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West End Girl and the Women Left Standing

West End Girl and the Women Left Standing

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 Lily Allen’s viral new album, West End Girl, digs deep. It catalogs the unraveling of her marriage and the deeper pain that lives between the lines of her lyrical prose. This isn’t tabloid fodder—it’s what Pitchfork called her most “brutally candid” work, a rare space where a woman can hold an abuser, a system, and her own art in the same frame.While Allen insists the record is “fictionalized,” it’s unmistakably laced with real life—even with the unavoidable layer of my own parasocial projection. The title track name-drops the couple’s designer—“Found ourselves a good mortgage / Billy Cotton got sorted”—a pointed nod to their now-infamous Architectural Digest home tour, which, in hindsight, aged about as gracefully as Harbour’s opening “bit,” greeting the camera crew like a mistress at the door. (Iconic, for all the wrong reasons…and very worth the watch. Psst. All relevant links are down at the bottom!)With almost no pre-launch marketing, the album shot up the charts, hailed by Variety, The New Yorker, and countless fans as her best work yet. (Personally, I’ve been devoted since her early-2000s protest anthem “Fuck You,” written about George W. Bush.) Still, West End Girl took over my social feed overnight. Yours too, maybe? This is because it touches something deeper than celebrity gossip or divorce voyeurism.Those of us who have spent years minimizing our needs, over-explaining our emotions in an attempt to have them recognized, or trying to contort ourselves into palatable versions of dominant cultural scripts feel a shock of recognition in every song. Allen articulates the quiet grief of being gas-lit into gratitude for crumbs.West End Girl isn’t just about Lily Allen and David Harbour—it’s about the way patriarchy teaches women to negotiate with our own erasure to serve the agenda of systems of oppression. She’s writing from the same ache that so many of us have been metabolizing privately for generations: the manipulation, the gaslighting, the subtle minimizations that we stomach under the guise of love in an attempt to find it/have it/keep it.And that’s exactly what the cultural moment is naming out loud. As Vogue recently asked in its viral essay, “Is It Embarrassing to Have Boyfriends Now?”, there’s a growing recognition that heterosexual love has long demanded women trade dignity for proximity. Asa Serasin even coined a word for this in 2019—heterofatalism, or the idea that heterosexual relationships are doomed to fail, because women are too often expected to shrink our brilliance, temper our boundaries, and laugh off harm to keep men comfortable.Enter Left Standing: The PodcastI actually recorded the first episode of my new podcast, Left Standing, before West End Girl dropped—but they’re part of the same conversation, and I knew I had to discuss them as such.The show is about the reclamation of our narratives: the language, myths, and cultural scripts that have been rewritten and manipulated to serve the false ideals of systems of oppression. In episode one we will trace the etymology of words like gossip (originally meaning “god-sib,” a woman who stands by you in difficult times), and hysteria (from hystera, the womb). We will also discuss the way in which patriarchy rewrites myth, starting with my favorite goddess, the true, often-erased story of Medusa—a survivor punished for being violated.The first episode unpacks these histories and the lineage of tone-policing that still shapes how we hear women like Lily Allen: as “dramatic,” “unladylike,” or “sharing too much.” In it, I quote Melissa' Febos’ book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She writes:Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.Because when survivors tell the truth, someone will call it embarrassing, dramatic, attention-grabbing, unnecessary, not lady-like, or a lie.And every time we tell it anyway, we reclaims our power—and gives others permission to do the same.As this is our first episode, your shares, comments, likes and subscribes mean OH SO much to me!Details and resources below!Thank you Jacquline Burtney for designing this! If you want to know why we went in this direction—listen to the episode for the feminist story of the iconic Medusa!Housekeeping Notes:* What happened to Business Witch? Well…a random woman who said she owned the trademark for “The Business Witch” demanded I rebrand. In lieu of litigating over the matter, I did. And I like this title way better…what about you? That being said, our old ...
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