Is Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ sexist?
The short answer is no. It’s almost the antithesis of sexism. It plays with male self-pitying norms so much that it is almost post-sexist, a satire of the patriarchal break-up songs that went before it. However, it is easy to see why some think the opposite at first glance. That is the triumph of Bob Dylan and how he pushed music onto a new literary height—ensuring, for the first time, first glances wouldn’t suffice. Lyrically speaking, ‘Just Like a Woman’ is, in fact, one of his finest progressive triumphs.
Paul Simon once said, “With Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun at the same time.” With ‘Just Like a Woman’, he paints himself as a victim but then reveals – like the consummate unreliable narrator – that the truth is he is, in fact, the wrongdoer and the resultant acrimony has nothing to do with the supposed ways of womanhood.
“Nobody feels any pain,” he sings in a defiant fashion. Then, in the very next line, he reveals the lie of the first: “Tonight as I stand inside the rain.” He’s not merely caught in a storm here, if he was, then there’s room enough for the syllables of “outside in the rain” within the melody. But that’s not the case, the rain we’re dealing with is a downcast disposition—the weepy movie character roving the wet streets in distress. Dylan feels plenty of pain, he’s just boyishly pretending otherwise.
With this one deft touch, Dylan informs those paying close attention that this here singer is a liar and he’s actually riddled with so much pain at present that it’s bordering on delirious agony. That sets the stall up for the rest of the story. He’s singing from the perspective of a scorned and silly little boy—a disposition that tragically few seem to grow out of in matters of the heart.
From then on, when the singer points the finger at his fairweather former lover we are able to infer that his attack is loaded with bitterness rather than truth. We are dealing with a self-pitying man who has been – to use the parlance of our times – triggered by a break-up and is now going on the offensive. However, seeing as though it is his former lover, he can’t go in too hard, or that would somehow implicate him, so he says that she was, essentially, a great catch, it’s just that she got away. This wasn’t due to his own shortcomings or wayward ways but because she was cursed by the fickle flaws of the opposite sex, unlike his strong, painless male constitution.
Then, after rattling off her faults, he covertly declares that his sexist effrontery is, indeed, a mask that serves to hide his own issues, like Tony Soprano getting defensive on the therapist’s couch. “Ain’t it clear that I just can’t fit,” he eventually confesses in the glim hope that all the sullying he has said beforehand muddies his own heartache, and he can still cling to his Brando-like, drenched and defiant manhood.
But then, in one beautifully poetic moment, he is forced to admit his own vulnerability. “But when we meet again, introduced as friends / Please don’t let on that you knew me when, I was hungry and it was your world,” he epically writes—quick as flash, returning to his attack as though to whisk that plea for mercy out of sight and mind in a renewed wail of derision. He would’ve whispered or, better still, texted the previous verse if he could’ve.
It is the narrator’s call for a public truce that lets him come out on top in the eyes of society. Without getting too salacious, we could even garner that this might be about Joan Baez and how she was the Queen of Folk before he came along and she welcomed him into her throng as King rather than the other way around. He was, indeed, “hungry”, and it was, indeed, “her world”. But to ignore the fact that Dylan rightfully reconciled this, is to ignore the fact he admits it in song.
This is all the more prescient in this day and age when frequently women are exposed to toxic public behaviour from men followed by a covert private confession this is actually a face-saving way of sheltering their own vulnerability. In other words a cowardly text along the lines of: ‘I’m being nasty because I’m hurt babe; it’s a mark of love, and you should be proud, besides please don’t do the same to me because I’m sensitive’.
Even in 1966, long before social media heightened this dangerous misogynistic behaviour, Dylan was pointing out the nettlesome dynamic of this through his troubled narrator. You don’t want to be Dylan in this song—he’s not the hero, he’s the fool catching a cold and kicking a can around.
To wrap things up, he sings the last line with a softness that was absent in his previous scathing verses, a whimpering last word. He’s said his break-up piece, very little has been reconciled, and now he is moving on unscathed, the pain having passed through a toxic outburst. The perpetrator is now off scot-free, hoping that when they meet as friends, she sticks to his story rather than sticking the boot in.
And just like that, Dylan shows that even in break-ups, the books are cooked toward the crooked cocks of this world.
It is far from a flaw that this doesn’t always immediately come across in the song, and people might catch the wrong drift, that is the beauty of the songwriting here: it has a depth that yearns to be explored. Hell, you cliched on this over half a century after the song was written and read to this point because we’re still mulling it over—that’s the brilliance of great writing. It’s still serving an important lesson to the world at a time when it is unfortunately more pertinent than ever. He lays out the wicked machinations of manhood that still exist to this day under five charming, irony-laden minutes.
A thousand simple pop songs before it were outrageously sexist, and they were taken with a pinch. Dylan subverted that; writing a song that is ostensibly sexist not to be taken with a pinch of salt so that when the depth is pried at, the mechanisms of misogyny are revealed, using irony to expose a greater sense of truth in a truly entertaining fashion. Hopefully, we can reverse-engineer these mechanisms and quash this damn crooked system where male violence is only getting worse.
As Lou Reed decreed of Dylan’s illuminating work: “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song I thought.” Adding: “Now, other than Dylan, there’s not much there.” Like a book, with Dylan you not only have great lines, but a lot of reading between them to relish, too.
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