Creativity Quote by Siobhan Fahey

There is a blunt genius to "Being a woman is really crap": it refuses the poetic euphemisms people expect from female pop voices and trades them for the language of a fed-up friend. That casual profanity is the point. "Really" does the heavy lifting, too. It turns a sweeping political claim into an exhausted admission, the kind you say after the 20th small humiliation of the week. The line lands not as theory but as lived accumulation.

Fahey, coming out of the late-70s/80s British pop machine (and later the more adult, noir mood of Shakespears Sister), knew the bargain women performers were asked to sign: be visible but not too loud, desirable but not demanding, empowered as a brand but punishable as a person. In that context, calling womanhood "crap" reads less like self-loathing than a refusal to decorate structural unfairness with empowerment slogans. It's a critique of the rigging, not the player.

The subtext is also strategic: by making the complaint so plain, she dodges the endless debate about whether women are allowed to be angry "correctly". No careful qualifying clauses, no "not all men", no softened edges for male comfort. The phrase is short enough to be quoted, misquoted, laughed off, and yet it sticks because it captures a truth many people recognize but are trained to minimize. Pop culture loves strong women; it still flinches at women who say the quiet part out loud.