in the mid eighties, a Boston personality recorded a 45 of To Sir With Love, and I disliked his campy approach, much as I had disliked Sid Viscious’ version of My Way. My reaon in doing this Female album was my belief that gender was a phony socio-cultural construct, that men and women were emotional pretty much the same at heart, and I found myself able to express my own emotions through these female songs. The male/female paradigm was essentially false. Personallu. I knew that my preference for Bergman over Tarantino, Morrissey over The Rolling Stones, and practicing piano over playing baseball had no bearing on my self-identity as a male, although my father would probably argue that claim. Wheen i sing “how do you thnsk someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume,” i am not thinking of those particular objects, but of the teachers who took me from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Philip K Dick.I dont have to masculinlize the lyrics to get this across.
Interesting approach. You captured the tonal quality/phrasing of the song.
The book and song was a huge influence on my young teen self as we had to read the book aloud in English class and we were all worried about those particular feminine passages, so for me, gender matters quite a bit. Thankfully, that particular passage was assigned for private reading. This was as traumatic as going into the 7th grade worried about taking public showers in PE class, which affects girls in a different way than boys. So I’m not sure you can separate the emotion from the physical. But feelings are feelings and we all have them.
We boys had equally traumatic disclosures concerning our sex in the seventh grade and continuing through the next few years. Adolescence and puberty are a trying period for everybody, and although the problems faced by the boys are are certainly different from those facing the girls, the emotional response is comparable.