How Wham’s Everything She Wants Taught Me How To Be A Woman

In the summer of 2011, before I would enter my Junior year of high school, I was sixteen years old shopping with my mother, and I heard this song that I heard before. My mom is a Wham! fan and put her songs on my MP3s for me to listen to. The song hit differently than when I first heard a snippet of it in my cheap headphones on the school bus, and now listening to it in the overhead speakers of Dress Barn. I was old enough to understand it. It struck me like it was a song that I needed to listen to now because it had a catchy beat but it had a message behind it that I couldn’t let go of. The lyrics are very self-explanatory it’s about a man that becomes exasperated and exhausted with the constant demands of what his selfish girlfriend wants. When he is told that she’s pregnant with his child, he knows he’ll just be working even harder to provide for two when he can barely provide for her. Even though he is trying his best, the best isn’t good enough for her because she wants more, hence why the song is called Everything She Wants.

Months later when my mom and I were making our road trip to Arlington for a convention called AnimeUSA, we played her Wham! CD in the car. My mom had no objections have a Wham!-a-thon in the car. I played this song any chance I got, thinking back to my favoritism of this song, I never pushed it on my friends. I can only assume it's because it was something for me to enjoy and I didn't have to share the word of this song. If I wanted to talk about it then I would have, I was just content with just playing this song on my own.

But this song is about money which I knew about in the sense of anxiety.

I had known about the rule when it comes to dating is that the man pays for everything which is appreciated and even though I would never dream of doing that to a man, this song just really encapsulated that lesson for what it feels like from a man’s point of view.

I’ve always had an unbalanced relationship with money, I get guilty and nervous if someone buys my meal because I don’t know if I earned it and I don’t want to appear as a moocher even though oftentimes it’s been told to my face. Even though I know that I’m not because of my fear of money I don’t want to go broke and I’ve seen what it’s like to have to scrape pennies together for a bill and count coins in the drive-through. Even when someone tells me, “get whatever you want", to this day I'm still apprehensive when it comes to someone telling me I can get whatever I want.

Even though I was taught the value of the dollar, to make it stretch and to use it on someone else. Money can be a selfless thing if the other person is grateful, it costs zero dollars to be grateful. In this song, we know the woman through the singer, we know who she is. She's ungrateful, shallow, and controlling.

When I got older and I started dating I thought about the song and that I didn’t want to be like the woman in that song. I never want to do that to a man who even though a man will provide for me and support me and love me. Money can be a very tricky thing to apply so that way it’s not a necessity or a luxury but simply something casual. And there are some women out there that will abuse money.

This is one of those rare happy-sounding pop songs that doesn’t get its message lost in the music, some happy-sounding songs have the most harrowing subjects of death, betrayal, war, and loneliness and the song is so happy when people don’t recognize its message. When I listen to Everything she wants by Wham! the message still gets me in my soul and teaches me the most valuable lesson as a girl, and it helped shape me into the woman I am today. Don’t abuse the money of the man that loves you, they will do anything they can to support you even if it means they will sell every possession to help you, with men, it is the norm that they pay for everything for the woman, and ever since then, I’ve never abused that.

Of all the lessons I’ve been talked to by my friends and family in my evolution into adulthood and womanhood. I credit this song for teaching me a different perspective, to always be courteous and aware of what a man will do for me. Sure, money makes the world go round and it does provide a lot of fantastic things but the best thing is that love is priceless.