Art & Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

It lands like a shrug, but it’s really an indictment: the music industry’s permissions structure is still gendered, still policed, still weirdly Victorian about who gets to narrate desire. Kristin Hersh frames it as what’s “allowed,” not what’s true. That verb does the heavy lifting. Songwriting isn’t presented as self-expression; it’s presented as a fenced yard where certain bodies can roam and others get leashed.

The first half points to the default setting of pop storytelling: men write about “people” and it’s treated as universal. Their girlfriends become stand-ins for humanity, their heartbreak becomes a genre template, their point of view gets laundered into neutrality. Hersh’s sting is that “people” is a rhetorical costume men are permitted to wear. The second half flips the mirror: women can write about women, but the permission comes with an asterisk. Female-to-female address is often filed under niche, confession, or spectacle; it’s “women’s music,” or it’s eroticized, or it’s read as autobiography that needs explaining.

Hersh, coming out of alternative rock’s era of supposed authenticity, knows how quickly “authentic” becomes a trap for women: be personal, but not too personal; be bold, but not threatening; be queer, but only in marketable ways. The line is less a celebration than a clipped report from the front: even now, the freedom to write expansively is distributed unevenly. The quiet provocation is asking why “people” ever belonged to one gender in the first place.