The short answer is no. It’s almost beyond the antithesis of sexist. It plays with male self-pitying norms so much that it is almost post-sexist, a satire of the patriarchal break-up songs that went before it. However, it is easy to see why some think the opposite on first glance, and that is the triumph of Bob Dylan and how he pushed music on to a new literary height. Lyrically speaking, ‘Just Like a Woman’ is, in fact, one of his finest progressive triumphs.
Paul Simon once said, “With Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun at the same time.” With ‘Just Like a Woman’ he paints himself as a victim, but then reveals – like the consummate unreliable narrator – that the truth is he is, in fact, the wrongdoer and the resultant acrimony has nothing to do with the supposed ways of womanhood.
“Nobody feels any pain,” he sings in a defiant fashion. Then in the very next line, he reveals the lie of the first: “Tonight as I stand inside the rain.” He’s not merely caught in a storm here, if he was then there’s room enough for the syllables of “outside in the rain” within the melody. But that’s not the case, the rain we’re dealing with is a downcast disposition—the weepy movie character roving the wet streets in destress. So, with one deft touch, Dylan informs those paying close attention that this here singer is a liar and he’s actually riddled with a lot of pain at present.
From then on, when the singer points the finger at his fairweather former lover we are able to infer that his attack is loaded with bitterness rather than truth. We are dealing with a self-pitying man who has been – to use the parlance of our times – triggered by a break-up and is now going on the offensive. However, seeing as though it is his former lover, he can’t go in too hard or that would somehow implicate him, so he says that she was, essentially, a great catch, it’s just that she got away. This wasn’t due to his own shortcomings but because she was cursed by the fickle flaws of the opposite sex unlike his strong, painless male constitution.
Then after rattling off her faults, he covertly declares that his sexist effrontery is, indeed, a mask that serves to hide his own issues like Tony Soprano getting defensive on the therapist’s couch. “Ain’t it clear that I just can’t fit,” he eventually confesses in the glim hope that all the sullying he has said beforehand muddies his own heartache and he can still cling to his Brando-like manhood.
But then in one beautifully poetic moment, he is forced to admit his own vulnerability. “But when we meet again, introduced as friends / Please don’t let on that you knew me when, I was hungry and it was your world,” he epically writes—quick as flash returning to his attack as though to whisk that plea for mercy out of sight and mind in a renewed wail of derision. It is the narrator’s call for a public truce that lets him come out on top in the eyes of society. Without getting too salacious, we could even garner that this might be about Joan Baez and how she was the Queen of Folk before he came along and she welcomed him into her throng as King rather than the other way around.
This is all the more prescient in this day and age when frequently women are exposed to toxic public behaviour from men followed by the covert private confession this is actually a face saving way of sheltering my own vulnerability, eg. ‘I’m being nasty because I’m hurt babe, it’s a mark of love and you should be proud, besides please don’t do the same to me because I’m sensitive’. Even in 1966, long before social media heightened this dangerous misogynist behaviour, Dylan was pointing out the nettlesome dynamic of this through his troubled narrator.
To wrap things up, he sings the last line with a softness that was absent in his previous scathing verses, a whimpering last word. He’s said his break-up piece, very little has been reconciled and now he is moving on unscathed, the pain having passed through a toxic outburst. The perpetrator now off scot free, hoping that when they meet as friends she sticks to his story. And just like that, Dylan shows that even in break-ups, the books are cooked toward the cocks of this world.
It is far from a flaw that this doesn’t always immediately come across and people might catch the wrong drift, that is the beauty of the songwriting here: it has a depth that yearns to be explored. A thousand simple pop songs before it were outrageously sexist and they were taken with a pinch. Dylan subverted that; writing a song that is ostensibly sexist not to be taken with a pinch of salt, so that when the depth is pried at the mechanisms of misogyny are revealed, using irony to expose a greater sense of truth in a truly entertaining fashion.
As Lou Reed decreed of his work: “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song I thought.” Adding: “Now, other than Dylan, there’s not much there.” Like a book, with Dylan you not only have great lines, but a lot of reading between them to relish.
