God Forbid a Girl Has Hobbies
Multimedia notes towards a comparative theory of girlhood, featuring Alysa Liu and Salome
Before she took to the ice for her free skate performance this week, Alysa Liu told the press: “I don’t need a medal. I just need to be here, and I just need to present, and I need people to see what I do next.”
Naturally, she won gold with a buoyant program set to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite.”
Amid so many programs in recent games that have been set to lackluster film scores the music choice in and of itself was a breath of fresh. But Liu, who only recently returned to figure skating after a two-year break, was equally buoyant. Her goal wasn’t to win, it was to skate on her own terms after burning out on a system that is more built on the performance of gender than the performance of anything else. One tweet I saw making the rounds after her victory summed it up: “Alysa Liu really just IDGAF’d her way to an Olympic medal. An inspiration.” Patricia Wallinga, Bluesky’s favorite opera composer, drove the nail further into the head when she wrote that Liu did each of the required technical components as “a little flourish tossed in while she rollerskates along the lake with a boombox nearby.”
This, in and of itself, feels like a rebuke to what Ellyn Kestnbaum describes in Culture on Ice as “presenting the abstract beauty of the skater’s body line and musical expression as a means of demonstrating artistry”—and the end-goal of this approach being the emphasis on figure skating as a “feminine” art. (This is precisely why so many skaters have used Bizet’s Carmen for their programs, and why so many of those programs have failed.) For her comeback, Liu—whose previous programs have followed this framework—didn’t take the bait. Rather than playing to body lines, shapes, and abstract beauty, her programs in Milan emphasized effortless athletic execution, underscored by a singular style that refused to comport to skating’s classical definitions or standards.
“What is it like to hold a blade in your hand, knowing it could cut you or propel you forward, and trust yourself to wield it wisely? What is it like to say you’re living from a place of joy and mean it?” asks Meredith Constant in a recent Substack post, titled “Alysa Liu’s Free Skate Radicalized Me.” Liu, Constant adds, “didn’t just throw out the playbook on how to build a champion female figure skater; she redefined girlhood. Womanhood.”
At the risk of dropping into youth pastor voice, the links between Liu and our current, slightly-transgressive notions of girlhood made me think of another figure who was equally radical in her approach to getting what she wanted. Her victory in the end was described by conductor Norman Del Mar as “a horrible display of hysterical triumph,” which could very well have been the same words used on Fox News in response to Liu’s (iconic and delightful) statement as she was leaving the ice.
Subversion is baked into Strauss’s opera, stretching into its source text from Oscar Wilde (and Wilde’s own inspiration from Gustave Flaubert’s “Herodias”). A colleague remarked recently that Salome, for all of the characters who remark on the heroine’s looks, is really an opera about the female gaze. Her descriptions of Jochanaan—his body as a column of ivory, a garden of doves and lilies, and a tower of silver—are likely the same things millions of teenage girls have written about their high-school crushes in marbled composition books and on old LiveJournal blogs.
I’m likewise very much persuaded by director Lydia Steier, who describes visions of Salome as a little girl, helpless and abused, as “spectacularly uninteresting,” adding: “She is strong, she is decisive, and she does all of this very much on purpose.” For Steier, Salome’s dance and her requested payment therefor are her means of bringing down the corruption of her mother’s and stepfather’s dynasty. Depending on who you believe, the same could come to pass in the wake of Liu’s win.
Writing about Salome’s final, female gaze-y monologue, Craig Ayrey parallels Steier’s argument by dismissing the argument that Strauss’s work on the whole is a “study in obsession” or that the heroine is the apex of the opera’s perverse undertones. That may be how Herod, and even Jochanaan, view her. But, Ayrey points out, “Salome is the only character in the drama who attempts to fully engage with Jochanaan,” ready to accept him first as a man and then possibly even as a prophet. Jochanaan dismisses her for her relationship to Herodias, but “unconventionally, even existentially, Salome demands to be known for herself.” It’s not hard to imagine her singing to Jochanaan’s severed head: “Right from the start, you tore me apart. You took the best part of my heart.”
The choreography of Liu’s “MacArthur Park” mirrors the fluidity of that final scene, one where Strauss abandons traditional beauty for organic expression. It didn’t take me long to cut the two pieces of media together in a way that worked musically while also underscoring the full spectrum of girlhood on display: youthful IDGAF-isms tempered with singular obsession, a tension between societal performance and self-expression, and the familiar balancing act between sacred and profane.
The final line of Salome comes when Herod says: “Kill that woman!” The stage directions tell us that this order is taken out, but what if we never get to that part onstage? What if we just end with Salome triple-lutzing again and again into the mystery of love before tipping over in to the mystery of death?
That’s what I’m fucking talking about.