"If I were to change gender roles"

Prince’s song “If I was your girlfriend” is a critique of traditional gender roles. The speaker in Prince’s song believes his girlfriend shares a kind of intimacy with her best friend that she does not share with him. The speaker suggests the reason his girlfriend does not share that kind of intimacy with him is because those kind of activities are reserved for her female friends rather than her boyfriend. The way the speaker suggests this is by asking if she would do those activities with him if he were one of her girlfriends. He suggests that gender dictates the types of intimacy his girlfriend will allow herself to have in a relationship.

The line “If I was your girlfriend” is repeated throughout the song to establish hypothetical situations where the speaker believes his girlfriend would act differently if he were a female friend rather than a boyfriend. In the third and fourth lines of the song the speaker suggests there are things his girlfriend did not tell him because he is a man and that she would have told him those things if he was female.

The speaker also suggests involving your significant other in decision making, even if it’s something small, is an intimate activity that he wants to do with the person he’s in love with. At about the Thirteenth line the speaker asks, under the pretense that he is just one of the girls, if he could help his girlfriend pick out the clothes she’s going to wear when they go out. He acknowledges that she doesn’t need his help to make it clear that he just wants to be a part of that decision making process. He goes on to say, “But sometimes, sometimes Those are the things that bein in loves about.” It is clear the speaker believes things like picking out clothes together is something people do when they love each other, but his girlfriend won’t do something like that with him because of her beliefs in gender roles. She believes, no matter how close a woman is to a man, some activities such as picking out clothes are reserved only to do with other women.