of your high table
These lyrics indicate a situation where there is no love, respect, or gratitude in a relationship. The woman works tirelessly only to receive emotional turmoil from her partner. The images presented of ‘tending an orchard’ or ‘fixing gables’ communicate that there is a lineage of this type of treatment toward women, and it has transformed into an unending cycle.
- For somebody I thought was my saviour / you sure make me do a whole lot of labour
Women are raised to believe that their wedding day will be the happiest day of their lives; would you be living for yourself at all if that is the truth?
Girls are raised consuming fairy tales centred on princes saving the damsel in distress, taking her away from her life and showing her a whole new world. Within these stories, there are archetypes like the maiden, the damsel, and the heroine who must fall in love, and there are women cast as villains for having the audacity to be selfish, queer-coded, or wild.
This lyric highlights the moment when the woman realizes that the concept of a male saviour is a fallacy and much of the labour she performs is overshadowed, thankless, and unpaid.
- All day every day/therapist/mother/maid/nymph then a virgin/nurse then a servant
This section where Paloma lists off all the things women must be in a chant-esque manner is powerful and unendingly true.
These lines emphasize how caring for another person can become a woman’s identity. How a woman can be so caught up in the needs and wants of others that she forgets to tend to herself or cannot recall her own hopes and desires.
Specifically, the line nymph then a virgin emphasizes the expected roles being contradictions to each other; you must be sexually desirable but cannot be sexually promiscuous, which is reminiscent of the Madonna-whore complex where cis heterosexual men can conceive only two categories for women, a pure, virtuous woman (Madonna), and an overtly sexual, manipulative woman (whore). The perpetuated Madonna-whore complex puts women’s freedom and sexual expression into one category or another.
To commit to this one-woman play where the woman constantly must change is emotionally taxing work, and the trope is overdone.
- Just an appendage / Live to attend him / So he never lifts a finger / 24/7 baby machine / So he can live out his picket fence dreams / It’s not an act of love if you make her/ You make me do too much labour
An appendage is meant to attach to something, and it does not have a personal livelihood. The concept of an appendage is a concept that has been repackaged and repurposed for many years, referring to ‘the trophy wife’ or the ‘stay-at-home mom’.
Additionally, talk of women and their inevitable children cannot be escaped. It is something that is expected if you’re able, and there is rarely a reason not to. Women tend to the house, to the kids, to the cleaning, to the food. However, this is not considered a job. After all, a job should be paid or at least regulated. This phenomenon is called the double burden of household labour and waged labour that women disproportionately carry in society, which feeds the capitalist system.
THE MUSIC VIDEO
The video opens with a man sitting expectantly at a dinner table as a woman sets the table with food and drink. At the dinner table, he stabs the food with a fork and eats everything while the woman sits with an empty plate.
She watches him until the song builds, and something snaps in the woman. She reaches to the middle of the table for the fruit, specifically the pomegranate. The pomegranate represents abundance and fertility. In the ancient Greek myth of Persephone, she is trapped in the underworld because of her marriage to Hades after eating a few pomegranate seeds. The pomegranate on this table symbolizes the binding nature of marriage.
She cracks the pomegranate in half, and its juice explodes onto her dress and the table. She eats it ravenously, redness coating her hands and dripping down her mouth. The man laughs at first, but the woman does not regain her composure, so he begins to frown, kneading at his fingers angrily.
However, when he looks up again, she has disappeared, and the man is left staring at the wall.
THE IMPACT
In this century, it is normalized for women to be attending postsecondary and to get a degree. However, like many things in a woman’s experience, it becomes a decoration. Even if the degree is put toward a job, a woman should not make more money than her husband; he must be the breadwinner, and the woman should stay home and knead the dough.
Women still carry the same burden they did before, but it is now shadowed by the notion that since they were given the rights they wanted, women must ‘make their bed and sleep in it’. Making their bed and sleeping in it entails the double burden of a day job and the shadowed labour of birthing children, cleaning, cooking, and tending to your husband and all his needs etc. All these reasons and more
All these reasons and more are why so many people have connected to this song, and why Paris Paloma is releasing a new version of the song just in time for International Women’s Month this year. Paloma has combined the voices of her listeners who have covered the song and posted it online, making it into a cacophony of voices screaming this anthem of generational hurt, her goal being for her audience to find catharsis through it.
Upon announcing LABOUR (the cacophony), Paloma took to her social media to acknowledge the platform and attention this song has garnered and to turn her audience’s attention to the women and girls under siege in Gaza, Palestine. Taking this action cements intersectionality and interconnectedness in womanhood and how all our struggles are unified.
And if you are looking for some songs about how to love and take care of women, stream Hozier and call it a day.