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.
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.