Sister Blister

I love this song...

The lyrics of this song are very powerful to me, i think its about women who sabotage eachother in the name of men. ''such a pity to disavow each other with how far we've come with how strong we've been'' thats explaining how much pain women have been through in the past just trying to get the right to speak, and after how far we have come, we still trample on eachother to win the aproval of some guy who will more than likely just give us hell anyway! And no...I'm not a lesbian lol

Yeah I agree with that totally - after all the hisotorical battles of women fighting to be independent of men and becoming a sisterhood, we abolish this by fighting for men, and falling over ourselves and trampling on eachother in order to impress them. A great song, we need to unite, girlies!

lol its odd, i see it as, like everyone else, two female friends arguing over men. But i also see it as sabotaging yourself for a man. a bit scitzophrenic, but like arguing with yourself, like a split personality.

This song is clearly about the problems facing the early feminist movement (and still facing feminists today). The divide between groups within feminism..."you and me feel joined by only gender we are not all for one and one for all" clearly refers to the realisation that there were differences in the needs and experiences of individual groups within the movement (often down to class and race differences) which lead to divisions within feminism. Gender alone was not enough to join them. "we forget how hard separatism has been"- another indication that this song is about the feminist movement, there is disagreement amongst feminists about whether or not seperatism (emphasizing male/female differences) helps or hinders their cause. I think this is an excellent song by alanis and should've made the U.R.S final cut. It stands alone from much of her catalogue in that it doesn't focus primarily on a specifically personal experience (although i am not saying this is a particulkarly good or bad thing). What do people think about my comments?

In answer to the message of this song: AMEN TO THAT! The way I look at it its about the crime its is to "disavow a sister", how women have had to fight tooth and nail to get where we are and still have ground that is untaken and yet we waste our time sabotaging each other by backstabbing, slandering and competing over men. This song is definatly stirring and one worth A LOT of discussion and worht using in discussion.

Something simmilar to what P!nk was referring to with "stupid girls".

well i understand what the song is trying to say. i just don't see how women are sabotaging each other, or i don't see this rivalry between women. I do think that women try to become more equal to men by reaching for those top jobs for example but i don't see how women are fighting with each other over men.

mlfm256, it's not just specifically talking about women fighting over men. It's a much more vast problem, like the fact that women degrade and demean each other to men to make themselves seem like "one of the boys". Like calling each other sluts or whores, while men are allowed to get away with the same behaviour or it doesn't even come up (like with how they dress). It's about the double-standards that exist between the sexes and how women use the same language against each other that men use to put us down.

The entire song is how women can attack each other over things like men, jobs, looks, etc; it divides us when we need to be more united.

It also says to me that we fight to be accepted by men and to get into their "boys' clubs" instead of wanting to do things on our own terms.

While there may well have been an external object in Al's mind when she wrote this, she's working on a more internal level here primarily. Al understands internal conflicts and something called "borderline personality organization."

She has gone down this road before (see "Mary Jane" and "Break," for example).

Al is =very= aware of her internal conflicts and uses her writing to try to work through them so that she is less (unconsciously) "split in two" and more (consciously) "integrated."

Authors like Pia Mellody and Claudia Black, as well as Marsha Linehan and Glenn Schiraldi (the latter two at a more technical level), have written a lot about this topic.