Ryan Adams and the Emergence of Taking Women Seriously
Last week, a 1977 clip of Dolly Parton interviewed by Barbara Walters started making the rounds—it has 106,000 likes on Twitter—in part because we can see now more clearly the prescience and wisdom of a young Parton in the face of a patronizing culture.
Walters asks Parton: “You don't have to look like this. You’re very beautiful. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs, you don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?”
“It’s certainly a choice,” says Parton. “I don’t like to be like everybody else. I would never stoop so low to be fashionable—that’s the easiest thing in the world to do. I just decided to do something that got their attention. Once they got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked and all that, then they would see there were parts of me to be appreciated. I’m very real where it counts, and that’s inside.”
Walters continues: “Do you feel like you're a joke, that people make fun of you?”
“Oh, I know they make fun of me, but all these years the people have thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually on them,” says Parton. “I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent. I’m sure of my love for life and that sort of thing. I am very content. I like the kind of person that I am. So, I can afford to piddle around and do-diddle around with makeup and clothes and stuff because I am secure with myself.”
We are in a redemptive moment for women, one of re-examination of how we have held them in regard then and now—women at large and women in particular, women who were jokes or villainesses or merely invisible. In other words, women who were dismissed in one way or another, as they often are.
In the past year, Lorena Bobbitt, whose story of brutal domestic violence became a national punchline, is now the subject of a four-part Amazon documentary series produced by Jordan Peele and a profile in The New York Times. We find out that Bobbitt opened a domestic-violence nonprofit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, and hopes to open a shelter. Tonya Harding also got her own New York Times profile, “Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now,” following the cinematic debut of her story, I, Tonya, starring the very beautiful Margot Robbie. And Monica Lewinksy, no longer hiding in the shadows, has emerged as an anti-bullying activist and Twitter personality, and literally wrote her own story for Vanity Fair, “Emerging from 'the House of Gaslight' in the Age of #MeToo,” and gave extensive interviews for the A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair.
Unlike the other three women, Parton, of course, was a country superstar, not a victim. But it goes to show the degree to which America, both the media and the public, has long ground down the complex, nuanced stories of women, be they of great success or painful victimhood, into simple punchlines. It’s no coincidence that this redemption of women, a time when we are actually hearing their stories, has dovetailed with the #MeToo movement, in which the lives and interiors of women are no longer seen as mere collateral damage for the lives of important men.
Take, for example, the recent New York Times report on singer-songwriter Ryan Adams’s pattern of abusive behavior toward women, which included interviews with seven women, including his ex-wife, actress and singer Mandy Moore, his ex-fiancée, Megan Butterworth, and singer Phoebe Bridgers, as well as more than a dozen other associates. It concluded that he “dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex” and “turned domineering and vengeful, jerking away his offers of support when spurned, and subjecting women to emotional and verbal abuse, and harassment in texts and on social media.”
It also revealed, in a review of 3,217 text messages, that Adams, then in his late 30s and early 40s, pursued a minor called “Ava,” who was between the ages of 14 and 16, sending her graphic sexual messages and appearing naked on a Skype video session. In multiple messages, Adams implicitly acknowledged that he knew Ava was underage: asking her to keep the exchanges secret, pressuring her repeatedly to say that she was 18, joking about her mother, and saying, “If people knew they would say I was like R Kelley lol.”
In the past few years, our culture has started to take these claims seriously enough to investigate and air them. But not everyone is convinced. There is still a vestige of that old thinking that the lives of women are merely the footnotes to male genius and success, whatever the costs, as most recently demonstrated by British music journalist Neil McCormick.
Last week, in The Daily Telegraph, McCormick mounted a defense of Adams, a strangely celebratory one at that, under the suspect auspices of defending art writ large: “If Ryan Adams can be ruined by his creepy behaviour, most of rock will go down with him.” His conclusion: “Do we really expect our artists to be paragons? Because, if we do, we are not just going to be very disappointed, we are going to be stuck with a lot of mediocre art.”
In his 1,174-word response, McCormick spends more than 700 words on Adams’s personal biography, including bits on his “colorful” love life, which notably includes models and actresses, and McCormick’s own personal interactions with and assessments of the star. “I found him to be incredibly smart and articulate, a deep thinker about creativity, a little bit goofy in his humour and obsessive about music and pop culture,” he writes.
He kicks off his pièce de apologia in a laudatory mode better suited to an album release, rather than the revelation of corroborated accusations of a 40-something pressuring a high school student into a sexually explicit correspondence. “On the title track of a spartan masterpiece in 2003, Ryan Adams sang repeatedly ‘Love is hell’. Love, sex, bad relationships, bitterness, heartache and regret are pretty much the acclaimed Americana singer-songwriter’s oeuvre,” McCormick opens, equating abusive and predatory behavior with run-of-the-mill romantic mishaps. He goes on: “Indeed, his wondrous solo debut in 2000 was titled Heartbreaker.” Indeed.
The McCormick piece is peppered with quotes from Adams, culled from radio appearances and McCormick’s own interviews with him, on his creative process, drug habits, dating history, use of medical marijuana as a sleep aid, and feelings about the death of one girlfriend. Yet there is not one single quote from any of the women who spoke up about Adams.
Downplaying the predatory nature of Adams, as well as his professional vindictiveness toward his victims, McCormick dubs his behavior as vaguely not-so-great: “a lot to be desired” and “unpleasant.” He acknowledges that while the accusations were “damaging” to Adams—never mind their effect on the lives and artistic output of the women he targeted with harassment—“it’s not exactly another #MeToo scandal on the scale of Harvey Weinstein,” he writes, seemingly asserting that the only abuse deserving of social opprobrium must involve 50-plus accusations including rape.
McCormick seems to be operating in the antiquated mode of reducing the artistic and emotional lives of women to nothingness while elevating those of important men to unassailable. On Twitter, following criticism of his piece, McCormick complained of a “pile on” and claims that “our record collections (& book shelves) are full of creeps,” implicitly arguing for the protection of an abhorrent status quo. And when another Twitter user pointed out the rather damaging evidence regarding Adams targeting a minor, he continued to play defense for the musician.
He then went on to equate criticism of his arguments on social media with the extrajudicial murders of black men at the hands of actual mobs: “I wonder if art of any kind can survive in the lynch mob attitude of social media?” And then, in melodramatic fashion, McCormick complained of the “lack of empathy on social media” and committed to logging off for a time, offering this somewhat silly pablum: “That, to me, is not about men and women. It is about humanity and art. I think all human beings are inherently deeply flawed. We contain within us multitudes. This is one of the things art shows us, & in doing so helps foster empathy for our fellow flawed and complicated beings.”
What McCormick confuses for social-media mobs is actually the voices of those who were long suppressed now being heard. And it is certainly true, however treacly, that humans “contain multitudes.” But it is only now that we're starting to consider the complexity and humanity of women—including female artists subjected to career-ruining vengeance at the hands of abusive men, whose abhorrent actions have previously been excused with trite words on the flawed nature of humans and art.
If nothing else, McCormick ably demonstrates why and how monstrous behavior toward women and the less powerful has been allowed to flourish in the creative arts for so long. How nice that this kind of thinking is finally being left behind.
