30 Years Later, ‘You Outta Know’ Is Still the Feminist Rage Song We Need

Would she go down on you in a theater?

I know it makes me sound like a loser, but I am not someone who is into music. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy music. I like all kinds, and I can appreciate it as a critical form of art. But I can’t name all four Beatles. I don’t have a favorite artist. I don’t often attend concerts.

It makes me uncomfortable when I meet someone new and they ask, “so what kind of music do you like?” Uhhh, I started listening to Dave Matthews Band as a teenager, and I love Taylor Swift for the nostalgia of young heartache. While this is an honest reply, I don’t feel it’s a fair representation of who I am. 

However, I do have a pretty good answer to “what was your first album?” 

The first CD I ever bought was Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, which is celebrating its 30-year anniversary this month. I bought it at the age of 14, with money I earned from working at a diner down the street from where I lived. I was absolutely scandalized by “You Oughta Know” and the infamous line, “would she go down on you in a theater?”

I was a teen living in a small town, who had only recently learned what a blow job was. I was finally getting all my burning questions answered by the adult waitresses at the diner, who seemed to think my naiveté was both hilarious and something to be corrected, STAT. Even at that age, a part of me understood that smiling at and chatting with the old men who sat at the counter to drink their coffee — that withholding my opinions and nodding along with whatever they decided to tell me that day — was more likely to earn me a dollar than if I poured their coffee stone-faced or offered a thoughtful reply. Yes, a part of me understood this, but I couldn’t have explained it.

While listening to music that talked about sex made me feel grown up, I failed to notice the true brilliance of the album: its feminist rage at all those unexplainable inequities. I knew nothing about the patriarchy, unequal power dynamics, coercive control… Of course I had experienced or would experience all of it, but I lacked awareness of what was happening to me.

In the ’90s, I would not have called myself a feminist. That term only creeped into my life in the early 2000s, in college, when I took part in a production of the The Vagina Monologues and read Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (and not even Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which instigated Mailer’s book—a truly humiliating oversight). I wasn’t a true feminist. I was gathering information, listening to others’ ideas of womanhood and glomming on to anything that made sense to me at the time. That I didn’t have a clear definition of feminism isn’t all that surprising, given that third-wave feminism is defined by its diversity of thought, which many scholars believe continues today alongside the fourth wave. 

It was not until my mid-thirties that I began to unravel my own ideas of feminism and the patriarchy. I was frustrated that nobody believed me when I said I didn’t want children. I was annoyed at being told it was my responsibility to behave in a way that protected me from being assaulted, rather than putting the onus on the assaulter. And most recently, I was enraged that women are no longer allowed to terminate a pregnancy they don’t want or that could end their life. 

So when I listened to the album again, the rage came.

There is more than one man who has smirked when I recently voiced my appreciation for Jagged Little Pill — and these are men who I respect and who respect me and other women. I can only assume they can’t understand the value of Morissette’s lyrics, the anger and pain that she was brave enough to actually express, because they lack the experience of being undervalued, ignored or forgotten. Most men I know have not been complimented at work for their appearance but had their ideas ignored. Most men I know have not been asked when they will have children. Most men I know have not been judged for having too many girlfriends or going on too many dates or sleeping with too many people. The good men listen to women and look for ways to correct these problems. Most men are not good in this way.

Taking “You Oughta Know” as one example, Morissette writes about being dismissed for being too young, too sexual, too pushy, demanding too much from a romantic partner who was much older and apparently happy to let her devote herself to him sexually, until he became bored by it. In fact the lyrics that follow “would she go down on you in a theater?” are the most impactful:

Does she speak eloquently?
And would she have your baby?
I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother

In just three brilliant lines, our culture fills in the blanks and we know that the new partner is perceived as better in some way — more chaste, more educated, more deserving. More “ladylike.”

That was 30 years ago. And just this year, an episode of the Based Camp podcast hosted by pro-natalists Malcolm and Simone Collins explained how men can win over “high value” women to have their many babies. According to Malcolm, these are not the women who would have a one-night stand. We can assume he also believes that these are not women who would perform oral sex in public. (What Malcolm doesn’t seem to understand is that all sorts of women have done all sorts of things.) Unfortunately, his are not obscure or isolated ideas; the Collins’ are thought leaders on subjugating women and are consulting for the White House. 

To say Jagged Little Pill was ahead of its time is cliché and insufficient, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was ahead of its time. The song title “You Oughta Know” in itself is a plea to be heard in a world where no one is listening to women. He should know, he oughta know, but does he actually know? Has he heard her? Morissette wrote the following about the time when the song hit the radio: 

“There was a cultural wave swelling…a readiness, perhaps, for people to hear about the underbelly, the true experience of being a young, sensitive, and brave person in a patriarchal world. This wave was moving through culture with or without me, and I happened to grab my glittery surfboard and rode that wave like a feisty androgyne on the back of a megalodon.”

Perhaps people were ready to hear about this “true experience,” but has very much changed as a result? A very different artist—blonde and sparkly—Taylor Swift shares a similar rage in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” on her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department:

… I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me
You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me
… You caged me and then you called me crazy
I am what I am ’cause you trained me

Compare this to Morissette’s lines:

It’s not fair, to deny me
Of the cross I bear that you gave to me

Both artists identify the patriarchal structures that diminish women, telling the powers that be: you handed me this burden, and now you’re angry at me for naming it. But save other women, who else is listening? Who else is angry? 

Even if little has changed, or changed and reversed again in terms of women’s rights and liberalism, sharing the rage and naming the bad actors offers a critical step forward. Fourth-wave feminism has done just that, utilizing digital tools to spread these messages more broadly than ever before.

Morissette’s album continues to find audiences and relevance today. Like Jagged Little Pill did for me, I hope that it helps younger generations feel seen and heard, but also to understand that at least some of their pain and anger is fed by the patriarchy, and that it must be torn down. 

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