Issue #49: He Belongs To Me (On Being a Woman and Loving Bob Dylan)

Time will tell who has fell, and who's been left behind, and it's probably a woman

By Marissa

Two weeks ago, I got to do something I never quite imagined would be possible: see Bob Dylan at a 1,200 cap venue in my town called Brooklyn Bowl, standing room only, close enough to be able to observe the details of his clothes as he stood up and down from the piano. And today I am doing something I also never thought I would do, which is write about Dylan in public.

I suppose that might seem strange: I am a journalist by trade and a lifelong Dylan fan. You’d think, at one point or another, I might have been contracted to write something on Dylan or lobbed out a pitch, but the honest truth is that neither of those things have ever happened. Can I chalk some of this up to the deeply embedded male-centric culture in music writing where only white men of a certain age are seen as the Dylan sages? Of course, though I have read or heard plenty of great things on Dylan over the years from women like Amanda Petrusich and Caryn Rose and Laura Tenschert, so spaced can be carved if you trust your own tools (or make them, rather). But I am self-aware enough to know that the real reason is probably that, while I love Bob Dylan, I sometimes loathe being a Bob Dylan fan, for one reason in particular: I am a woman.

Side note, caveat, whatever you’d like to call it: if you are reading this and your first reaction is to say to yourself something about Bob Dylan not being country and this being a country newsletter, then I don’t really know what to tell you – I listen to country music in part because I listen to Dylan, and Dylan listened to country music. I haven’t even given a thought to what genre he is, because I can’t think of anything less worth my time than that (or anyone’s time). But Dylan listened to Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, so I think we’re good here. Next.

It's never a massive blast being a female fan of a band that the culture at large has decided that men have ownership over, and I don’t think that this is even particularly true about Dylan (and, for the most part, I stopped caring about that long ago). And I am sure plenty of women could write this same story about Springsteen or Petty or Neil Young. But I’ve loved Dylan for as long I can remember, and loathed the experience of loving him about the same. That’s what we’re talking about today. I made this joke on Twitter the other day about the new biopic, and it sums up a lot of this pretty well. Come on – you know this man too. He just wants to tell you what he knows. He’d like to talk at you about the one show you didn’t go to on the tour you missed. He’d like to know your cards.

If you are a female Dylan fan, you always have to prove it. Life as a female music fan, in general really, is one long quiz we never remember signing up for.

“I have been in love with Bob since I was six,” a friend wrote me recently, as we plotted about the Brooklyn Bowl show. “And dudes cannot handle when I know more than them.”

I have rarely related to anything more.

Of course there are exceptions, and if you’re one of them, you probably know it because I have spoken to you about Dylan and not run in the other direction or awkwardly refused to even open my mouth until the subject changed. I know now to have a general policy of not talking to men about Dylan. I guess I am breaking my own rules today. Baby steps, so I can start running.

Rarely in my life have I had a conversation with a man about how Dylan makes them feel, but I have had a lot of conversations with them about the data. I never know how to answer – I don’t really enjoy talking about music facts, and I don’t know if it’s better that I show I know the answer or simply let them talk at me about what they want to know.

And here’s where I tell you the deeper truth: I haven’t aways had a great time being a female Dylan fan around other women, either.

I remember clearly the first time I told a certain group of friends that my favorite artist was Bob Dylan – remember when you are a kid, and people ask you this question? It’s the worst. Anyway. For a while, this was my answer.

“No, no, no” one of them responded. I’ll call her Leah. “You have to like Joni Mitchell instead. We choose Joni, not Bob.”

It took me a long time to break this all down at a much deeper level, but in that moment, they’d decided that because there was a king and queen of folk music, as they saw it, in order to show who you were – if you were a feminist or not, essentially – you had to pick a side. So I did. I picked Dylan. I debated back when they made arguments like this, or when they told me he wasn’t for us. To entertain these theories was to buy into the base belief that Dylan is inherently for men, anyway, in my view. All I knew is that this music spoke to me, lingered with me. And I didn’t listen to enough Joni Mitchell because of it. I’ve spent years working to right that wrong. What a dumb choice to have to make. This is the land that patriarchy built.

But I get it. I joked once that I’d write a book called Men Tell Me Things About Bob Dylan, and maybe the idea is just me rewriting everything I’ve read over the past decades about Dylan, but through a woman’s voice. Better yet, it’s a compilation of anyone who is not a cishet white man talking about Dylan, instead of being talked at. Because he belongs to me, and he belongs to you. I promise. No quiz required.

I’ve been toying lately with the idea of writing about Dylan in public, and this is me trying. This is me starting. I have listened to Margo Price and Cat Power and Emma Swift reclaim Dylan, and in some ways it’s never felt more comfortable to be a woman and a Dylan fan at the same time. I have a network. We commiserate. We share, we talk. I keep a life spent defending and proving my love in my back pocket, no doubt. But I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.