“Hurtful”: Why Stevie Nicks hated being a “sex symbol”
The contemporary era is undoubtedly that of the female popstar, with the likes of Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and many others at the forefront of culture. While there is still a fair way to go in combating misogyny and sexism, things have changed dramatically since the days when Stevie Nicks was at her pomp.
It’s widely acknowledged that the Fleetwood Mac vocalist is among the greatest of all time, her extraordinary voice and songwriting ability setting her apart from the majority of her peers. Alongside her then-partner Lindsey Buckingham, she was instrumental in revitalising Fleetwood Mac, a band that had been struggling for direction and limping along during the era of 1974’s largely forgettable Heroes Are Hard to Find. Brimming with the distinctive vocals and potent melodies of Nicks and Buckingham, its follow-up, 1975’s self-titled album, showcased a band that had found its footing, with tracks like Nicks’ composition ‘Rhiannon’ epitomising this transformative period.
Despite Nicks being a pivotal figure in Fleetwood Mac and rock music as a whole, with her era marking the band’s most influential period, her time with them wasn’t solely defined by music. She had to navigate the turmoil surrounding the making of Rumours, which followed her breakup with Buckingham and the separation of John and Christine McVie, all while drugs wreaked havoc on the group. Yet, this was just one of many challenges for someone already waging an exhausting daily battle.
It goes without saying that women have to face hardships that men could never fully comprehend. Still, things were noticeably more problematic in the 1970s and ’80s when Nicks and Fleetwood Mac were at their cultural and commercial zenith. It was an era when boys’ clubs permeated every aspect of society, from democratic institutions such as the police and health services to the music industry, and women fell foul of these crowing groups of men who held all the power and harboured sexist and misogynistic views, often deeming women as nothing more than their organs. It’s grim but true.
The Victorian era might have been years ago, but the idea of ‘separate spheres’ was still very much alive. This is something that one of the period’s biggest stars, Cher, recently touched on in her autobiography when discussing her treatment at the hands of her ex-husband and creative partner, Sonny Bono.
Even the Fleetwood Mac classic ‘Go Your Own Way’ – written by Buckingham about Nicks in the aftermath of their breakup – contains lines that would not pass today. In a song filled with potshots, the line, “Packing up / Shacking up is all you want to do”, took issue with her allegedly promiscuous behaviour. She has always maintained it was simply not true and was just a bitter Buckingham wanting to make her “suffer” for leaving him, which had the intended effect. For that reason, this sore track, painting her as an old-fashioned floozy, makes it the song of the band she hates the most. For the contemporary listener, it also makes for a deeply uncomfortable listen.
This was just symptomatic of gender relations at the time. During an Australian interview with Countdown in 1980, Nicks was asked a question that many female artists would rightly be aggrieved at today: whether she was conscious that she was a “sex symbol” in the rock world. It was a ridiculous query that clearly made her very uncomfortable, but the singer commendably explained why it was “hurtful” to be deemed as such.
She said: “It was somewhat hurtful to me because that isn’t what I wanted. And that was everybody else’s, how they were making it up. And so, my chiffon and things that I wear are beautiful, beautiful things, you know, they come down to here, they’re very diaphanous and stuff, but they were never made to be taken for what a lot of people took them for. So I had to fight along with it, trying to be able to keep doing what I wanted to do without being put in that bracket, you know?”
Stevie Nicks was never just a musician, which is why she is adored so greatly. In the face of many obstacles, she continued battling, providing a shining example for girls wanting to break into music. Without her efforts, it’s likely that all of today’s stars wouldn’t have had such a platform to flourish. She continued building on the foundations laid by the likes of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and Big Mama Thornton before her.
