Positions, Part 1

Madame President, your husband is on the line

When Ariana Grande’s album Positions came out at the end of 2020, I tried to listen to it. Then I stopped. As she sang in her characteristic virtuosic runs about giving and receiving oral sex, I remember feeling a particular kind of inner swoon in me, something between nausea and fear. Eventually, I abandoned the album and I never went back.

I wasn’t exactly an Ariana Grande fan, but I had listened to her previous album, thank u next, a lot. I remember playing it from front to back as I biked through Palo Alto, finding its dark bouncing rhythms and self-aware therapy ballads particularly soothing as I waited for the light to change on Page Mill Road. Grande had a way, both through her music and her constructed persona, of making her extraordinary talent appear unstudied, even naive.

The dark aesthetics of the thank u, next era.

What’s more, thank u, next as a project emerged from one of the most challenging junctures in Grande’s life. Mac Miller, her ex, had just died; she had just run the rounds of the tabloids with her whirlwind engagement then un-engagement to Pete Davidson; she was likely still recovering from an actual bombing that had happened at one of her concerts. I say all this not to drum up needless sympathy for an extraordinarily successful and well-supported public figure, but to characterize the backdrop of an album that at times is strikingly tender, sometimes even despite Grande’s own constructed persona. thank u, next is an album that cannot help but tell the truth, and reacts almost violently to its own telling — a hard clamshell case around a beating, bloody middle.¹

So it came as a surprise to me when, upon trying to listen to Positions, I found myself feeling kind of awful.

Positions as a project is laid-back on the surface, recalling R&B sounds and the muted colors of the 60’s. Underneath all that, though, the record tells a classic American story, moving from doubt to self-assurance to literal marital bliss. Where thank u, next was roving and traumatized, Positions is a quiet triumphal procession.

The retro pastel aesthetics of Positions.

Positions is about Ariana Grande’s marriage to Dalton Gomez, the real-estate agent who sold her her house. They met, fell in love, and got married within a year. And in case you weren’t paying attention to any of those details, Grande wants to make it very clear on this album: he is The One.

Heaven sent you to me
I'm just hoping I don't repeat history

Boy I'm tryna meet your mama on a Sunday
Then make a lotta love on a Monday
Never need no one else babe
Cause I'll be

[Chorus]
Switching them positions for you

“Positions,” the song that the entire album is named after, is about the idea of “switching positions” for a lover in order to be very, very happily monogamous. It’s about the heterosexual female drive for excellence turned into bloodsport. If classic non-monogamous doctrine — and just plain common sense — reminds us that we can never meet all of our partner’s needs, “Positions” would like for us to kindly consider putting our backs into it.

Here is the rest of the chorus:

Switching them positions for you
Cooking in the kitchen and I'm in the bedroom
I'm in the Olympics, way I'm jumping through hoops
Know my love infinite, nothing I wouldn’t do
That I won't do, switching for you

This is a gloriously clever song, no question about it — the double entendre around “positions,” the idea of this love-drunk woman running around doing everything for her beau, from cooking to charming his mother to blowing his mind in bed. One of the most clever things about it, though, is the way it makes such a backwards idea seem feminist.

You may think I cherry-picked a particularly egregious image of Ariana Grande for this juncture in the essay, but you’d be wrong: this is an actual screenshot from the music video for “Positions.”

Who said the f-word? Feminist? Ariana Grande isn’t saying this song is feminist, she’s just proclaiming her love for her hubby. Not everything has to be feminist, right?

—Except, in the music video for this song, Grande plays the President of the United States.

All’s running well in the world of President Grande.

The music video, directed by Dave Meyers, opens on a sweeping drone-shot of the White House. Then, as we enter the building, we see Ari at the head of a long oval table, speaking with various advisors, all of them women in power-suits. Then we see her in her presidential office, signing some papers with an air of authority and grace. #ImWithGrande, I guess.

But this isn’t a music video about the political representation of women. It’s about what the most powerful woman in the world chooses to do with her spare time. Because at 0:40, just as the chorus kicks in, the presidential office spins away and we find ourselves in Ari’s kitchen. She’s alone, tossing some dough incompetently, and covered in pizza flour.

When I first saw this scene, I almost laughed out loud because it seemed so absurd. I’m not sure I’d trust that pizza. But seeing it now, I think the ineptitude of her kitchen work is kind of the point: she’s not supposed to be in the kitchen. That’s what makes it sexy.

I could be preventing World War III as the leader of the Free World… but, let’s stay in tonight, babe.

She’s not just a housewife, some woman who’s supposed to be in the kitchen. She’s literally the President. And the President wants to cook for you, babe. And you know what? The President is your housewife.

Again, I want to be very careful here. If the actual President also wants to be a housewife, that’s none of my business. There are certainly more pressing things to critique. But what I take issue with here is the way in which Ariana Grande plays both the President and the housewife: with her political hustle only increasing her value on the marriage market. It even feels like the whole reason this MV opens on the President scene is to make the payoff of the kitchen that much sweeter, like putting on a full face of makeup so your lover can have the pleasure of ruining it.

When do we admit that the pleasure we are offering our lover is a kind of metaphor for the pleasure of owning us? Isn’t the pleasure of coming home to the President’s cooking, on some level, the pleasure of domestication?²

I said earlier that I couldn’t finish listening to Positions. I wish I could argue here that it’s because the album is just embarrassingly bad, or a scourge upon the ear. It’s not. It’s not even a scourge upon feminism, though — as I’ll get into later — it is a particularly good example of what makes certain forms of contemporary feminism inadequate. Instead, I hated this album because it made me feel torn.

Listening to Positions, I felt torn between both wanting and wanting to be free of what it represented. In other words: the dream that Ariana Grande promises is actually appealing to me, on some level. I’d love to be influential in my career and happily live in domestic bliss at home, cooking stupid pizzas for my husband and meeting all his needs. Heck, there’s even a part of me that can see the appeal in being owned, like a precious thing that is accounted for not just once — by myself — but twice — by the person who loves me.

But at the same time, whenever I try to actually imagine a life like this, I feel like I’m trapped inside a cardboard box, or on the garish set of a children’s show: somehow both stifled and overstimulated at once. Not only do I feel like the vision never resolves into something plausible, I also feel haunted by the unreality of it, like there’s something really important I left behind.³

I think really, what I’m longing for — and try not to think about when I avoid listening to Positions — is that mythic union of what I want with what society expects me to want; to want something so completely, like Ariana Grande apparently wants to be married to Dalton Gomez (and to be married in general), and to have that desire fulfilled in a societally-sponsored paroxysm of bliss. No more anxiety about whether my desires are “bad,” because these are the desires to be having. Just… fulfill them, go ahead, enjoy. Marriage is the peak of a woman’s life, so indulgence is holy.

Collage by Bob May.

But the truth is, I’ve never really wanted to be married in the burning way Grande has apparently always wanted to be married. I’ve felt, at various times, and in various ways, how much easier my life would be if I just fucking wanted what I was supposed to want. People, life events, milestones, cultural roles. If I was supposed to pick up the program somewhere, I must have missed it.

As for Ariana Grande, she’s been consistent from day one. She even sings about marriage on thank u, next, the album I was bumping in 2019:

One day I'll walk down the aisle
Holding hands with my mama
I'll be thanking my dad
Cause she grew from the drama
Only wanna do it once, real bad
Gonna make shit that last

And I heard her singing it then, but I guess I let myself forget. Maybe it felt like one of the fantasies one spins as self-consolation in a low moment. Maybe I just wanted my enjoyment to go on.

Whatever the reason I missed it the first time, my hopes of having a longer engagement with Grande’s music were summarily put to rest with Positions. It’s like we found ourselves sitting next to each other on the same flight, perhaps exchanging numbers with the optimism that only travellers — torn from context and all its constraints — can have. But we weren’t going to the same place at all.

For me, heartbreak and a genuine reckoning with my own flaws was a path to becoming a whole person, ideally embedded in community. For her, it was in the hopes of landing an even bigger fish.

The last thing I’ll say is this. It’s on the unmistakeable feminist signalling in Grande’s music video.

One of the fundamental confusions of our time, I think, is the subtle but irreversible way in which feminism — at its heart a collective movement, about a group of people, however indistinctly or problematically defined⁴ — has become conflated with individual expressions of female agency. Since when did feminism start meaning, “a particular (usually famous) woman doing whatever the fuck she wants”?⁵

I think making space for women to express themselves as individuals can certainly be part of a feminist project; but being a woman, and just expressing yourself, isn’t necessarily feminist. Or, to put a finer point on it: the personal isn’t always political. Politics, by definition, involves other people.

And it’s clear that Grande wants to be married, that she values the idea of being both President and a wonderful housewife. Positions is all about how happy she is, now that she’s achieved her personal goals. But is Grande achieving her goals of being both traditionally successful and happily married particularly feminist? —No. She’s the ideal woman under capitalism. We get to choose whether we celebrate that or deem it irrelevant — but it certainly seems difficult to argue that it’s liberatory.

And when I watch her, and her team, making such brazen gestures at the idea of “empowerment” in her videos, while simultaneously suggesting that such “empowerment” derives its ultimate value from its sexiness… I get the sweaty feeling of watching a mobster pull off an extraordinary heist.

What is the mobster stealing? Not much. Maybe a just a little bit of our collective conviction that there are meaningful things for women to experience, beyond being extremely rich and also possessed by a choice mate. I can put some of these meaningful things into words: friendship, learning, leaving a revolutionary legacy in the world. Some other things feel more nebulous and unnameable. But they exist; I know that very well because I can see them from my position, however more difficult, strange and tedious it is.

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Finally, if you liked this, you might like these other pieces: My Problem With Taylor Swift; Music for a Szechuan Restaurant

Thanks for reading.

1. For those who are more familiar with the album, consider its bizarre closing track, “break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored.”

Here is an album that has dealt with themes of grief, regret, self-deception and neediness… and it closes with an anthem that emanates sheer power and lawlessness. Is this even the same singer who a few tracks back was crooning, “I know you hear me when I cry /
I try to hold it in the night”?

One of the most interesting — and I think artful — things about this record is the way it shows us, in real time, how a persona of power and invulnerability acts to patch over the tender disclosures of the self. Like waking up with a vulnerability hangover and needing to slam the door closed.

2. We can also question, of course, why we associate feminine labor — such as cooking and cleaning — with lower value. Perhaps cooking is more important than being the President. But I don’t think Grande’s music video turns on this argument; rather, it cheekily couches its shock value in this misogynistic value differential that it doesn’t question. And then implies that is feminist!

3. Knock-knock.

—Who is it?

It’s me, the irrepressibly freaky part of you. Remember?!

4. Indistinct as in: who counts as a woman represented by feminism? Do transwomen count? What about non-binary femmes? What about folks who can get pregnant but who do not identify as women? —These are all questions that any form of feminism has to contend with to remain legitimate.

Problematic as in: how much of feminism has been subject to the dynamics of “elite capture” in the sense that the most elite women’s goals have become the apparent goals of the whole group? White feminism, corporate feminism, etc.

As much as these are ongoing, unresolved issues under the banner of “feminism,” they still concern an imagined collective.

5. Maybe with Beyoncé? Ah, I’m so sorry. A gripe for another time.

For the record, the brilliant poet Morgan Parker has said this more eloquently than I’ll be able to, and through poetry, as in her lovely collection, “There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé.”