God Made Girls...but for what?

The first time I heard RaeLynn Woodward's single "God Made Girls", I turned the station before she could warble the refrain. The second time I heard the song, I turned the station just as quickly. The third, the fourth, the fifth time the lyrics "Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt" seeped through my car speakers I emphatically turned the station. It took several weeks before I forced myself to sit down and listen to the song through to the bitter end. And what I discovered was not surprising. "God Made Girls" in its entirety outraged me just as much as those first lines. But not for the reasons you may think. 

Before beginning this article, I read through the comments on YouTube under the song’s official music video. As you can imagine, commenters ranged from incensed feminists to June Cleaver fan-girls and everyone in between. One person states, “This really is a terrible, sexist mess of a song.” While another retorts, “This song is … about girls and what they mean from a traditional perspective very much based in life realities.” Both are fair points, and while I tend to agree with the former, I also have qualities of the latter (simply put, I wear skirts and the occasional strand of pearls and make no apologies for embracing my femininity). However, in this blogger's opinion, "God Made Girls" is not an accurate, based-in-life-realities song. Rather the lyrics dumb down the complexities of femininity and emasculate men in a succinct three minutes and thirty seconds.

 

Flaw #1: Femininity = Perfection

"God Made Girls" commits the age-old sin of portraying women as divine! The lyrics raise us to the role of savior; women (and us alone) give men a reason to live and act respectably. Our vulnerability, emotions, beauty combine into a superpower that makes men our puppets. Worse, though, than having our attributes inflated, is song ignores our flaws. The omission places women in a dangerous scenario. If art and artists do not consider a woman’s beauty parallel to her flaws, the pedestal effect occurs – we are adored and admired by men but simultaneously become removed from day-to-day living. Our perceived perfection, the fragility mentioned in the song, in past decades were used against women to justify keeping us from fully participating in our communities. Men fed us the party-line that we were “too perfect” or too delicate to involve ourselves with such things as finances, career aspirations, or politics.

Somebody's gotta be the one to cry.
Somebody's gotta let him drive

Give him a reason to hold that door 

So God made girls.

The music video does further damage to femininity by parading three major, albeit oversimplified, female archetypes across the screen: the child (or virgin in some conversations), the seductress—whose only purpose in the video is to add the "necessary" sex-factor—and finally the mother. It is this last character who appears to dominate at least the lyrics of the song.

Somebody's gotta make him get dressed up, 

Give him a reason to wash that truck,

Somebody's gotta teach him how to dance,

So God made girls.

Setting aside the lines about flirting and lighting up in the dark*, the woman described performs all the duties of a mother: getting the boy to church, teaching him how to dance, consoling him when he hurts, teaching him manners like holding the door, and nagging him to wash his truck. To my mind, the underlying message of “God Made Girls” is that all women are destined to become mothers—which, don't get me wrong, is both a worthy calling in life, and a facet of femininity. But again, femininity is complex and to portray  us solely as mothers or mothers to-be pigeonholes womanhood.
             
                          Something that can wake him up and call his bluff
                          And drag his butt to  church
                          Something that is hard to handle
                          Somethin' fragile to hold him when he hurts

*Let me say, God did not put me on this Earth to be some man’s night light!

Flaw #2: Men are helpless children

The lyrics make it abundantly clear that were it not for women's sacrifices and effort, men would languish in a vegetated state. And sadly, there are some women who will read this and nod their heads in agreement. I guarantee,  as a reformed female chauvinist, such an attitude only confirms to men that all feminists are ball-busting Man Eaters. Yet, "God Made Girls" seems to present a sugar-coated version of this brand of feminism. The scenario is nothing short of an inverted version of Pygmalion in which the man is lifeless, unmolded clay until the hands of the woman deign him to exist—but exist within her terms and up to her standards. 
                      Somebody's gotta put up a fight, 
                 Make him wait on a Saturday night
                      To walk downstairs and blow his mind,
                      So God made girls.

The music video further spurs the portrayal of the man’s passiveness and the role of the woman as mother and savior in that the only male character is a child no older than ten. And is he playing, shouting and laughing, getting dirty, scraping his knees, running with friends? No! He is peering from behind a tree at a girl (also no older than ten) and looking completely besotted.

Not only does this scene paint the picture of men’s helplessness and childishness, it also defines an expectation for both genders at a young age. Their ultimate goal in life is to find a mate—forget friendship, career aspirations, travel plans, family obligations, and rescuing that cocker spaniel at the local shelter. The girl (and boy) must develop a tunnel vision that leads them to find each other amidst the 7 billion people on this planet so that they can finally do what every love struck couple aspires towards—a carefree existence in which the two of them frolic through an enchanted forest like Puck and Tinker Belle in a damn perfume commercial!

 

Conclusion

At twenty-three years old, I have already had the questions posed to me: “Do you want to get married?”,
“Are you seeing anyone right now?”, “How many children do you want to have?” In the six months following our college graduation friends of mine have gotten engaged or married or are dating the person who will likely “put a ring on it.” And good for them. But for me, a blissfully single woman, to be reminded in overt and subtle ways that I have not yet checked all the boxes for a Fulfilled Life, frustrates me. God did not make women solely to be wives and mothers. He made us to be individuals and partners in life with not only our spouses,  but our friends, and our families (and vice versa). Thus our worth as women is not in whether or not we are able to get him to church and then down the aisle. It is in our femininity—the thing that allows us to wear the pretty skirts as well as the pants.