Cry wolf

I think this song is about the inexact nature of the emotional circumstances surrounding rape.

Date rape happens. Most girls who are raped, are raped by their boyfriends or a close male friend/relative. That's a lot of emotional conflict to deal with. It's not uncommon for such a girl to having warring emotions of affection and hate for her rapist, if she knew and loved him before. People can't always just make things simple and convert all their emotions straight to hate in such a situation.

And women's reputations are put on trial when they report rape -- to the police, sure, but also, when they report it to their family and friends. Rape is a weird problem; in even very liberal societies, people's general attitudes are reductionist, and we put blame on the female for being raped, rather than the male for raping. We go out of our way to justify why it was her fault, and not his, as method of comforting ourselves into believing that if we never act the way this girl did, we will never be raped -- and for some men, if a girl ever acts this way around us and we rape her, we have a built-in loophole ready.

People immediately forget that everybody has a complicated psyche, and can't abide by rape victims who are not visions of internal consistency. They can't have ever made any sort of mistake that can be held against them. As far as date rape goes, most of us are still paying dues to a boy's club, which is why songs like "Cry Wolf" are such a staple of female singer/songwriters' catalogs.

as was previously stated, I too see this song as being written about "the inexact nature of emotional circumstances surrounding rape," date rape. statatory rape. etc. I believe this song is pretty upfront about the situation it is describing. It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for different interpretations.

"They say she got just what she wanted."

I listened to this song after a situation warranting similar feelings. It helped me bleed the wound. There is a profound amount of pain in a situation where the line of fault is not precisely clear cut, and the rapee can't even begin to explain it to anyone if they tried--because the general assumption is that they wanted it. Rape is about domination and violation. Boundaries are broken, and it's even harder to identify where the boundaries laid in the first place if the rapee thought they were at fault for initiating any interest in sex with the raper in the first place. A young girl might think she is a woman, and enjoy acting like one by flirting or acting in a provacative nature, but that wouldn't make it right for a man to sleep with her. A teenage girl might flirt or kiss a boy at a party drunk, but that doesn't make it right for him to later hold her down and force sex upon her.

This is the centerpiece of "Geek the Girl," one of the greatest albums of all time, especially lyrically. It\'s the only song on the album that\'s actually about being "taken advantage of sexually," a central theme of the album according to Germano\'s liner note:\n\n"hi this is the story of geek the girl, a girl who is confused about how to be sexual and cool in the world but finds out she isn\'t cool and gets constantly taken advantage of sexually, gets kind of sick and enjoys giving up but at the end still tries to believe in something beautiful and dreams of still loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life.........ha ha ha what a geek!"\n\nWhat\'s initially surprising is that this is a song about "love," which tells you the emotional dynamic: she has a crush on a guy who\'s just looking to score. \n\nWhat\'s easy for younger listeners to miss is that "wolf" was THE standard term for a guy who was just looking to score, when Germano was growing up (I\'m four years older than she is, and I learned it in kindergarten!) I think it only survives now in the phrase "wolf whistle." And "cry" is of course ambiguous; it can mean crying out, exclaiming, as in "cry wolf," but it also means to shed tears, and when used twice, as in "cry baby cry," it\'s almost always about weeping.\n\nSo "cry, cry wolf" describes the guy\'s reaction to her changing her mind about wanting sex. This is not, I believe, about forced date rape by an existing boyfriend. It\'s about realizing too late that the guy you\'re so into is not into you at all, and about the gentle, seemingly reasonable guilt trip that the aroused guy lays on the balking girl, until she gives in, ironically, in concern for his "feelings" which of course are 100% faked. (This sort of pressure can include the "blue balls" argument, where the guy claims that it\'s physically painful to be aroused but not satisfied.) \n\nThis is not to say that the song isn’t about the fact that no one takes her complaint seriously. The “cry wolf” element is twofold: her friends are tired of hearing about this pattern of behavior, and they’re not convinced that she actually regrets what happened. There are plenty of women who like casual sex like most men do, so it can be easy to assume that a woman who is having a series of one-night stands is getting “just what she wanted.” \n\nIt’s this dual meaning of the title phrase that makes the song sheer genius. Listen to the way she sings “cry, cry, wolf”: it’s as much or more about the guy’s pleading. There’s even, remarkably, at least a hint of pity for him.\n\nThere are three other double meanings in the song, two created by punctuation! “She didn’t know, she didn’t want it” seems to mean “She didn’t know that she didn’t want it,” which is sort of true, but she did want it, in the beginning. So “She didn’t know” can refer to her not understanding that the guy wasn’t into her, and “it” in “she didn’t want it” can refer to his emotional indifference. “You should have known, it’s all your fault” does the same thing in reverse: she is also saying that “you should have known that it’s all your fault.”\n\nBut the other huge double meaning in the song comes from the switch from talking about herself in the third person as an emotional distancing effect, to the second person. People use the second person all the time to castigate themselves. Is the “you” in the final section herself, or the guy? The answer is “yes.” Following “Didn’t they tell you” with “cry cry, wolf” seems to be explicitly about her friends warning her of her pattern of behavior. But it’s also, quite devastatingly, a summary of his dynamic: didn’t the girls tell you point-blank that they didn’t want sex? And your response was to metaphorically shed tears.\n\nIt’s worth pointing out that in the available video of this song, it seems clear that Germano is singing the ending to the guy, right in his face. As autobiographical as this album clearly is, “geek the girl” is still a character Germano has created; this is art, not therapy. Germano is too brilliantly self-aware throughout this album to make it credible that she was as lost and desperate as her character. But the way you create great art is to generalize from your experiences and find the universal within them. This, kike the whole album, is astonishingly great art.