Anna Marie Barkdoll (abark...@mail.sdsu.edu) wrote:
: > Cornflake Girl is based on an Alice Walker book about female genital
: > mutilation...
: > -Kevin-
: > Crow9...@usa.pipeline.com

: Female genital mutilation????  Where did that come from?  Maybe I'm
: missing something *big* in the song...  but I like the interpretation by
: Morty at http://members.aol.com/jenray1/morty.htm (towards the middle of
: the page).

Well, Tori has specifically mentioned Walker's book.  But Cornflake Girl
has more going on than that.

Article time.  : )  Oh, boy!

TORI DEFINES CORNFLAKENICITY:
(Re: journalists who slant)  
TORI: What I remember is spending three hours with someone for an
interview and you've gotten to know them a little bit and talked about
intimate things and tried to be open.  Then you've read what they've
written and you think, God, this is not where I was.  You feel really
invaded.  You think, Well, that is a Cornflake Girl.  People want to know
what a Cornflake Girl is? That journo right there.
                                "Q" 5/94  HIPS.  TITS.  LIPS.  POWER.  

"`Violence  between women isn't really looked at or talked about, how we
treat  each  other,'' Amos mused. `` `Cornflake Girl' is about the shock of
the  betrayal...."
                        VIRGINIAN-PILOT (Norfolk, VA) (VP) - 7/27/94

Take "Cornflake Girl" from her
new Atlantic album Under The Pink.  The song's whimsical mentions of
"cornflake girls" and "raisin girls" may have you thinking Amos is a
veritable fruitloop.  But the song, based on Alice Walker's book
"Possessing the Secret," is anything but ingenious.
     "It talks about how the mothers took their daughters to the butchers
to have their genitalia removed.  Even though it may be instituted by the
patriarchal group in the culture, it's very telling that the monsters were
the ones that took this away from the daughters.  When I just started to
feel what that made me feel like," Amos sighs, "I started to really have
to deal with my illusion of the sisterhood.  I mean, we all likc to think
that only guys can do something likc that, but we can be very, very vicious
and we have to be responsible as women for the fact that we've got a lot of
blame going on.  We blame each other, we blame men, we take very little
responsibility for what we've created."
                        Tori Amos:  Holding Hands With Violence

     "I really started looking into these relationships between women,
and how we treat each other.  Originally 'Cornflake Girl' was influenced
by Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy. The part in it that
really nailed me was where the mothers take the daughters to the butchers
to have their genitalia removed."
     A collective wince fills the room.  Ritual mutilation still exists
in this day and age.
     "Just reading that it's so... forget about the act for a minute and
consider that your mother..." she breathes.
     To think that the person you trust more then anyone in your life
would do that...
     Tori nods.  "You trust them.  And to think that a woman, whose been
mutilated herself, to take you to become mutilated, she's been through it and
this is all in the name of what's best for you."
     We absorb this for a few seconds until Tori continues.  "And it's
not the fathers that take the girls, that's the thing.  You see the lack
of responsibility again. And the deepest betrayal. And again, we're
talking about division. I'm not a shrink, but I do think there are common
truths. And when your mother is saying one thing and yet it is the worst
thing that can be done to your physical body, that has to be a genetic
memory, that had to be passed down. When I read it, I was just raging..."
as she curls her small fists and clutches them by her head. "This hadn't
happened to me, I hadn't had this betrayal by my mother, yet the feeling
of women doing this to women: I was truly in agony! And I understood what
Alice was trying to do in writing it:  it's we're not looking at how we
betray each other and what our responsibility is. We have to look at is
the hurt from that experience.
     "But now it is in insidious ways.  We're still doing it emotionally,
and yet we're not looking at 'wait a minute, why are we hurting each
other?' Competitiveness, and most of the time it's withholding, not being
able to say 'you did a good job,' thus making another woman doubt herself
by what you don't say."

(Later, discussing the women who didn't understand Lorena Bobbit's
revenge on her husband, the interviewer, Sandra, says: "The frightening
thing is there are many women who can't accept what she did as a
deep-rooted rage. She didn't kill him: that would have been so easy, for
her to plunge that knife into his heart. But she took her rage out on
the part of his body that she associated with her pain. Many women can't
handle that principal and that confuses me.")
Tori fixes me with a triumphant look, slowly declaring, "Do you know why,
Sandra? Because they are cornflake girls.  And there you have it! If
anybody asks me what a cornflake girl is, there they are," she
gestures.   "They're wearing their flakes shamelessly.  And again,
there's that sense of betrayal.  It's not the men that bug me, it's the
women who don't understand.  It goes back to they can't look at the rage
inside themselves.  They can't look at the part of them that also has
violated other women."
                                        ARTICLE UNIDENTIFIED            

 It's based on the Alice Walker book. The women that I wrote it about
were people who I thought I knew. Then, all of a sudden, my jaw is on the
floor going, "No, she didn't do this; she didn't say this; she doesn't
mean this." It reminds me of when you talk about reality over and over on
your record. Instead of, "Well, let me see their higher self," it's, "No,
honey, I don't want to see their higher self; I want to see--"

    SB: Who the fuck they really are!

    TA: Yeah! Not potential behavior, but where they are choosing to stand
right now.

                                        Interview  v24 p96(8) August, 1994

Bob:  Want to talk about "Cornflake Girl?"

Tori:  Yeah.  This song... I read _Possessing_the_Secret_of_Joy_, Alice  
Walker.  And the way that the mothers sold the daughters to the butchers
to have their genitaila removed.  I... people are listening to this
going, "Oh my God!  Can't she, like, have a twinkie and get over it?"  
Well... but this stuff isn't... it's not negative to me or sad.  It's a
very safe place to be able to talk about this stuff and also have a
laugh.  And we have a laugh during the record.  There are moments of...
maybe it's a sick little laugh, but, you know, it's a laugh nonetheless.
And it's very freeing.  Again, it's betrayal of women with women.  I
mean, guys can be pretty brutal.  We all can be to each other.  But women
towards women is a pretty ugly thing.  And it's done mostly in secret.  
So "Cornflake" is just the shock of, "She's gone to the other side. This
is getting kind of gross.  And I go it's sleepy time.  This is not really
happening.  You bet your life it is."
                                        from Tea with the Waitress

After I read Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker, about how
mothers sold their daughters to the butchers; that kind of floored me.
One always feels safer when there are good guys and bad ones. But there
are no good guys out there. And it's not as if one sex can make it okay.
Now with Cornflake Girl, the idea was that I always had this sisterhood
and it was just blown to bits. I was betrayed by someone, a girlfriend,
who gave me a pretty shitty deal. Her opinion was, I'm a shit--it depends on
whose table it is that you're having arsenic at. I think the  
disappointment of being betrayed by a woman is way heavier than being
betrayed by a man; we expect it from you guys. It hurts, but I'm not
shocked.
                                The New Review of Records 1994  (UTP Review)

T: I read the Alice Walker book, _Possessing the Secret of Joy_, and
there's umm, in that book, the mothers take the daughters to the butchers
to have their, let's say their genitalia removed.  And even though it's a
patriarchal culture that she's talking about, and that this custom was
put into practice a long, long time ago by the patriarchy, it's the
_mothers_ that take their daughters.  And, what I was singing about was,
it's funny how from generation to generation women really betray each
other in the ladies' room.  There is a whole secret society that happens,
and a lot of times a mother will say "I'm doing this for your good"
whether it was binding the feet in the Eastern cultures or whether it's
marrying your daughter to this gangrene, smelly-breathed, old, decrepit,
rotting scumbag that's 80 years old with dough.  "You know, this is
really the best for you," when the truth is, it's the best for everybody
else.  And, that's an extreme of women's relationships brought to just
like, your girlfriend that you're hanging out with, but betrayal is
betrayal, and I was thrown in to many situations as I was reading that
book where girls, my girls, we were just dissin' each other.  The things
that we were doing, umm, it's like I would have never imagined that we
could be so unsupportive of each other, and it was just happening while I
was reading this book, and "Cornflake Girl" is the betrayal really of girls.
                        from 99X interview 9/5/94. (transc. Jason Watts)

     I've written a song called 'God' [single released in America.
January 1994] about patriarchal reliegion, and how it's just fucked the
whole thing up.  Basically I say to Him, 'You know, you need a babe and
I've got nothing to do Tuesday and Thursday this week!' lt's unacceptable
in how it's affected people.  And it isn't just women who've been
affected.  Men have had to cut out a whole part of themselves too, which
is why we have to deal with all that shit from our boyfriends! Men and
women are going to have to recognise the female energy that we've cut out.
    'Cornflake Girl' [single released in Britian, January 1994] deals
with it too.  There's a book by Alice Walker called Possessing the Secret
of Joy, and it's about mothers taking their daughters to the butcher to
have their genitalia removed.  That's what the song is about too.  It's
like cutting a penis off.  Now if we lined all the boys up and cut their
penises off, I don't think it would be lunch as usual! I think they'd
have something to say about it, and yet the mothers are the ones that
take the daughters to do this! Obviously the whole society is involved,
but when is a generation of women going to rise up, not to fight, not to
war, but to honour themselves and each other?
                        Women, Sex And Rock 'N' Roll - In Their Own Words

Take "Cornflake Girl" from her
new Atlantic album Under The Pink.  The song's whimsical mentions of
"cornflake girls" and "raisin girls" may have you thinking Amos is a
veritable fruitloop.  But the song, based on Alice Walker's book
"Possessing the Secret," is anything but ingenious.
     "It talks about how the mothers took their daughters to the butchers
to have their genitalia removed.  Even though it may be instituted by the
patriarchal group in the culture, it's very telling that the monsters were
the ones that took this away from the daughters.  When I just started to
feel what that made me feel like," Amos sighs, "I started to really have
to deal with my illusion of the sisterhood.  I mean, we all likc to think
that only guys can do something likc that, but we can be very, very vicious
and we have to be responsible as women for the fact that we've got a lot of
blame going on.  We blame each other, we blame men, we take very little
responsibility for what we've created."
                                        Axcess 2:2