Driver Education - Response

The Indigo Girls’ song, “Driver Education,” seems to promote the rebellious girlhood.  There’s promotion and selling of the pop culture items such as Marlboro, Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Pepsi.  There’s suicide, alcohol and drug use, aside the innocence of riding the school bus, which seems to place an interesting dichotomy within the first half of the song.  A definite binary is set up between the two types of girls “when you were sweet sixteen/I was already mean,” as well as within the lyrics “With the switchblade set and the church kids learning my moves.”  We have a division within the song between what would be considered the good girl and the bad girl.  The song as well, draws a line between the “waterlogged,” birth and the older female reflecting on the ways in which she behaved, “giving it up,” as a younger woman.  The woman in the song is now tattooed, like others she refers to “with a past they can’t remember.”  However, interestingly, the narrative voice within the song doesn’t necessarily say which girlhood choices were wrong or right, only that they were, and that there was a binary between the two, with no mention of middle ground. 

I assume that the “she” referred to in the song, as “She tastes like spring, there she goes again, drinking with the older guys, tripping by the lakeside,” is a “she” that the narrator has experienced.  The reference to having given it up, likely sexually to a male, I also believe is part of a wanting to fit in, a way of “Achieving a convincing gender practice” (O’Brien 1999), and enacting the ‘gender script’ (van Doorn, Wyatt, Zoonen, 424).   

As well, I don’t think it is coincidental that mention of “swimming pools,” and “waterlogged,” as reference to water, are often discussed in terms of yonic symbols.  However, I wrangle with the idea that the male type that attracted the narrator, exhibited “nerdish homosociality” (Straw, 639), which revealed the queer struggle by way of attempted suicide, and lack of sleep with “bloodshot eyes.”