In defence of anguish bangers.
Yearning! Regret! Using your SAD lamp as a ringlight for nudes! Yearning from different angles! Yearning with better filters! Making sly references to an ex on Instagram before the main evening Yearn!
I love the Lanaverse. It is a place where you can royally not have your shit together and be waiting for a lover to rescue you. Your makeup is immaculate, your credit score is shocking. It is where you can lounge in a photogenic binfire of your own terrible choices, then make more terrible choices. The dream.
The Lanaverse is, of course, absolutely unmanageable for everyday life. Like all celebrities, Lana Del Rey performs an escapist fantasy of wealth, ease and irresponsibility that’s dreamy to dip into before you have to plan a food shop and reply to emails. But unlike the ballsy girlboss white feminism of Taylor Swift or sheer workaholic power of Beyoncé, Lana makes no promises that money or success will rescue you from pain. And the attraction to Lana has something to do with our relationship to romantic love, but as much to do with our relationship to work.
I’ve been talking to my Mum and boomer / Gen X feminists about endless feelings of precarity around work. My takeaway is that for my Mum, work was what set you free: for millennial women, work is part of what keeps you stuck. The general landscape of low pay for hard work, limited or no job security, increasingly fragmented employment while everything gets more and more expensive does not, in my experience, fill young women with hope.
The Lana mythos doesn’t foreground busyness and hustle. It emphasises life tucked around the corners: intimacy, leisure, daydreaming. Lana isn’t boasting about getting WhatsApps from her bosses on the weekend or working 24/7 to push another album out (although she definitely is.) The Lana schedule we love to witness is a dreamy collage of vaping longingly into the middle distance and contemplating sorrow against various floral backgrounds. If only this is how real, grown-up women could live.
The darker side of Lana fandom is that work is falling short of the feminist liberation we were promised. Conversations with my friends about work – even in aspirational careers which we’d rather have than not have – revolve around how to set boundaries and avoid constant burnout. If you’re thinking about children, there’s an additional game of 4-dimensional chess to figure out how the financial, physical, mental and emotional commitment of motherhood is even feasible when it is so expensive to just continue existing. My friend with two young children who’s managed to keep building her career in the film industry explained very bluntly: “I married rich.”
Although the way my middle-class, educated feminist friends jokingly send each other tradwife influencer TikToks is usually ironic, and sometimes the starting point for a good chat about the worrying rolling back of women’s rights, their seductive quality is the same as Lana’s. Unlike the exhausted working mums who barely get half an hour to themselves, tradwives get to wear beautiful dresses and dedicate a whole leisurely afternoon to “bread.” We know this is all, at best, artful marketing – at worst, vulnerable women foregoing financial autonomy to rebuild their own cage. But when women’s incomes aren’t meeting the cost of living, more than a scrolling fantasy, being a tradwife or a kept boulevard bride feels like the more bearable economic option.
Pole dancing has a peculiar relationship with this because it’s an industry where 90 per cent of money flows from and between women. I’m a full-blown wages for housework, universal free childcare and generous parental leave-flogging leftist feminist – until we get there I am fascinated by this ingenious space that (mostly) women have created to name and command value between the edges. Pole dancing is linked to sex work and therefore linked to putting paywalls before what’s usually expected for free: eroticism, care work, emotional and intimate labour. It’s therefore adaptable to a fractured and hyper-individualised labour market, where you have to command value and set your own boundaries. I’ve realised that pole dancers haven’t just been teaching me to hang off a stick: pole dancers are teaching me to be a more resourceful creative and a better businessperson.
But when it DOESN’T WORK and I succumb to the anguish, I’m having more self-forgiveness for when I’m having a Lana Del Day.
Did I sort my shit out today? No. Did I pull myself together and try my best? No. But did I do it in immaculate makeup, take a perfect selfie and type a devastatingly beautiful song lyric into my iPhone Notes? Also no. Did I spend my whole evening googling “Libras: WHY?” Listen –
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