Joni Mitchell is back on Spotify, and all is well in the world.
I want to talk to you/ I want to shampoo you/ I want to renew you again and again.
I want to knit you a sweater/ I want to write you a love letter/ I want to make you feel better/ I want to make you feel free.
He’s my sunshine in the morning/ He’s my fireworks at the end of the day
Joni simply loves men, in song after song. The albums Blue and Court and Spark are both short and… perfect. They sound like messages in a bottle from a time when men and women liked each other, and you can’t help but be happy listening to them.
I’ve lost track of which “wave” of feminism we are currently in, and I don’t follow the quarrels surrounding “trad wives,” Barbie and whatnot. But clearly this is a time when big questions have been re-opened on a number of fronts, and new thinking has become possible in certain quarters.
Of these, the most bracing I have found, and certainly the most sexy, is a new Substack provocatively titled Submission. But what Marilyn Simon is up to at Submission goes well beyond provocation or titillation: she channels a Joni-adjacent spirit of affection. Simon speaks to the pleasures of being a woman in relation to a man, in all of their binary glory.
There are indications of a biblically-informed anthropology in her work, and a lot of Shakespeare, but what makes Submission unique is that it is at once “conservative” (I think?), in some sense that is hard to pin down, and wildly sexy. This is not a Louise Perry lament about the downsides of the sexual revolution, nor a Mary Harrington ode to motherhood, as important as those voices are. Rather, it is about the joy of sexual difference.
Both hands now clasp my face tenderly, and he looks fully into my eyes. Although his hands have released their grip on me, I feel his strength over me as he pushes me into the doorway with his thighs and pelvis. His kiss is soft – but there is nothing tentative in it. His lips lay a claim upon me, and the question of my own will becomes, somehow, moot. I feel a spreading warmth between my legs, and a wetness.
This is not the sort of kiss one can recover from. Something stood revealed, some condition, in light of which the ideal of equality felt like a shabby consolation. He felt powerful, even predatory. As though in answer to a truth bluntly stated, I felt something unaccustomed: I felt like a woman. The experience was far from unpleasant.
We are conditioned to view circumstances where a woman is made to feel like a woman as negative, injurious to our sense of agency. Yet why must this be the case?
Simon questions the various suppositions that trap men and women both in sexual resentment, cutting us off from our nature as beings created for one another.
I’ll be following this one closely. And listening to Joni.