Date: Sat, 16 Apr 94 14:48:52 EDT From: SCOHN1@vaxc.hofstra.edu Subject: Hot Press Interview - part 2 Here is part two of the Hot Press interview. Tori Amos, like that other sex symbol Eartha Kitt, is a woman who admits that she herself doesn't get much pleasure from her own body, sexually. In Tori's case this is her response to being raped when she was 22, a trauma she still is trying to deal with on a daily basis. She reveals that her problems in this area were compounded over the past year when she was diagnosed as having cervical cancer. "I had a procedure done and, for a while, I thought it had spread further than it had," she says. "But it wasn't malignant it was benign, meaning that the cancer was stopped. Yet what also happened to me in New Mexico, where I went to write, and record, this album, was that at one point I was spraying Pledge polish in a cupboard and I inhaled it and I got a lung infection which meant I couldn't speak, or sing, for three weeks. And I really thought my voice was damaged forever and had to do voice lessons on the phone, with this voice teacher to try and get the natural corisone back on the cords. "I was thinking 'what if I never sing again?' Then I'd say "if I can't sing what's the point in being alive, is this person worth anything at all?" And there were moments where the only answer to that question was 'no'. Then i'd give in to the self-pity that comes out in the song PGY, and in the lyric "They say you were something in those formative years". Did Tori Amos really believe that if she is unable to sing, or play the piano, there is no point in being alive? "At one point I really did,Joe. And part of it was "do I want that girl around if she can't express herself through music?" Is she worth anything at all? You know what the song SATY is about. You can see the irony, right? There I was, having found a voice to express myself and suddenly I'm silenced by an accident? That was pretty creepy, to tell you the truth." During her time in NEw Mexico, Tori also had to try and come to terms with the silencing of her own sexual energy, a question she couldn't help but relate to the development of cervical cancer in her body and the lingering after-shocks from being raped. "Being in that place in north New Mexico I was forced to come to terms with myself on every level," she explains. "And what I definitely ahd to come to terms with is my violence and my withholding, from myself, of my sexuality and how I'd withdrawn from passion in my own life. I know I wrote about my experience of rape in "MAAG", but it's another thing to relly go back inside myself and see how that experience seeped into my cells, how the disease has spread. "A part of me has been unable to open up intimately since I wrote MAAG . After so many years I wondered what was it in me that cannot be juicy, that is so dry, except when I play music? I can go out and channel this energy during a show yet the moment I walk backstage afterwards I close down, sexually. And in New Mexico I did finally realise that I have to take responsibility for the fact that the man who originally violated me is not stopping me now- I am. But, still, there is a part of me that hasn't been able to open up since I came to terms with MAAG. And without Eric(Rosse), my boyfriend, I couldn't work my way through it right now." At this point Tori begins to cry gently. She insists, however, on continuing. "I never talk about this and it helps the healing process to do so. Because people out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it's the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done. emotionally, I mutilated myself by feeling I'm not worthy of being loved and fucked, and being able to love and fuck at the same time. I was straining toward the reconciliation the last time we talked byut the last frontier was crossed when I got the illness. At that point I had to deal with so much trauma in that part of my bodym and psyche. I do believe repression of that nature can cause the disease." Tori pauses and having gathered her emotions again goes on. "I also feel that the great frontier was crossed when I confronted my own violence, which is also what the album UTP is all about. Even though I had been working my way out of that violent experience I realised thtat I would remain a victim of it until I recognised the vioelence in myself. And my willingness to give up my Victims Anonymous badge followed my realising that the withholding of passion and pleasure, from myself, was a form of self-violence. "I told you before that seeing the movie "Thelma and Lousie", years after the rape, finally made me feel like I wanted to kill that man but, instead, I now realise that what I did was kill a part of myself. i already had the hatred that women feel for themselves in the Christian Church in terms of their sexual response: that tyranny of believing that love is one thing and lust another, instead of being able to join them together. That was where I first began to be segregated, within myself." "On top of that I took from the rapte that man's hatred of women, so much so that I couldn't access parts of myself. It's as though a computer chip has been put in , to cut out contact with your core self, your central energy source. And that hatred ran so deep that I just numbed myself to survive. Even sexually, aftet the rape, I became the vampire, I drank but would not let the men drink. And I had to be a hooker to have sex. having felt I let myself, and all women, down because of my total vulnerability the night I was raped. I then had to continually tell myself I was in complete control, so I had to feel like I was gettin paid." "Even in Baker, Baker, on this album, it says I'm the one who was endlessly unavailable, to Eric, even when having sex. And now the only way I'm getting out of all this is with him. The only way back now having taken so much hatred from one man is to accept so much love from another. But it's a long, slow process." Having paused again, and sipped from that ever-present bottle of Perrier water, Tori picks up the threads of conversation, balancing syllables as though each one contained a central truth about her life. "Okay, let's get to the core of it all. What this means is that Eric has to say 'I am not the man that raped you and I will not accept that concept.' When we make love he'll leave the lights on and say 'look at me, what's my name?' and I'll say his name. And even more importantly, he'll say 'what am I doing? I'm fucking you, say it." "And I't try to say 'you're fucking me'. Then he'll hold me as tightly as he can and say 'And I love you, I adore you, I treasure you'. So I am healing that way. And we're healing, because as you can imagine, I am hardly an easy woman to lie with. Or to love. But I am finally ceasing to see myself as a victim, which is the only way out of all this." Is Tori suggesting that feminists such as Andrea Dworkin are, therefore, 'victims' because they perceive all acts of intercouse between men and women as rape? "As women we are simply shaming men by saying 'all men are rapists' and I don't believe in shame. That's just Christianity in another guise, shame as a form of disease, a poison. As a woman I refuse to buy into that any more. So when Andrea Dworkin says that any form of intercourse between men and women is, by it's very nature, rape she is being a victim, yes. And ,by extension, she's also saying that all women are powerless, which ,of course, I don't believe. Women have got to see beyond those easy labels too, and men. Besides that kind of talk is just the language of violence, which is not, now, how I choose to communicate." Tori Amos accepts nonetheless that women these days do increasingly perceive men in general as,if not potential rapists, then 'then enemy'. And that the war between the sexes is escalating day by day. "That's another reason I wrote this record,"she explains. "This record and LE both come from the center of that war zone! But my position differs from a lot of the more militant feminist because all they are concerned about is just the position of women, in the universe, women re-defining their roles. That's facism. And that form of facism is not empowerment at all. I've lost women friends over this arguement, in the past year. Because all they do is blame men and become bitter because they are dominated, while still allowing themselves to be dominated, in ways. But that's basically because they haven't healed the place within themselves that remains both masculine and feminine, is part woman, part man and needs both halves to be in harmony." "I just can't accept it when the blanket resoponse of my women friends is simply 'all men are bastards, let's just cut them out of our lives, be rid of that male energy completely.' And it's really dissappointing on a personal level because my friends were not cornflake girls, not closed-mindedm rigid creatures, but raisin girls, who claimed to be open-minded and liberated. But they're the ones that have turned out to be the most reactionary, the most disappointing in terms of feminism. They are facists. And I don't want fascists in my life. I've had this idyllic view of the siterhood that has been shattered over the past year, that they would never betray each other. But I was wrong and that's what I write about in some songs on the new album." Tori's recent sense of betrayal was, she says, deep enough to connect her with an awareness of what she describes as 'women's hatred for women.' "The fact is that women have betrayed one another. I agree with Alice Walker when she talks about the cellular memory tht is passed down, wich all women have to come to terms with. Whether it is the women taking the daughters to the butchers to have their genitalia removed, or the mothers that bound the feet of the daughters, it is often women who betray their own kind, not just men. Likewise the mother who sells her eight year old daughter in Egypt, to the Saudi Prince, or, as I said, women who say I shouldn't express myself as I have chosen to. "That's why I say CFG is about how I came to terms with the naive notion that all women are the good guys and men are always the bad guys. that, obviously, is not always the case. I still feel so much love for my women friends, nothing I more sacred to me than that, except my relationship with Eric. so when we turn on each other it has to be devastating." "Whenever they would seemingly instinctivly attack men, or whatever, I'd have to say, I dont' automatically feel that way, I'm trying to rise above such feelings. Hatred for men, en masse, is as poisonous a feeling as shame. And Bells for Her is the scream of "no" before you cut the chord and let them go. The song "Anastatsia" also has a lot of that stuff in it." (Part two transcribed by Steve Broccoli Cohn, who can no longer (feel his fingertips. The conclusion of the article should be (typed tomorrow. Hope you are enjoying it)