BONUS: Tori Amos Reads "Resistance'"

For our weekly bonus episode, provided exclusively for our Patreon supporters at the Truth Teller level and higher, we're sharing this week's bonus with all Gaslit Nation listeners to celebrate Tori Amos's new powerful book Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage. In this excerpt from Resistance, Tori explains the harrowing inspiration behind her classic song “Cornflake Girl.”

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Andrea Chalupa:

Hi, it’s Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation. My co-host Sarah Kendzior and I read the new memoir by Tori Amos, “Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change and Courage”. We are both incredibly inspired by this book. “Resistance” has important insights on the creative process and why–as we’re always saying on Gaslit Nation–art matters, especially in times of crisis. Check out our interview with Tori, published on May 19.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt with our listeners from her chapter on the inspiration behind her classic song, “Cornflake Girl”, which concludes with Tori reading the lyrics. This excerpt of “Resistance” is provided to us courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio and read by Tori Amos.

{transition music}

Tori Amos:

Chapter 8. A drum and bass groove greeted me and Karen Binns as we walked down the street in 1993, a book under my arm. She and I were in deep discussion about how women could be abusive to each other and the many different ways that can play out. I didn’t know it, but in that very moment a song was being born–a song that has sparked varied interpretations by its listeners in the past 27 years.

Once a song leaves my lair, it will form relationships that I have no control over and really should not want to have control over. But the fact is, each song does have a genesis. Do I consciously know every aspect of the pollination process that creates a song? No.

Sometimes, it’s a listener who points out what they have learned about a song. They may have had an experience that aligns with a song’s inner secrets, secrets that may be hiding in the shadows that will take me years to discover, or will take a listener years to share their interpretation with me.

As I’ve said for over 30 years now, I am only a co-creator of the songs. This is a working collaboration that has been witnessed in action by a few of those I have made records with. The muses in the songs themselves offer melodies, chords, words and tones that allude to what the sound must be. Just because I don’t fully understand a tone does not mean I throw it away and impose my own. A tone may lead me to a discovery of a word or a phrase that reflects the tone originally sent by the muses. This is why I refer to songwriters as “sonic hunters”. Tracking down what a song wants to be requires being open to converging narratives. “Cornflake Girl” is the song that was forming herself as I walked down that street with Karen all those years ago.

Karen had allowed me into her language world in 1991. We had been speaking in this language for a couple of years. Our way of communicating consisted of renaming a word with it’s reference. For example, we would refer to serial saboteurs as “Cornflake Girls”. Another important element of our conversation about why and how women betray each other was the groove underscoring our chat. The swing-feel blaring out of a shop that day is known as a shuffle groove. I found it really difficult not to sway back and forth to this rhythm. So, as I was physically swaying to this bass and drum track, Karen asked me about the book under my arm. It was “Possessing The Secret of Joy” by Alice Walker, and it opened up the conversation to a practice with which I had been unfamiliar. It is now widely known as FGM, or female genital mutilation.

How women behave toward each other within the global culture of patriarchy is the discussion that the song “Cornflake Girl” wanted to take part in.

27 years from the inception of “Cornflake Girl”, listeners continue to share with me their insights about the song. Someone confided that her mother tried to justify her controlling behavior toward her daughter by saying, “I’m only doing this because I love you.” Over the years, hundreds of letters and conversations have taught me the severity of the words “I’m only doing this.” In one letter, “doing this” was threatening to cut off communication and support unless the daughter agreed to what the mother wanted her to do.

In other laters, the context was a severed friendship, possibly poisoned by outside influences. One woman wrote to tell me that a woman she cared for dearly was becoming more and more isolated and controlled by someone else. In this instance, the letter writer was having a difficult time accepting that the isolated woman was defending the behavior of the manipulator.

The details of each story have varied over the years, but the feeling of deep betrayal is consistent with most interpretations of “Cornflake Girl”. “Doing this” can take on sinister implications. “I’m only doing this to save you from yourself.” This story was told to me by someone who knew the two people involved and who asked “when are the words ‘tough love’ an excuse for abuse?”. At the center of the story was a mother and a daughter. The mother identified as a Christian. She believed that sex before marriage was a sin. The daughter’s religious beliefs were not specified. Her grades were very good and she was very involved in her high school. Apparently, she had gotten birth control believing it was the responsible thing to do. When her mother discovered the birth control hidden away somewhere, she tampered with it without the daughter knowing. The mother felt the daughter had to pay for her sin and wear her shame.

The daughter became pregnant and was forced to give birth. The question is still valid. When is the justification of “tough love” actually just an excuse for abuse?

A song can help open my eyes to the many emotions surrounding a complex issue. When I enter Cornflake Girl as an energy, she demands that we talk about what women perpetrate on each other, and what women withhold from each other. Cornflake Girl allows people into her frequency by being quite welcoming. I found her that way at first, anyway.

The more I was bearing witness through all kinds of scenarios to women on women violence–and in the case of FGM we have to talk about women on girl violence–the more I would burst out and say “this is not really happening” and the answer I kept getting back was “you bet your life it is”.

FGM–female genital mutilation–is described by the World Health Organization as “procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genital organs for non-medical reasons”. This is child abuse on a grand scale. Most girls affected by this harmful practice are cut between infancy and fifteen years of age. The numbers are overwhelming. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 200 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM. More recent data suggests that 68 million girls will be cut between 2015 and 2030. It’s estimated that 3.9 million girls were cut in 2015 alone. This number will increase to around 4.6 million a year if this abuse is not addressed globally.

The numbers continue to shock, revealing how many girls and women are at risk throughout the world, including in the United States and the United Kingdom. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 500,000 women and girls living in the United States are either at risk for or have undergone FGM.

There are subjects songwriters take on because the subject haunts them. My view of this particular women’s issue was pried open by Alice Walker’s words. Years later, I am still learning about the complexity surrounding this harrowing practice.

At first, I could not understand how someone could say they loved a young girl and then take her to a cutter who might use a razor blade, a scalpel, scissors, a knife, or a piece of glass to cut out a portion of or all of the girl’s genitals. As I’ve been exposed to this practice, and am still understanding more each day, it has become essential for me not to view it only as part of certain cultural communities. This is global gender inequality.

If we do not get involved, the numbers of victims of FGM are set to rise. With that in mind, I began recently to research the origins of this violent practice, and how we as women became complicit in it. Women and men are carrying on the tradition and taking their daughters to have their genitals cut, and health care officials, teachers, judges and lawyers are also perpetuating this violence. Even if by turning and looking the other way, many people are culpable.

We have to talk about this because it’s not going away and no one in the United States has been convicted of the practice. Those involved must be held accountable. Are US state lines being crossed to take girls to a medical care professional who is getting paid handsomely to violently abuse them?

FGM pre-dates the rise of Christianity and Islam and has been practiced all over the world, so it is not the provence of a single religion. As the United Nations Population Fund states on its website, unfpa.org, “In Western Europe and the United States, clitorodectomy was described to be practiced so as to treat perceived ailments like hysteria, epilepsy, mental disorders, masturbation, nymphomania, and melancholia in the 1950’s”.

The information of unfpa.org is useful to those of use trying to understand the severity of and the complex psychological issues attached to this life-changing procedure. For families to stop cutting girls, they will need support from the wider community. Because FGM is a prerequisite for marriage in many communities, economic necessity justifies the practice to many parents. The narrative has also been cleverly controlled by the patriarchy. One unbelievable myth warns that an uncut clitoris will grow to the size of a penis–heaven forbid.

The album that “Cornflake Girl” is on was originally entitled “God with a big G” but that got shot down by someone at the label, so then the muses guided me to the more expansive album title, “Under The Pink”. This reference was intended to speak to most women who have a pink to flesh-colored G-spot associated with their internal anatomy.

Lies claiming that FGM will enhance fertility or ensure child survival are passed down through the generations. According to the United Nations Population Fund, many people believe that a woman’s sexuality is “insatiable if parts of the genitalia, especially the clitoris, are not removed”. FGM is thought to ensure virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward, and to increase male sexual pleasure. The patriarchy was able to get some women to agree that the external female genitalia are considered dirty and ugle and should be removed to promote hygiene and aesthetic appeal.

We can all become indoctrinated into a narrative that is harmful, a narrative that can have deadly consequences, a narrative that can scar a person for the rest of her life–physically and psychologically scar a person for the rest of her life.

First and foremost, we have to have compassion and understanding for the women who have been cut as girls and, who as women, still believe that in order to protect their daughters, they, too, must be cut. But the reality is that FGM is one of the worst forms of sexual assault.

FGM is child abuse of the worst kind. In response to the first conviction in the United Kingdom of a mother committing FGM on her three-year-old daughter, a woman came forward to say that she could’ve easily been that mother, that she would’ve practiced FGM and cut her daughter had a healthcare professional not explained the harmful effects her beloved girl child would suffer. The woman had been cut herself as a girl and thought, “well, this was done to my grandmother, and then done to my mother, and then done to me, so if I don’t continue the cultural tradition, I will have failed them all, including my daughter”.

The psychological torment of this practice is heartbreaking, truly heartbreaking. In many cases, as it is linked to a right of passage, the older women in the room who may take part in the cutting by spreading the girl’s legs and holding them down, defended as tradition. The result of this practice is for the girl to have no sexual desire. The result of continuing the practice of FGM is to subjugate women physically and psychologically. The result of all of this is the global control of a gender.

Some of the defenders of the practice of FGM, usually downplaying it by calling it “circumcision”, are very powerful religious leaders. Some religious scholars, however, have said that FGM is not in the holy books and that religious leaders are only voicing their opinion. I encourage people to listen to survivors of FGM tell their stories. The telling of their stories is not just about educating us and informing us about this harmful practice. These women-survivors are allowing us to feel the depth of their pain, not only physical, but the additional heartache of trust dying in the harsh light of such a betrayal. These women are sharing their wounds, physical and emotional, and showing us how they have transformed and transmuted these wounds. These women are on a path of empowerment and healing through their activism. They all say in their own way, “We were cut for men”.

FGM activists are doing everything they can to make sure this abusive practice doesn’t go underground. Survivors devoted to change are speaking out about what has been a closely guarded secret. Listening to the women describe being terrified as they are held down, usually by people they have trusted, has had a searing impact on me. Each story is so deeply personal, with one woman intently detailing how the cutter had sawed away at her flesh which the cutter then flew across the room. She was talking about her clitoris being sawed off, piece by piece, as she was screaming in pain, and then voicing her realization that this portion of herself had been denied her, discarded, thrown away, and was gone, forever.

The journey from abuse to empowerment of Khadija Gbla, Dr. Isa Tutore, Jaha Dukureh, Halimatu Sisay, Leyla Hussein, Robi Samweli, Nimco Ali, and many more, each telling her story, IS the testament of turning sexual assault and child abuse into powerful, meaningful, effective global activism.

“Cornflake Girl”

Never was a cornflake girl

Thought that was a good solution

Hangin’ with the raisin girls

She’s gone to the other side, given us a “Yo, heave ho”

Things are getting kind of gross

And I go at sleepy time

This is not really happening

You bet your life it is

You bet your life it is. Honey, you bet your life.

It’s a peel out the watchword

Just peel out the watchword

She knows what’s going on

Seems we’ve got a cheaper feel now all the sweeteez are gone

Gone to the other side with my encyclopedia

They must have paid her a nice price

She’s puttin’ on her string bean love

This is not really happening

You bet your life it is

Rabbit, where’d you put the keys, girl?

Rabbit, where’d you put the keys?

Where’d you put the keys, girl?

And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much

Thinks he knows so much

And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows

Thinks he knows so much

I know, you know, I know it’s not easy

I know you know

I know it’s not easy

Rabbit, where’d you put the keysm girl?

Andrea ChalupaMay 20, 2020