You know, I'm gay and I grew up being aware of that at a very early age, in a fairly repressed family.
Why can't a woman be a little cooler in her emotions and a little quieter and more repressed without it being a huge thing? I've actually always quite enjoyed that, to tell you the truth.
I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.
In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
Even today, England is a very repressed, repressive country, and there's pressure to be kind of a certain way, so people do things that ultimately make them sad.
My mom was very much the product of a very paternalistic, deep-southern culture, but also a repressed feminist. Her way of being defiant was to raise us to be rebellious ourselves - basically, the opposite of who she had to be in her own life.
My whole world up until punk was this total repressed Catholic lifestyle.
I don't think Iraq could be transformed overnight into a democracy. How can you take a country that doesn't have any kind of tradition of democracy, where its people have been brutalized and repressed for decades, and suddenly impose Jeffersonian ideals?