Shaved Women

After the war, women in France who had slept with the nazis were humiliated in public by having their hair shaved. I think crass are implying that women who shave their legs, armpits, are collaborators with the enemy in the same way as the collaborators in vichy france. a rather extreme analogy, if that's the case. Trains are the trains to the death camps, the fate that symbolically awaits us if women continue to compromise their identity by conforming to whatever standards of femininity that (male)society demands of them.

If you've read JJ Ratter's autobiography, you'll know Glasgow Ranger and Kinked Moose's answers are both right!

i'm not entirely sure what it means, all i know it that its creepy as fuck, and gets some kind of point across.

shit.

I think the line "in all our decadence people die" is pointing out that we use our time and money to look more sexually appealing (for instance, by shaving our legs and armpits) when there are other people who are starving in the street. With labor conditions the way they are in third world countries, people's deaths could even be the direct result of our decadence if we buy cosmetics from companies who have outsourced labor and not bothered to not treat their employees like shit.

You're all wrong. The song is about the Magdalene Launderies in Ireland. Until 1996, women and girls in Ireland who got pregnant out of wedlock, had addictions to drugs and alcohol, or were considered too promiscuous were sent to live in asylums run by catholic nuns. Upon entry these women and girls had their heads shaved and were forced to wash clothes in silence with little to no contact with the outside world for sometimes years at a time. More than 35,000 women were sent to live in these facilities against their will and around 6000 children and babies are known to have died in them. Deaths which were covered up by the catholic church.

Shaved women. - The inmates.

Screaming babies. - The children who's deaths were covered up.

Disco dancing and shooting dope - rationality for the incarceration and enslavement of women and girls.

In all your decadence people die. - The wealth of the vatican juxtaposed against the inhumane conditions in the asylums.

Remember, Shaved Women was the B-side to Reality Asylum, an attack on Christianity. Note the word "Asylum" there, it's not coincidental. The songs are about the subjugation of women by the church.

[Edit: Expansion and edits.]

i like this song.

to me this song is about shaved women talking about screaming babies to a woman who doesn't shave her legs. the shaved woman might be a traitor and is also ranting against abortion.

oh but that's just me.

to me, it means that even though "shaved women" are traitors to their own kind, by taking the razor to their skin--they are still people. they still dance and do drugs. i don't quite understand the screaming babies though. oh, and trains are awesome.

I think this is about how women shave to be more sexually appealing, and using the Jack Kerouac school of thought 'Pretty girls make graves' (i.e. lust is the direct cause of birth, which is the direct cause of suffering and death) that would make sense based on the "In all our decadence people die" line. Just my interpretation...

I agree with GlascowRanger and kinkedmoose, and I'm not saying I know everything. But to me, the screaming babies bit means that the act of shaving to make desirable can end up causing screaming babies (all babies scream). It causes it because they are desirable and have sex, and often babies scream when they are hungry or unprovided for, so it could mean that with desirability they lure men in, but the men don't stick around to care for the children.

I know how petty it is to start a comment fight with a 10 year old thread, but wow, every comment here misses the mark entirely.

“Shaved women” is clearly a reference to the women tortured and humiliated in France after allied victory for being accused nazi collaborators. There is widespread understanding now that most of these accusations were baseless, none received anything close to a fair trial, and anecdotally, there’s even stories of women sleeping with nazis to pass on information to the resistance and still being tortured as “collaborators”. Many women were simply trying to survive the war, and even if they were sleeping with nazis, had no real control of the situation. Meanwhile, countless men who actually supported nazi occupation escaped punishment.

The image Eve Libertine is trying to evoke is this: after surviving years of the horrors of war, somehow keeping your children alive despite starvation and bombing in a situation where you are absolutely powerless, now, after being supposedly liberated, you are drug out into the street, child torn from your arms, attacked by angry men, shaved, beaten, tortured (or worse) as your children look on. Screaming Babies.

This has nothing to do with antifascist revenge and everything to do with misogynist violence.

Just look at the artwork on the back of Reality Asylum. It’s a shaved woman and her child running away from a horde of clergy, including a seig-heiling priest. The idea is the meaninglessness of this “liberation” for women. Inescapable violence.

The later lyricis are a simple “as it was then, it is now”-type rhetorical device. It’s more abstract here, but the implication is that the threat of male violence still controls women’s bodies regardless of one’s place in society (the disco elite or the dope-shooting underclass).

I mean, cmon y’all, Crass, and punk in general, is all about screaming back at the powerful. It’s about reminding us all of the violence they commit against the weak and vulnerable, not about body shaming women.