While reading ”Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax,” I got a specific song stuck in my head but couldn’t quite make it out. It turned out to be “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
The title is an allusion to The Odyssey, in which Odysseus plugs his ears with beeswax to listen to the sirens’ songs. In this mythology, sirens (winged creatures as opposed to finned ones— see the black feathers hanging around all over the tour bus) will sit on islands trying to lure sailors into the sea. In Armfield’s version, sirens tour all over an island (two, actually) luring women and girls into their posse.
In pop culture, sirens have a reputation as being purely seductive creatures. This has moments in the story, with Mona and Ava’s first experiences with the band both tied to their first sexual encounters. But in the original mythology, sirens are much greater than this; as Emily Wilson put it, “Their seduction is cognitive. They claim to know everything about the war in Troy, and everything on earth. They tell the names of pain.” Contrast this with how the band’s fans describe their music: “They make music about yearning, about hunger.” Any teenage girl could tell you the pain of hunger, of the constant denial of self that goes into female adolescence.
It was confusing to me at first why only young women were being affected, until I learned that sirens had been created to search for a young woman (specifically Persephone). This context flips the story, for me, from being about a vaguely evil band to a classic tale of revenge. Persephone had been stolen away by a man, so the sirens used their influence to keep that from ever happening again.
I feel so crazy I didn’t even notice the allusion. Now that you say it it feels obvious. They pull people in and dash them against the rocks without any sign of concern from their victims. Just like the tour crew. They were all so transfixed by the music they didn’t notice or even care about the terrible violence around them. Super cool!