What kind of love have you got
You should be home, but you’re not
A room full of noise, and dangerous boys
still makes you thirsty and hot
Long before any of us wandered on to Tumblr, The Eagles were out there in the trenches, bringing Southern California-style misogyny to the masses. Don Henley and Glenn Frey didn’t exactly invent slut-shaming, but they damned near perfected it over the course of the 1970s.
Seriously, in these dudes’ inner worlds, every woman was a femme fatale or tainted meat, ready to wreck a man’s dreams from the inside out. Which actually sounds bad-ass and empowering when I put it like that, but that’s never how they execute the material. The Eagles’ version of a Bad Grrl is always sad on the inside, secure in the knowledge that she’s a moral cadaver, rotting in the damp moonlight of masculine disdain. The general attitude seems to be: “women would be great, if they weren’t all such whores.”
Little did they realize that the great ones are the whores. With The Eagles series of smash-hit temper tantrums, they basically wasted the ’70s, which, for the record, was unequivocally the greatest decade for loose women and the despicable men who justify their existences. There was no AIDS, man. No internet to help them track you down. No DNA tests to prove you’re their babies-daddy, even if the bitches did find you. If you ever wanted to experience the raw thrill of taking a sexually-aware woman in her nascence, using her up in a drug-fueled orgy of eroticized contempt, and then disposing of her on a park bench at 4AM, I’m thinking sometime around 1974 had to be the perfect time to be alive with an erection. And yet here’s Don Henley, whining like a bitch about the sea of emotionally-stunted nymphomaniacs he was dog-paddling his way through. Gimme a break.
Spoiled old white guys are the fucking worst.
Victim of love, I see a broken heart
You got your stories to tell
Victim of love, it’s such an easy part
and you know how to play it so well