The Feminine Musique: “She’s Not Afraid” by One Direction
One Direction: the world’s biggest boy band known for its wild fans, incredible looks, and for single-handedly eliminating every 13-year-old girl’s insecurities. Hits like “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Little Things” clearly have superficial sentiments, but on “She’s Not Afraid,” the boys give the girl what they desire… character depth?
The Feminine Musique is a series where writers analyze portrayals of women in music.
Written by Ellen Daly
Photo courtesy of The Washington Post
Think about it: the first words One Direction probably ever said to you were the opening lines of “What Makes You Beautiful”: “you’re insecure.” Their breakout and perhaps career-defining single ruled 2012, having girls around the world sing their insecurities away to the sweet tune of teenage boys telling them they’re beautiful. However, a look into the lyrics reveals the boys believe that what makes a girl beautiful is the very unawareness of her beauty. As if knowledge of one’s own beauty is somehow unattractive; the boys repeat “You don’t know you’re beautiful / That’s what makes you beautiful.”
The second single off One Direction’s second album, “Little Things,” further capitalized off this idea. This track was guest-written by Ed Sheeran, but fell exactly in line with the heartthrob image 1D’s management tried to maintain. With lyrics like, “You still have to squeeze into your jeans / But you're perfect to me,” the song seems ultra-specific and honestly a bit bizarre, but the plan worked, and teenage girls bought into the sweet sound of male validation.
The song may have been well-intentioned, but its message is ultimately harmful. Not only does it encourage young and impressionable girls to rely on men to make them feel good about themselves and their bodies, but, in a way, it introduces them to insecurities they may not have even developed, further perpetuating the phenomenon of men setting beauty standards for women. Take the following for example:
I know you've never loved the crinkles by your eyes
When you smile, you've never loved your stomach or your thighs
The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine
But I’ll love them endlessly
When this song was released in 2012, I was in sixth grade, which was probably about the average age of a 1D fan at the time. I loved the song, but I’m not sure how much I worried about half the insecurities it lists before I listened to the lyrics. It only leads me to wonder how younger fans perceived this song and how being explicitly introduced to these beauty standards at such a young age can affect a girl’s confidence.
On the same album, however, lies that song’s antithesis: “She’s Not Afraid.” A timeless, underrated anthem, “She’s Not Afraid” might be the only 1D song that gives its love interest dimension ― that is, any characteristics beyond being young and beautiful and in need of a man’s validation. The hero of “She’s Not Afraid” likes attention, scary movies, running wild, and kissing in the dark. She’s her own person, and her fatal flaw is being afraid of love. This girl has the boys questioning her every move, wondering why she does what she does. She’s not some toy for the boys to play with; she’s her own person. In return, the boys acknowledge her personhood by singing:
Maybe she's just tryna test me
Wanna see how hard I'm gonna work
Wanna see if I can really tell how much she's worth
“She’s Not Afraid” tells girls it’s okay to be wild, it’s okay to have the upper hand in a relationship, it’s okay to keep things casual with a boy, and it’s certainly okay to be afraid of love. I’m not sure how aware I was of the magic of this song when I first heard it, but now that I’m older, this song is a clear standout in One Direction’s discography. It so blatantly rejects the entire knight-in-shining-armor trope that the rest of their songs rely on; instead, it portrays a woman who is complicated and a man who just doesn’t understand her. She knows her worth, and that she doesn’t need a man to save her. A stark contrast to the girls in “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Little Things,” it’s her confidence that makes her sexy.
“She’s Not Afraid” portrays women as flawed, confident, sexy, confusing, and real. In this absolute treasure of a 1D song, the woman calls all the shots. She comes off as fearless, even if she is not. She’s young and navigating love and relationships, and she’s afraid. And that’s okay. The song makes it clear that the boy loves her, despite her flaws, and that he knows she doesn’t need him. He’s aware of how special she is, and he doesn’t take her for granted.
One Direction may have missed the mark on some of their hits, but hidden gems like “She’s Not Afraid” show a rare versatility and depth that make the band more than just five singing heartthrobs. They’re real people who experience real relationships and who are trying to figure out love just like everyone else. Not only that, but the girls they chase are also very real, and they’re not perfect, and that’s okay.