Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Paris Paloma’s new song ‘Labour’ has women sharing their experiences of misogyny

A clip of the track has gone viral on social media alongside stories of women’s experiences

Megan Graye
Tuesday 14 March 2023 08:59 GMT
Comments
(@parispalomaofficial)

Your support helps us to tell the story

This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.

The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.

Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.

The forthcoming single from British singer-songwriter Paris Paloma has begun trending on TikTok.

A clip of her new track “Labour” – which will be released on 24 March – is being used for women to share their experiences of misogyny.

The track addresses “women doing all the domestic and emotional labour in cishet relationships, and deserving more”.

Lyrics in the clip of the song include: “You make me do too much labour.”

“All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid, nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant, just an appendage, live to attend him, so that he never lifts a finger.”

Since Paloma shared the track a few days ago, it has been viewed more than two million times.

The track has since started trending with women playing the clip with visible text of their stories of experiences of sexism and prejudice.

TikTok user Olivia Kirby used the track to show different “beauty standards throughout the decades” using the app to warp her body.

“The way my mother always explained it,” began another TikToker captioning the video, “the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient but he never falls in love with a subservient woman.”

“He’s like an exotic bird collector, he only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage,” she claimed.

Others captioned the song with stories from childhood and of previous experiences of feeling discriminated against.

“This song feels like doing the laundry at eight while my 15-year-old brother didn’t know the difference between a washer and a dryer,” said one, before another TikTok user added: “It feels like leaving my job because I was the lowest paid and then finding out they replaced me with a man who was hired at double my salary.”

“Labour doesn’t just allude to those manual tasks which cause gender imbalance,” says Paloma in a video explaining what the song is about.

“But also the overwhelmingly disproportionate emotional labour done by women in relationships.”

“Labour” will be released on 24 March.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in