Living Through This Material World: Hole, Consumerism, & Visions of Violence

More often than not, a feminist lens reveals the tendency to transform women into objects. There is, of course, a rhetorical danger in such objectification, but it also poses a more immediate physical threat to the female body. On Hole’s Live Through This, we see this tendency realized in the image of the “doll”—the collection of “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs / [and] … doll arms” that make up a woman. But, for all the attempts to reduce the female body, Courtney Love—Hole’s frontwoman—responds with fierce resistance.

Love seems to have a proclivity for labels. She readily brands herself a “kinder whore” and could often be seen with phrases like “witch,” “slut, “diva,” “butch,” or “mom” scrawled on her body in lipstick. Love seems to engage with such gendered stereotypes to not only provoke the sexist confirmation biases of the press, but to also destabilize and deconstruct the cultural narratives of femininity. With a biting irony, she presents herself in a package of femininity we’re comfortable with—one bound to familiar stereotypes and labels. What Love then accomplishes is not the willing reduction of her identity, but rather the weaponization of her body to effect a critique of the dominant culture.

For Love personally, as for Live Through This, the female body serves as a stage for a rebellion against systems of power and control.

Throughout the album, Love foregrounds the essentialist functions of the female body—the most base cycles of production and consumption—but she uses these biological processes to uncover a far more insidious cultural system. While early 1994 finds Courtney Love a widow, mother, and verified celebrity in her own right, the year also finds the country in a whirlwind of its own materialism and consumer culture, in the trenches of late stage capitalism and all its attendant anxieties. Love’s personal narrative and the nation’s broader cultural condition seem to converge in Live Through This, and the result is a work at the intersection of gender and economics. And, for Love, the commonality is violence and exploitation.

Films like Fight Club and American Beauty, both released in 1999, explore the effects of the decade’s consumer culture and hyper-materialism, identifying a capitalist system as a critical impetus for personal crisis. And yet, while these films locate a key sociocultural concern, they focus almost exclusively on the anxieties of and threats to contemporary white masculinity. What Hole executes five years prior on Live Through This is a scathing exploration of the same culture with an important, and necessary, difference—an interest in the wellbeing of women in such a society. What the album points out is that a materialist culture does not end at the consumption of commercial products, but further extends into the ravenous consumption of the female body. Those 1999 films sparked an important national discussion on the consequences of excessive consumerism and the dangers of an implicit, passive trust in the capitalist system, but they come out with the wrong victims.

The threat posed to the middle-class white men of Fight Club and American Beauty is sedation, but, as Hole points out, the threat that women encounter is physical, sexual, and emotional violence.

The album concerns itself with many of the traditional motifs of femininity, and, written in the wake of Love’s recent motherhood, is particularly interested in the image of milk. Milk is a symbol of the nurturing woman, an essentialist confirmation that women are meant to provide sustenance and life, and yet here we see it poisoned and dried up. Milk makes Love “sick,” milk is “sour” and “dye[d],” and by the time we reach “I Think That I Would Die,” Love is violently screaming “there is no milk!” The album offers an intense focus on the female body as a site of production, but, for Love, there still remains a striking hollowness at the heart of modern femininity; we find a woman left so empty that there remains “nothing left to suck,” a woman who “eat[s] ether” only to “thr[ow] up all the time,” a woman who’s physically emptying herself. Pioneers of feminist criticism Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss the tendency of the woman writer to feel such an “emptiness” upon the “recogni[tion] that in an essential way she has been defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species.” Is milk itself not a symbol of a woman’s “biological usefulness”? A resource to be “empti[ed]” and mined from the body? But Live Through This goes further, extending the impulse to “suck…dry” the female body from a hungry child to an androcentric society. And here we edge closer to the album’s central contention: to a consumer culture, women, seen essentially as producers, are therefore meant to be consumed.

Love’s interest in the ways that the female body is consumed is not limited to images of motherhood, but extends morbidly into narratives of sexual desire and physical violence. On “Violet,” ostensibly a critique of male lust, she laments “when they get what they want / And they never want it again”; “Asking For It” opens with the admission that “every time that I sell myself to you / I feel a bit cheaper than I need to”; and the chorus of “Credit in the Straight World” recounts the exchange of a “leg” and an “eye” for the titular “credit in the real world.” These verses expose a commercial exchange, a transactional nature to modern gendered interactions. The economic implications of “sell[ing]” oneself, feeling “cheaper,” and pursuing “credit”—all at the cost of one’s body—are not accidental, but instead open into a more ominous assessment of modern culture.

Live Through This is fundamentally concerned with the ecosystem of the female body, but largely in that it reflects the socio-economic structure of American culture in microcosm.

In a sweeping historical review of body commodification, anthropologist Lesley Sharp points specifically to capitalism as an exploitative force. She argues that the human body “frequently emerges as a site of production, where the associated demands of capitalist labor rapidly dehumanize subjects; … female bodies in particular are frequently prized for their reproductive potential, rendering them especially vulnerable to commodification.” Live Through This seems to arrive at a similar conclusion, and the “doll” that we see on the album epitomizes Sharp’s vision of the “dehumanize[d]” and “commodifi[ed]” woman. In a culture infatuated with commodities, biological production becomes indistinguishable from economic production—and consumer culture becomes indistinguishable from a culture of gendered violence.

Such an existence as an object and a product then opens the female body to exploitation; under a patriarchal Western system, Hole sees this exploitation manifest in scenes of murder and rape. In the album’s most explicitly graphic track, “Jennifer’s Body,” Love offers a tragic distillation of her concerns. Possibly inspired by the kidnapping case of Colleen Stan, the song tells us of a woman whose body, before it is “found [in] pieces,” is “ke[pt]” in a box by the bed / alive, but just barely.” Again returning to the image of consumption—“you’re hungry, but I’m starving”—Love portrays a woman owned, used at will, and hacked to pieces. We never see Jennifer as a woman, but only as a body to be consumed in physical violence and sexual desire. The “now she’s mine” that concludes the song firmly establishes the track as a narrative of ownership, of a gendered power imbalance akin to the relationship between consumer and product.

Live Through This is about a lot of things. Though the album cover might suggest otherwise, the songs are not concerned with conventional beauty, but rather the ugliness that seems to define the mainstream: rape culture, objectification, eating disorders, drug abuse, and violence against women. And yet, what underpins a culture such as this is the capitalist structure: the system that views women as sexual bodies to be consumed, as inanimate collections of body parts, as bodies to starve into aesthtic conformity, and as objects to be owned and eventually discarded. And yet, though Love satirizes this culture, she does not succumb to it. She’s

“sick[ened]” by milk and by the cycles of fetishizes bodies and commodities that it represents. Her unfiltered rage drives the album and, by the time Love screams “fuck you” on the final track, it brings us a message entirely impossible to ignore.

For all the album art’s literal pageantry, it introduces us to an argument of forceful eloquence. What we ultimately see on Live Through This is a rebellion against the use of women as ornaments, as producers and products there merely for our benefit. What we hear is a voice, as aggressive as it is intelligent, that speaks against exploitation. That screams because for too long the body has been silenced.