Seconds before interviewing Cassidy Hartmann, Executive Producer of Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, the Untold Story, I happened upon a post from CNN about Taylor Swift that stopped me in my tracks.
Um, open season? As in let’s all shoot a young, gifted, generous woman, who already gets death threats every day, for spreading joy with her catchy, ecstatic, and deeply moving album that made me grateful to be breathing, in love, and alive?
Then I remembered Jerry Falwell’s reaction to Lilith Fair, back in the 90s. And the bomb threats that this all-women’s music festival received just for creating a safe and joyful space for female groups to headline during an era when radio stations refused to play two female artists back to back in succession. Plus ça change, I guess, right? Sometimes it feels as if we women seem doomed to remain stuck in the same sexist loop for eternity.
For those of you too young to remember the bizarre and constant sexism of the 90s and early aughts, here are a few other examples that took place in the same era as the Lilith Fair. College student Amanda Knox was framed, accused, and convicted of a murder and rape in Perugia she didn’t commit during her semester abroad—Rudy Guede, the real rapist and killer, left his DNA all over the crime scene—simply because she was pretty, young, and sexually active. She then spent four years in an Italian jail. “Heroin chic”—aka anorexia—and pin-straight hair were all the rage, so gorgeous, brilliant, and talented Minnie Driver was called “drab” for being a “flabby frump who didn’t wear makeup and sported a curly mop of unruly hair.”
Harvey Weinstein openly hunted his actresses and other women he worked with with impunity. Brittany Spears and Princess Di were hunted, period. Monica Lewinsky was blamed for Clinton taking advantage of her youth, innocence, and his position of power in the White House.
Even I, as I explained to Hartmann during our zoom, was called a slut, Bang-bang girl, and Battlefield Barbie in book reviews of my first memoir, which also blamed me for my own rape and accused me of dressing inappropriately sexy at work.
This is what I looked like at work.
(In “Actually Romantic,” written twenty-five years after my memoir, Swift writes of another singer, allegedly Charlie XCX, calling her “Boring Barbie.” Like I said, plus ça change.)
Was all of this vast history of sexism, both mine and others’, why I could not stop ugly crying while watching the Lilith Fair documentary? Was it realizing that, as far as we women have come, someone always wants to knock us down, keep us from progressing, yuck our yum, steal our bodily autonomy, and/or cause us reputational harm? Can we never have nice things without someone taking a critical axe to them for the crime of being female?
Was it simply the joy of hearing the songs of that era and seeing the dedication of artists such as Sarah McLaughlin, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, Jewel, and Eryka Badhu, who proved all of their naysayers wrong by building a matriarchal world in which women, peace, community, cooperation, fun, and beautiful music prevailed? Was it the the nostalgia of remembering that era when I was a brand new mother trying to navigate a workplace and a society that told me I was damned if I had a career and damned if I didn’t while providing no support for either? Was it seeing the music school McLaughlin founded or hearing about all the money she donated to promote women’s reproductive health?
I don’t know exactly why I was crying throughout the entire film. I think it was all of this and more. But let’s rewind further. Back in 1990, when I was 24, I was sent on an assignment to a small, matriarchal peninsula in Greece called Trikeri, where family property gets passed down from woman to woman, and all municipal decisions are made by women, because the men are gone ten months out of the year on their boats. As I was speaking with Hartmann over Zoom about her Lilith Fair documentary, I suddenly had a strong and vivid memory of this place I hadn’t even thought of for thirty-five years. Back then, pre-Internet, I did not know that this matriarchy had started when Trikeri became a concentration camp for female left-wing political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. But what I did remember was this: the joy! The laughter! The feeling of safety, community, cooperation, and calm in what seemed to me, back then, as a female-lead utopia.
It was the same joy, in fact, I felt while watching the Lilith Fair documentary. And it is now a joy I suddenly feel as if it is my duty as a woman to spread, particularly now, during a difficult time in our own country for those of us born with uteri, as rights we once considered immutable are blithely stripped away, one by one, by a corrupt and misogynist regime.
All this to say that, when you’re searching for something to watch on TV tonight or tomorrow or whenever, and you want to maybe feel the simultaneous joy of female empowerment along with the sadness over our continuing lack of progress, please go watch Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, the Untold Story. Yes, it’s really that good. And it’s also a necessary reminder of what could be, if only women were in charge, and it weren’t still open season on us daily.
“Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story” is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+
