In Praise of Heteronormative Love Songs

A Valentine's Day reflection

Thank you all for your patience. I’ve had an interesting week. Soon I’ll be preparing some reportage on an intense day at a Lansing Planned Parenthood with my friend Prisha Mosley, who’s suing medical professionals for the harm caused by her attempt to change sex as a vulnerable teen. I’ll make that free for everyone. Meanwhile, as a Valentine’s Day gift for my paid subscribers, I thought it was past time to take a break from the past month of grim fare and write something fun. See, I have range! Enjoy!

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Last year, a group of enraged transgender activists tried to cancel the song “Natural Woman,” written by Carole King and made iconic by Aretha Franklin. Or…maybe they didn’t, but someone at least made it look like they were trying. “Aretha Franklin’s 1968 song ‘Natural Woman’ perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” the Norway-based account tweeted. “There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ woman. The song has helped inspire acts of harm against transgender women. TCMA is requesting it is removed from Spotify & Apple Music.”

It was a fun troll, but the fact that some people fell for it is a sign of the times. Meanwhile, if we rewind the tape by a decade or so, the leftist criticism of “heteronormativity” in love songs (along with movies, pop culture, etc.) has been all too annoyingly real. Writing about the recent Taylor Swift discourse, Politico notes the irony that while the MAGA right hates Taylor today, twelve years ago it was the left who had beef with her for writing cute, straightforward “girl meets boy” love songs. (One wonders if they were later appeased by her acerbic breakup songs.) Now that LGBT identities have been so pervasively normalized, complaints that our culture is too heteronormative might be slightly less frequent. But you can still find lists like this of “gender-neutral love songs,” with passive-aggressive introductions about how hard it is to find romantic tunes without “binary” language. As another list introduces itself, these songs “celebrate love without assumptions,” making them suitable for same-sex weddings.

A lot of the tunes that get cited in these things are indeed flexible, including old standards like “When I Fall in Love,” “At Last,” or “It Had to Be You.” These and many other classics have been covered by both male and female voices. (For that matter, some old tunes explicitly written for one sex were historically covered by the other. The Andrews Sisters’ breakout hit “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” is clearly written in the voice of an awkward man trying to propose. They would go on to sing multiple overtly masculine wartime tunes like “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time.”)

However, something lost in the compiling of such lists is that a love song can fail to be “gender-neutral” in other, more subtle ways besides a pronoun tip-off. Consider the popular choice “To Make You Feel My Love,” written by Bob Dylan and covered by Adele. Technically, a woman can sing this song, but how well does it really work in a woman’s voice? Take lines like “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet/But I would never do you wrong,” or “I could make you happy, make your dreams come true/Nothing that I wouldn’t do/Go to the ends of the earth for you.” These lines have a distinctly masculine flavor. The man waits for the woman to make up her mind, assuring her of his steadfastness. The man vows to go to Herculean lengths to make the woman’s dreams come true.

The leftist might try to argue that I’m smuggling in the gender of the speaker’s beloved here, and there’s no reason why this couldn’t be sung by the more confident or dominant partner in a same-sex relationship. Maybe, technically. But the complementary dynamics of such a lyric are inescapable, even when subtle. Any attempt to transplant them into a same-sex context is a pale attempt to recreate what is already built into the essence of the relationship between man and woman.

Being unavoidably heteronormative in composition is neither necessary nor sufficient for a love song to be great. But it’s a very fun exercise to think about some good ones that are. Readers are, of course, free to object to my standards of greatness and leave superior selections below!