Can a pop song cause mental illness? If you’re old enough to remember the Crazy Frog, there’s a strong chance you’ll reply in the affirmative.
But I mean that question seriously. Can a pop song cause mental illness? In recent weeks, I’ve become convinced that one song in particular, a song called “Labour” by Paris Paloma, is having a detrimental effect on the sanity of young women across the Western world, especially in America.
Is it any wonder women are so mad and only getting madder?
In August, the song was the soundtrack to a hundred-thousand TikTok and Instagram reels about the Lindsay Clancy case, each one vying with all the others to make the most lurid and sensational claims about the victimization of women, the unfairness of modern society and the “obvious” guilt of a man whose wife freely admitted she killed her three children with a set of exercise bands while he was out running errands. Now there’s the Cornell Seven case – a campus orgy gone wrong – and again “Labour” is the mood music. The song has become the anthem of generalized female discontent, whatever its object.
I’d never heard of Paris Paloma before, but she has something like ten million monthly listeners on Spotify now, thanks almost entirely to “Labour.” The song was first released in 2023, and then the “Cacophony” version a year later, featuring the “roaring” vocals of a hundred female fans, all singing in unison the song’s frankly barmy middle-eight section.
All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket-fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labor
It’s self-dramatizing, self-aggrandising – like I said, barmy. The music video features a mousy, bedraggled Paloma serving up a Tudor spread to her brutish Henrician husband, who watches her with cold menace until she starts gobbling the food herself, smearing it all over her pale face.
If the song isn’t actively scrambling women’s minds, at the very least it’s stirring them a little bit faster. A few months ago, Britain’s New Statesman introduced us to the nation’s “angry young women,” who are livid about everything from Israel to endometriosis, and derive their only pleasure from displeasure, struggle and the hatred they feel for men and carbon emissions. “Impossibly bleak,” is how the New Statesman describes it.
I’ve offered various explanations for the rise of the “angry young women,” including the massive toxic burden of the modern world and changes to our hormonal environment caused by poor diets, sedentary lifestyles, plastic chemicals and non-stick coatings—and also birth control. Research shows just three months on hormonal contraception can change the structure and function of a woman’s amygdala, a region of the brain associated with threat perception. Leftists—and the “angry young women” are definitely leftists – have been shown consistently to have smaller amygdalas than conservatives. About 14 percent of American girls aged 15-19 are on birth control, and nearly 17 percent of women aged 20-29.
This is precisely the kind of thing that’s still more or less unsayable today. At the very least, as a man, you’re going to get called some fairly unpleasant things. By saying precisely this kind of thing, including in my most recent book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, I ended up being branded one of the “Men Who Fear Women” by Helen Lewis, the journalist who made Jordan Peterson crash a motor vehicle during their interview for GQ magazine in 2018. My brand of “masculinism,” Lewis claimed in The Atlantic, is of a piece with that of Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes and a whole basket of other internet deplorables, all of whom pose a clear and present danger to women’s dignity, autonomy and maybe even their safety. I thought that last claim was a tad dramatic.
But it’s not just biology, as important as I consider biology to be. It’s ideology too – and the title of that Paris Paloma song – “Labour” – really gets to the heart of the matter.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, a new generation of feminists began to deconstruct the great texts of the revolutionary tradition. The aim was to reveal how those texts, rather than offering a route to genuine liberation for the fairer sex, perpetuated harmful assumptions and stereotypes. One of those texts was Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, written not long after the death of Karl Marx and drawing on extensive historical and anthropological research.
For all intents and purposes, The Origin is a pretty radical text. Engels argues that all ancient pre-class societies were “primitive matriarchies” where women held the whip hand because they controlled the means of reproduction – their bodies. The first class society, Engels said, was the first patriarchy, because the first property was women themselves, chattels of their husbands. The implication was that the Marxist goal, the end of capitalism, would also be the end of patriarchy. More than that: It would be a return to primitive matriarchy; although what that would look like, in reality, wasn’t spelled out. But the broad message was clear enough: Women should, for reasons of self-interest, support the project of Marxist revolution.
Feminists like Kate Millet agreed, but only up to a point. They noted that Engels, like Marx, had so much to say about the value of male labor – agricultural, industrial – and its role in the world-historical process. But what about women’s labor? Isn’t cooking, keeping house and raising children a load-bearing stone for capitalism too?
The danger, then, was that if women’s labor were not properly recognized, the same structures of oppression that have existed since the demise of the primitive matriarchies would simply remain and women would be no better off.
In the last seventy years, women have entered the workplace like never before, coming to outnumber men in a great many professions, but they’ve also been encouraged to see every aspect of their intimate lives as a form of “labor” too. Far from breaking out of the exploitative logic of capitalism – time is money – women have embraced it completely and made it part of their very being. Now, in the name of liberation, they subject their time, energy and emotions to a brutal market-oriented calculus that leaves them feeling short-changed in pretty much all that they do.
Even the ordinary give and take of a relationship, something that’s only ever been subject to a loose double-entry, becomes warped beyond recognition. Boyfriend having a hard time? Perhaps he’s lost his job and you’re having to be extra nice – well, that’s “mankeeping,” and yes you should feel upset if you aren’t accurately recompensed for every single “investment” of physical and “emotional labor” you make.
Is it any wonder women are so mad and only getting madder, when even their favorite music tells them the trap they’ve fallen into offers the only route for escape?
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