This song was brought into my life a few years ago by my Mum, a reliable source of excellent music. It’s a blues standard, but my preferred version is Elmore James’ 1962 recording, with his incredible voice and slide guitar.

While It Hurts Me Too is superficially about a man’s love for a woman who loves another (highly unpleasant) man, to me it could as easily be about platonic love as romantic love. I’m bringing my own experiences to bear of course, but to me it sits on the same shelf as Strawberry Switchblade’s Let Her Go or the Dresden Dolls’ Delilah. It’s about watching from the sidelines, furious and helpless as someone you care about gets hurt, over and over again. For me it is inescapably about abuse.

While the song is old and has been re-interpreted time and again, when Elmore James recorded his version he made some lyrical changes to the hit version recorded by Tampa Red in 1949. Comparing the two there’s a subtle shift from a reasonably upbeat song imploring an object of desire to leave a cheating no-gooder, to a heartbreaking lament for the trap in which a loved one has been snared.

For example, Tampa Red sings:

That man you love, darlin’
He don’t want you ’round
Whyn’t ya make love with Tampa, darling?
And let’s jump the town
When things go wrong, so wrong, with you
It hurts me, too

And James sings:

He love another woman, yes, I love you,
But, you love him and stick to him like glue.
When things go wrong, oh, wrong with you
It hurts me too.

What I like best about it is that unlike many other blues standards (and plenty of mainstream pop songs – see Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, The Beatles’ Run For Your Life, Tom Jones’ Delilah), It Hurts Me Too is a song about empathy, not jealousy. The singer claims no ownership over the woman, it’s her suffering that pains him, not the fact he can’t have her. For me, it works as an antidote to the musical tradition of the jealous murder of women by men. I believe it’s a song about love in the truest, broadest sense: what you feel, I feel.

It Hurts Me Too  by Elmore James

You said you was hurtin’, you almost lost your mind.
Now, the man you love, he hurt you all the time.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

Now, he better leave you or you better put him down.
No, I won’t stand to see you pushed around.
But, when things go wrong, oh, wrong with you, It hurts me too.

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The ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ are intricately designed dioramas on a 1 inch to 1 foot scale. Each detailed dollhouse from hell represents a crime scene composite of several real-life court cases. They were created in the 1930s to help train police in the art of forensic investigation by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress who seems to have been more interested in forensic science than ladylike accomplishments and society balls. She used her inheritance to found Harvard’s Department of Legal Medicine, and was awarded the honorary title Captain of the New Hampshire State Police.

In an article for Harvard Magazine, Laura J Miller explores Glessner’s background:

“Fanny” was a sheltered and indulged child, raised in a household that epitomized the aesthetic and moral ideals of nineteenth-century domesticity… Architecturally, the house embodied a cherished conceptual divide of the period: between the distinctly masculine public realm and the private, feminine, interior. Fanny and her brother were educated at home. He went on to Harvard; she married a young attorney, Blewett Lee, at 19. The couple had three children and at first appeared happy, but Glessner Lee eventually received a divorce. Their son attributed the failed marriage partly to her “creative urge coupled with high manual dexterity – the desire to make things – which [Lee] did not share.”

This manual dexterity was extraordinary – Glessner reputedly used sewing needles to knit stockings for some of the figures in her ghoulish scenes – and her attention to detail endlessly impressive: she even attended autopsies to ensure the dolls she was creating were accurate. As Miller explains:

Although the crimes depicted in the Nutshells were composites of actual cases, the character and decoration of the dioramas’ interiors were Glessner Lee’s invention. Many display a tawdry, middle-class décor, or show the marginal spaces society’s disenfranchised might inhabit – seedy rooms, boarding houses – far from the surroundings of her own childhood. She disclosed the dark side of domesticity and its potentially deleterious effects: many victims were women “led astray” from the cocoon-like security of the home – by men, misfortune, or their own unchecked desires.

This is a theme which emerges in Susan Marks’ documentary too. One of the things that makes the Nutshells so disturbing but also so fascinating is the domesticity of the scenes. The flowery curtains, the cans of soup on a kitchen shelf…

Something the film’s contributors repeatedly mention is the way that Glessner Lee was able to document the extreme violence wrought mostly on women, and mostly in their homes: that notorious private, feminine sphere – ‘where they should have been safe’ – without sentimentality or any attempt to turn away from the truth. With their chintzy, bloody record of domestic violence and prostitution, the Nutshells recognised that the home is not always safe, especially for women.

Frances Glessner Lee managed to achieve professional recognition and high esteem for her supremely unladylike interest in death, crime, medicine and the law, and it tickles me to think that one way she did this was by turning such a traditionally feminine and often trivialised skill as doll-making and decoration to such a dark and ultimately noble end.

Amid calls for the video to be banned, it’s interesting to see how much of the outrage centres on the murder, rather than the rape. Granted, the shooting and its aftermath is shown far more explicitly than the hinted-at assault, but commentary such as that of media watchdog Paul Porter:

“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime…”

appears to be divorcing the shooting from its context, concentrating on Rihanna as the agent and perpetrator of a crime, rather than as the victim of one. This wilfully ignores one of the video’s central messages, which is the ease with which these roles can be merged.

Sex and violence, and sexual violence, as themes in art and entertainment are as old as art and entertainment themselves. To be flippant for a second: maybe it’s just the use of the word ‘Mama’, but the chorus of ‘Man Down’ put me in mind of that certain section of Bohemian Rhapsody where the narrator, having just killed a man, ruminates on how ‘life had just begun and now I’ve gone and thrown it all away’. And while I don’t think Freddie Mercury was ever actively described as a positive role model, neither was he castigated for encouraging cold-blooded cod-operatic executions among 1970s youth.

Is Rihanna coming in for particular criticism because of the publicity previously given to her real-life encounters with violence? Those of you following along at home will of course have noticed that she didn’t respond to her experience of assault by shooting Chris Brown on the concourse of Grand Central Station. Surely no one seriously believes ‘Man Down’ to be advocating that the victims of violence engage in violent reprisals – any more than that was true of Thelma & Louise, or Straw Dogs, or, to really stretch the analogy, Death and the Maiden? ‘Man Down’ is, on one level, a revenge fantasy which relies on the dramatic and the sensational to get its message across.

Roger Ebert wrote of Irréversible, whose backwards chronology ‘Man Down’ recalls, that the film’s structure makes it inherently moral – that by presenting the vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications. Might the same apply to ‘Man Down’? Throughout the lyrics and video, the song’s protagonist may contextualise and explain her actions, but she’s not free of regret, she isn’t gleeful or exultant, and she acknowledges her actions as a crime with implications for the rest of her life. She calls herself a ‘criminal’ and reflects that her rapist and victim was ‘somebody’s son’. The narrative doesn’t glorify murder, but it recognises that we live in a world where this kind of fantasy-vigilante approach might often seem more accessible and plausible than relying for justice on the state or the police.

Art and entertainment don’t exist in a vacuum. Art will be asked to justify itself, particularly when it touches on themes that are an everyday reality for many of us and which feed into issues like the space which women, particularly women of colour, have to express themselves, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes versus the impetus, the desire, and perhaps the moral duty, to openly discuss the conditions under which we live.

The complex intersections of race and gender hardly lend themselves to being cleared up in the confines of a blog post, but ‘Man Down’ has sparked plenty of engaged and informative discussion online – at Crunk Feminist, The Beautiful Struggler, and Hello Beautiful for starters. I’m just glad debate is happening and that we have a mainstream artist who doesn’t shy away from instigating it.

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

Kinda like that issue of Time Magazine where they said "the person of the year is everyone", only less cheesy. (photo via Flickr, taken by user Jessica E Sideways. Shared under a Creative Commons license.)

This post, then, is about those people; people who are getting on with the everyday business of making change happen. That ranges from people who work in charities, NGOs, and support organisations; people who lobby and campaign; and people who are acting on the change they’d like to see in their interactions with the people around them.

So here, then, are just some of the many organisations run by awesome people, doing awesome things on a daily basis.

• African Feminist Forum – They run biennial conferences for feminist activists in Africa, and make efforts to include the voices of groups often marginalised within African feminism (and arguably feminist movements in many countries) – commercial sex workers, women with disabilities, and bisexual rights activists.
• Central American Women’s Network – They’re working to improve the political, social and cultural rights of women in Central America through advocacy and campaigning, and raising awareness in the UK and US. Freedoms in Honduras have been a particular issue since the coup d’etat of 2009.
• Women’s Budget Group  – Based in the UK, they’re bringing gender analysis to economic policy, because it’s hard to work for an equal society when the vast impact of government expenditure is skewed in favour of one portion of the population.
• British Insitute of Human Rights – Because human rights for everyone is very much a feminist issue, and the BIHR are one of several fantastic groups supporting that. (See also: Liberty, Amnesty International)
• Race On The Agenda – Too often the history of feminist discussion has been marred by an unfortunate exclusion of the voices from often-marginalised groups such as the Black and Asian communities. ROTA are one of the organisations helping to keep things more inclusive.
• Powerhouse – Women with disabilities are another group that’s been too often pushed to one side or rendered invisible. Run “by and for women with learning disabilities”, Powerhouse bring focus to this.
• The Feminist Library – Libraries are basically the most awesome things ever, and this one carries a huge stock of feminist literature. It should hardly need explaining why this is an entire industrial-sized vat of pure brilliance.
• The Survivor Project – I want to include these folk, because judging from what I’ve read they’re awesome, but unfortunately they seem to be without a website currently, so, er, you’ll have to find them yourselves later. They’re a non-profit working against domestic and sexual violence against anyone, but with a particular focus on trans* and intersex survivors. It’s an issue that’s all too often ignored in the mainstream. (If in the future a website becomes available, hopefully we’ll be able to draw attention to it.)

This list isn’t even remotely exhaustive, and couldn’t possibly hope to be. There are more people out there working to support good ideas than I have any chance of adequately enumerating here. The fact that I can only post a tiny, miniscule example of some of the many groups and organisations involved in this is, honestly, brilliant. It’d be a worrying sign if every beneficial organisation could be summed up in the space of one post. For more comprehensive overviews of the groups out there though, do check the members list for the Women’s Resource Centre and the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. (Of course, that only covers groups based at least partially in the UK. The list gets even longer when we go global.)

And then of course there’s the fact that the above list has only covered organisations, groups, and charities. We’ve yet to even touch on the vast array of feminist bloggers, writers, artists, and others out there making their ideas visible. Or the yet wider group who don’t have a public podium from which to spread their message but are engaged in thinking about, discussing and living with this as a part of their daily world view.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of us, and the collective weight behind this set of ideas is formidable. And that’s seven shades of kickass.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!