The Problem With Lana Del Rey’s ‘Soft Feminism’

I, like many internet-bred teenagers of the 2010s, had a pretty thick Lana Del Rey phase. Right along with Marina (and The Diamonds), Lorde, and Arctic Monkeys, a lot of my personality was born and bred from the kind of music that you’d find swimming in almost every Tumblr user’s “xxsadnessxx” playlist on 8track. It was mourning a wasted youth that you were currently living, wishing you could be experiencing life instead of lingering in the magazine-cutout-coated walls of your childhood bedroom.

While all of the artists that I listened to as a teenager were melancholic, Lana Del Rey was specifically melancholic toward relationships. Back in 2014, she was like a sadder, cooler Taylor Swift. All of her songs were about women (including herself) and their interactions with men. Like I’ve said about Swift in the past, I really don’t find a problem with this. And I think that both Taylor and Lana’s criticisms of the backlash that they get for singing about their relationships with men are entirely warranted. That criticism was the basis of the viral public statement that Lana Del Rey posted on Instagram recently. Other women get awards for writing songs about men, so why do people criticize me when I do? My response could be boiled down to “that’s not the point babe”. But let’s dive a little deeper into what the problem really is.

To be completely honest, I don’t really have a problem with Lana. I hadn’t even thought about any of this until I read that initial statement. She’s obviously one of the most talented musicians today and, again, influenced my adolescent personality to an absurd degree. But while her music gave me the warm, fuzzy sadness that I craved, it also both reinforced and multiplied my shitty understanding of romance.

For some background, I’m a gay woman who decided at a young age that I liked men because I had a lack of positive male attention and felt compelled to make up for it. The only problem was that, well, I really wasn’t attracted to men. So, instead of dating them, I fantasized about them. I created men in my mind and put them up on pedestals as beautiful, broken creatures that needed extra love that only I could give to them. This man and the relationship with him that I’d created were based on the media that I was consuming.

He was aggressive like Han Solo. He had authority like Ezra from Pretty Little Liars. He was insecure like Dan from Gossip Girl. And he treated me badly because of it, like all of the guys that Lana Del Rey sang about. I know that in her recent statement (the first of many, really) she pointed out that she wasn’t glamorizing abuse—merely “a glamorous person” who spoke openly about abuse. I can definitely see what she was trying to say there and can even respect it. I don’t think that Lana Del Rey was in any way purposefully telling me, a fourteen-year-old repressed lesbian with daddy issues, that I should let a sad boy yell at me because he just hasn’t been loved hard enough. Nevertheless, she did.

While I don’t blame her for the messages that I and many other teenage girls at the time were receiving, I do blame her for gaining fame from that music and not using it to tell her young audience that the abuse in her songs isn’t romantic. No one told me that I shouldn’t do everything for a man like Lana Del Rey did in “Video Games”. No one told me that I shouldn’t feel like I would die without my boyfriend, like in “Off To The Races”.

With all of her statements coming out recently, I decided to check out her newer music to see what the fuss was all about and stumbled upon the titular track from her latest album, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”. And...yeah, that song lays out the basics of what I’d decided was the “perfect” relationship. A man who thinks he’s a spurned genius who “[talks] to the walls when the party gets bored of [him]”. It was everything that I loved about my emotionally abusive ex, who was simultaneously the most insecure and most egocentric person I’ve ever met. But the part of the song that broke my heart? The chorus.

“‘Cause you’re just a man, it’s just what you do, your head in your hands as you color me in blue.”

I feel everything about this line, which makes it all the more beautiful. But, considering my teenage self, I can see how it could be confusing as well. The way she sings it is sad, but it’s also romantic. He’s just a man. Men are allowed to be sad and treat us poorly because, well, that’s what they do. That’s what they’ve done forever.

The problem with Lana Del Rey’s cries that she wants to make room for more “soft feminism” is that she doesn’t use her music to promote a message that is powerful for women. Yeah, a lot of the songs include sexual liberation, but those songs also tend to focus on her need for the man’s desire more than her own desire. Again, I don’t think this is inherently wrong. I was and in some respect still am the kind of person who would put a man’s sexual desire before my personal comfort in an attempt to feel wanted. But I’m not influencing millions of people with my music.

Being soft and traditionally feminine isn’t what people are criticizing Lana’s music for. It’s the fact that she has created this romantic “girl with daddy issues” persona that has inadvertently led to women putting themselves in shitty situations because they felt as though that was the best place for them. Because they heard their hero, Lana Del Rey, talk about how she could never leave her boyfriend or that no one else would ever love her and took it as law. She never says “my music is about my suffering and it’s not what you should aim for”.

Lana Del Rey’s “soft feminism” isn’t good, not because feminine women don’t deserve a place in feminism, but because her version of feminism is dictated by a need to please men. It seems like Lana is really saying that us refusing to support her continued self-harm in the form of toxic relationships is sexist, which frankly isn’t true. Other women who primarily write songs about their relationships with men have written about how romantic a bad situation can be, but have also released songs about liberating themselves from those situations. Look at Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together”, Halsey’s “You Should Be Sad”, or Selena Gomez’s “Lose You To Love Me”. If these songwriters can speak candidly about their growth away from toxic relationships, why can’t Lana Del Rey?

The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know that, as an intersectional feminist and liberated ex-hetero, my feminism has no room for romanticizing the need for male attention without equal criticism of it. I believe that Lana should write a song about liberating herself from a shitty relationship. Or she could just have an open discussion with her fans about her history with emotional abuse and how she has gotten through it. Her music has the opportunity to be a force for good instead of unintentionally teaching women (also gay men and genderqueer individuals) that we are to worship men and put their desires above ours.