Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like A Woman’: A misogynistic nightmare or Andy Warhol take-down?
It’s hard to say anything about ‘Just Like A Woman’ with any surety. Depending on who you talk to, it was either written about Joan Baez or Edie Sedgwick, though many claim Bob Dylan didn’t meet the ill-fated Warholian starlet until much later. Some have claimed it was written on Thanksgiving Day, 1965; others that the lyrics were improvised during the Nashville sessions for Blonde on Blonde. Whatever the story, Dylan’s portrait of a woman breaking “just like a little girl” has made him countless enemies over the years, with several critics accusing the singer-songwriter of overt misogyny.
That anger is understandable. Dylan knew how to write a put-down, and ‘Just Like A Woman’ is really quite cruel. The song’s critics tend to focus on its refrain, as Dylan sings lyrics such as “She takes just like a woman/ Yes, she does, she makes love just like a woman/ Yes, she does, and she aches just like a woman/ But she breaks just like a little girl” – but the lines in between are far nastier. In each verse, Dylan finds new ways of degrading his female subject, reducing her to a catalogue of sexist tropes – hysteria, greed and vanity being his favourites. “Nobody has to guess that baby can’t be blessed,” he sings, “’til she finally sees that she’s like all the rest/ with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls.”
But it would be foolish to take those lyrics at face value. As is so often the case with Dylan’s songs, it’s not what he’s singing but how he’s singing it, and in ‘Just Like A Woman’, there’s a certain irony in Dylan’s voice, which is perhaps why so many think he was deliberately toying with sexist tropes to interrogate the view of women as disposable objects. Of course, such a reading relies on Sedgwick being the subject of the song and Warhol, not Dylan, being the speaker.
Edie Sedgwick starred in several of Warhol’s films. He told her he was going to make her a star but quickly lost interest and moved on to someone else, just as he had done with Nico. According to Jonathan Taplin: “Dylan liked Edie because she was one of the few people who could stand up against [Warhol’s] weird little numbers: she was much stronger than the sycophants who were hanging around him at the time.”
Warhol, he wasn’t so fond of. In fact, he famously slammed the artist in ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. If we view ‘Just Like A Woman’ not as a first-person attack on Sedgewick but as an example of Dylan utilising free-indirect discourse to capture Warhol’s attitude towards his female stars, that divisive chorus suddenly seems much more sympathetic, with Dylan giving emotional complexity to a person Warhol viewed as expendable. “She aches,” Dylan reminds us. “Yes, she does.”
None of this is to say Dylan isn’t capable of sexism – he once criticised female singers for “whoring themselves” on stage during an interview with Rolling Stone. It’s just we often assume songwriters can only ever write about subjects from a first-person perspective when they’re more than capable of being omniscient, of inhabiting minds that are not their own and adopting perspectives that they don’t necessarily agree with. After all, what is art if not a place where we can be different people?
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