It pains me slightly, but I have to give [Smurfy] credit for a half-decent title. No-one is actually attempting to ban 'Delilah', of course, and it isn't a campaign against a song, but an illustrative example of misogyny being so cheerfully embedded in popular culture that most people don't even see it, in the context of a Commons debate about the role of men in preventing violence against women.
The text of the debate is here. The pleasure involved in a Welsh rugby crowd belting out the song (goddammit, it's catchy) is a complex phenomenon that isn't reducible to a mass endorsement of the protagonist's self-justification for his violence in the lyric. Scanning rugby crowds for the men who sing it with the most gusto is going to be a lousy guide to who will and who won't beat the crap out of his partner when he gets home. Neither should singers be treated as if first-person narrative voice automatically renders them morally responsible for the acts of a fictional murderer. On the other hand I don't see why people can't be asked or prompted to think about what they are singing, even if thinking about such things compromises their pleasure. I've always found the song troubling in an undeniably enjoyable way, precisely because it's so joyously persuasive in its self-pity and victim-blaming. In this sense it's completely authentic - one of the recurring stories we continue to tell ourselves about how it's women's fault that men abuse and kill them. Barring re-writing the melody, it will take an artist with a bit more edge than Tom Jones to render it with the bitter irony it deserves, but for selling it to us straight, he is the business. It's weird that the WRU compared it to
Romeo & Juliet, when the much more obvious parallel is
Othello (perhaps they just aren't across their Shakespeare). There's never been anything forcing writers, directors, actors or audiences to share Othello's repugnant conviction that the tragedy is about him, and depends on Desdemona's innocence, but it's still being reliably reproduced, well into the 21st century. Popular culture is always an easier target, though.
