“I have been trying for some years now to extricate my relationship with my body from the smug power of patriarchal beauty standards. The belief runs so deep it feels almost biblical: that to be skinny is to be loved, to look young is to be happy, to be shaved is to be sexy; that fighting every natural impulse of your body means you have your life together. Underpinning all of this is the most urgent message of all – that the male gaze is the utmost, desperately important thing to be achieved.
It makes me want to kick, scream, writhe, and distort in agony that this culture does not treat women’s bodies as what they are: mammals, animals, human beings. ‘Good Girl’ articulates that kicking and screaming – the refusal of the idea that my body is for consumption or ornamentation. My body is my vehicle through the world. Good Girl is the aching, drudging, daily battle not to fold under the pressure to commit violence against my body: by starving, injecting, constraining, stripping, or going under the knife to reach some new level of social approval that I can mistake for unlocked confidence, or, God forbid – feminist empowerment. There is no end to it, no ceiling to be reached.
‘Good Girl’ is about the violent feeling that rises in me when a man believes my existence is a performance for him. Comments about my shape, my body hair, my teeth, my legs, my face – from catcalls to internet comments, from sexual harassment to insults that strike when I am simply existing. The song is my defiance in the face of men who cannot grasp the fact that I do not give a fuck about their attraction, their approval, or whether they are looking at me. I am looking at them.”
Paris Paloma | Ones To Watch Playlist