Go drink beer with the guys

Beyoncé Knowles’s song, “If I Were a Boy,” is a tale of how men simply cannot understand and are incapable of loving women, because at the end of the day, men are just boys. At first glance, Beyoncé’s words are the anthem to female liberation from male dominance in modern day relationships, a pop song to make the feminist’s cheer. However, upon deeper inspection, the songstress herself, or whichever persona she chooses to speak through (Sasha Fierce or whomever), is overlooking her own sexism. The song amounts to a generalization on the entire male species, particularly those who play the role of boyfriend or significant other, and the generalization is not in a kind light.

The speaker of the song is an unspecified “I,” who is a woman in a relationship with an inattentive boyfriend. The use of an unnamed first person narration allows the song’s lyrics and meaning to be applied to essentially all women. Thus, the negative sentiments towards the boyfriend in the song, is mistakenly broadened to mean all men and all boyfriends. She, the speaker, opens the song with a hypothetical situation, if she was a boy, and the following lines detail what she would do and how she would feel as a guy. Granted, in general, men in contemporary American and Western society overall, are more forgiven for their fashion faux-pas than are women. However, the line “go drink beer with the guys,” stereotypes the entire male race as a beer-drinking population. Without shedding light on to the other activities that guys partake in, the audience is left with the impression that all men are just a bunch of drunks. And if they happen to be dressed nice, the incident was mere chance, since they “roll out of bed in the morning and throw on what [they want.]” The next verse continues on to say that as a boy, the speaker would “chase after girls,” furthering a negative attitude towards men.

In the third and fourth verse, the speaker goes on to say that if she “were a boy [she] could understand how it feels to love a girl [and she would] be a better man. [She would] listen to her ‘cause [she knows] how it hurts when you lose the one you wanted ‘cause he’s taking you for granted and everything you had got destroyed,” continuing to play out the scenario. Since the speaker is a woman, she would of course be better equipped than a man to understand and listen and love a woman, which is absolute truth, since women understand women and men understand men better than women and men. However, that sentiment is slightly misleading, because then the speaker indirectly says that men are not competent, or rather compassionate, enough to truly love women. That is not giving men a fair chance, and is just generalizing one type of man to represent all men. There are surely, several women who are just as bad as the unfeeling men represented in the song.

Again in the following verses, the speaker portrays men as self-absorbed philandering creatures. It is not so much that men are evil beings, rather that the speaker is in a bad relationship and in her bitterness (whether justified or not), she takes things out on all of man-kind. Genuine people who care about their significant others do not always “put [themselves first” or “turn off [their phones and] tell everyone it’s broken so they’d think [they were] sleeping alone.”

If anything, the speaker is just venting and airing out her “grievances.” Understandable in any break-up situation or rough patches of a relationship, however, the song loses credibility when the simple fact is that not all men are bad; the good and great men out there and amongst us serve as living proof. The song finishes with a list of injustices, that he doesn’t listen, that he doesn’t care, and that he just takes everything for granted, because, after all, he is, just a boy. Well, the speaker is just a girl.