There is a new Lizzo song, GRRRLS. The lyrics describes a situation where Lizzo and her girlfriends are about to beat up a guy and cut off his penis (“ima go Lorena Bobbitt on him, so he never fuck again/no-oh, now you can’t fuck again, bro”). As far as I can tell, there’s nothing else in the song but…beat up a guy and cut off his penis.

What else might we expect to see in a song like this? There could be context, like part of the song is a story that leads up to us believing that this guy deserves to get hurt. Maybe he’s a serial killer; maybe he’s a war criminal who conducted horrible experiments on war prisoners. But there’s nothing like that; no story. In fact, it’s not clear that Lizzo has a particular guy in mind at all; as far as we can tell, any guy could be an acceptable victim.

Ok…so there could at least be some sort of justification volunteered for doing this to (what may be) a random guy, like “all guys are assholes.” But there isn’t even that…like many of the youtube questionnaire girls, Lizzo and her friends are going to do this simply because they feel like it.

Finally…well, there could be ANYTHING ELSE in this song. Like, they’re having a crazy night, doing all kinds of crazy stuff, including mutilating a random guy. Literally as far as I can tell nothing else happens in the song other than “my friends and I are going to beat up a guy and cut his penis off.”

While that IS all the plot in the song, it isn’t actually all the content. The refrain is:

’cause that’s my girl, we codependent/if she with it, then I’m with it/yeah we tussle, mind your business/zu zu zu zu zu su lu/that’s my girl, we CEOs/and dancin’ like a CE-ho/we about to throw them bows/let’s fuck it up

This part isn’t a description of wanting to beat up the guy; it’s a description of a bond of sisterhood. So it seems possible that the song is saying a way to express your sisterhood is to sexually mutilate a random guy.

She could be right, at least in a way; I feel like I’ve heard interviews with members of white supremacist groups and so forth, saying that their lives lacked brotherhood or fatherhood, and that the extremist/violent group was the only presence in their lives that offered this. Presumably, groups of this sort hope that horrible acts their members commit together will bond them to each other and to the vision and cause of the group.

(I know I don’t cite anything in the above paragraph; I don’t think that that’s controversial stuff, but if anyone wants me to flesh that out, just send me a note and I’ll add to it).

SO Lizzo got in trouble for this song; not because of the mga, but because she used the word “spaz.” She issued an apology for this, as well as a new version of the song with that word taken out.

This might be the best example of mga meta-invisibility I’ve seen. It’s possible things will change in the next few days, but right now if you do google searches for “Lizzo GRRRLS,” you’re going to come across many mentions of the “spaz” controversy and her response, but nothing or very little about cutting off a man’s penis. I found one comment in a reddit thread, and one video by a conservative commentator…that’s it. But lots about the spaz thing.

In media, the best examples of what I’m calling meta-invisibility are places where sexual assault, graphic violence, and other serious, universal triggers do not belong. So mga in the John Wick movies isn’t meta-invisibility; mga in disney is. How do you have a children’s movie with violent sexual assault? But…mga is conceptually invisible to us. I bet many people involved in the making of, say, disney movies had reservations about including mga, but said nothing, because they literally couldn’t, they didn’t have the language or concepts to do so, and they knew that some of the people around them simply couldn’t see it for what it was. That’s a very, very powerful kind of invisibility.

So this woman writes a song about her and her girlfriends wanting to beat up and mutilate a random guy. Almost no one seems to respond to this. To the entire way of thinking that generated this song, as well as to the entire internet apparently, the mga is meta-invisible. Meta-invisible, not normal-invisible, I’m sure; she put the castration there for a reason, people hear that part, they react to that part, mga victims I’m sure are triggered by it, perhaps her target audience feels empowered by it. But they have no way of talking about it, because it occupies no place in their dialogues, arguments, philosophies. It’s conceptually invisible. So much so that there’s a thoughtful and complete apology for SOMETHING ELSE related to the song, something much more trivial than mga (I’m not saying name calling is inherently trivial, but it is trivial when measured against sexual assault and dismemberment).

This part is what makes it classic meta-invisibility. The apology for “spaz” tells us this is song is supposed to exist in a safe space. But the horror of cutting off a man’s penis, just because you feel like it, can’t be talked about in this particular safe space.

In her apology, she says “As an influential artist I’m dedicated to being a part of the change I’ve been waiting to see in the world.” She also says “I understand the power words can have.” Of course, she’s using this in the context of apologizing as sincerely as she can for the “spaz” thing, but they are chilling statements in the context of the rest of this song.

If we take those two statements of hers to be true, then she not only stands behind the basic content of this song, assaulting and castrating men, but that this is part of the change she wants to see in the world. She is using the power of her words, a power she understands, to enact that change.

What is going on here? Does Lizzo want women to go out and castrate men? If not, is she completely deaf to herself, to this song, to her response to the “spaz” criticism? I have a feeling the answer is somewhere in the middle. Were I to guess, her attitude about castrating men is some under-analyzed combination of “women are never violent, and so all this song is doing is sticking it to the patriarchy” and “yeah maybe it would be good for men to get hurt for a change.” So what about the irony between the “spaz” apology and retraction and the song about mutilating men? I suspect that Lizzo does actually understand words and subtle kinds of aggression and harm quite well, and understands the meta-invisibility of mga to an extent. A real way to stick it to victims of mga is to pretend not even to understand what their problem is. What better way to do THAT than to effusively apologize to someone else, especially for something much more trivial? So in the context of a song about cutting a man’s penis off, she apologizes for the word “spaz,” subtly showing just how unimportant mga is as a topic.

(For the record, I wouldn’t be surprised if, when pushed, she tries to say that the generic male victim in the song is actually more specific, like that he’s a bad guy, or a specific bad person she has in mind, or he is all rapists or whatever. But that’s just not in the song, and I’m guessing that that is intentional. Again, she does say that she understands the power of words).

I’m going to shift gears for a moment and look at the word “spaz.” The criticism she received was that this is an ableist slur, targeting people who in one way or another have visibly limited or imperfect control of body parts or body movements. That seems totally plausible to me and not particularly interesting for our purposes…but if you do a google search on this word, you see that it means other things, and it seems that it isn’t primarily a slur that targets people with disabilities.

Here are the first things I found. First, google offers this:

short for spastic. lose physical or emotional control

Then from urbandictionary.com:

one who is inept; klutz

one who has a proclivity for wild, random outburst of activity

“he is a total and utter spaz.” “he threw a spaz and dropped everything.” “when he heard his hamster died he, like, totally spazzed out.”

from wiktionary:

a stupid or incompetent person. a hyperactive person. a tantrum, a fit

So these are all attacks that essentially imply a disability for people who are not actually disabled, but…inept, hyperactive, etc. I agree with the assertion that this, by implication, is an insult to people who actually have disabilities that might evoke the word “spaz,” and I have no argument with them complaining about the use of this word (at least in a general and theoretical sense; for the purposes of my entire blog I’m avoiding larger political questions related to free speech and so forth). Rather, I’m pointing out that people who regularly get called “spaz” are very likely among the victims I write about in this blog, boys who are easy targets for bullies, boys who don’t fit in, boys you have some flimsy excuse to hurt, boys you know no one will stand up for, boys you know will get laughed at when you hurt them.

So, while Lizzo retracts that word in deference to the disabled community, she encourages mga in the most flagrant way I can imagine; actual castration, to any guy, doesn’t matter who, because you feel like it. So who will this hurt? Does this “strike a blow against the patriarchy?” The girls in the youtube questionnaire, and the girls and women who will be inspired by Lizzo’s song, aren’t targeting the quarterback, the CEO, the prom king, the rich popular guy (not that any of that would be IN ANY WAY ok). As bullies do, they’re targeting boys and men they can get away with targeting. Many of these are exactly the boys who already get called “spaz.”

Which do you think those boys would prefer Lizzo apologize for and retract…the word “spaz,” or the mga she is encouraging?