Fiona Apple’s “Pale September,” the penultimate track on her best-selling 1996 debut Tidal, is a love song—albeit one wherein she subtly subverts the masculine and feminine archetypes of the lovers therein described. In contravention to the tendency of most male-dominated media to presuppose a desirable man must perforce be aggressive, muscular, and forceful, Apple by contrast describes her male lover in what has historically been classified as feminine traits; and given the widespread toxic masculinity currently poisoning our public discourse (which never really left in the first place), this song is well worth revisiting.

She for example compares the object of her affections–whom she very clearly identifies with male pronouns–to “a water lily/Gentle on the surface,” just passively floating along; she similarly describes him as “Unweighed down by passion or intensity/Yet unaware of the depth upon which he coasts,” further emphasizing his basic zen passivity; she also praises him as “brilliant as the moon”—a traditional symbol of femininity, since it “borrows” its weaker light from the “masculine” sun—one who does not heroically rise above his circumstances or forcefully declares his independence, but rather “sank in the burrows of my keep.”

And perhaps most significant of all, she is not repulsed or turned off by this apparently passive man, but instead finds “all my armor falling down in a pile at my feet,” falling in love with him all the more, with “my winter giving way to warm, as I’m singing him to sleep.” The fall of her armor here is significant, because the knight-in-shining-armor archetype is much more commonly identified with a male hero. But then, throughout almost the entire album preceding “Pale September,” she has been defiantly aggressive and heroic herself: from the barn-storming opener “Sleep to Dream,” to the lead-single “Shadowboxer” and the deeply-sarcastic “Criminal,” she forcefully fights back against the various men who would constrain or control her, resisting them with spirit, strength, and will–which again you will note are traditionally identified as masculine traits in our overwhelmingly patriarchal society. Indeed, you will also note that throughout most of world literature, it is women who are presented as only being able to conquer their strong, heroic men–to strip them of their armor–through their meekness and weakness alone.

Yet Fiona Apple here has cleverly reversed the polarities: in “Pale September,” it is now the heroic woman fortified in armor, who finds herself conquered by the passive male before her. Of course, what she’s really calling attention to here is the (what should be) obvious fact that none of these traits are gendered in the first place: passive vs active, moon vs sun, gentleness vs strength, and so on and so forth, have no associated sex whatsoever–it is a false dichotomy–people of all genders can be found on one end of the spectrum or the other, or a wild mix of both. The very Autumn equinox that the month of September houses—the equal balance between the Summer and Winter solstices—seems to emphasize for Apple the even mix of the supposedly feminine and masculine present in all peoples.

This fact is often difficult to remember, especially in a patriarchal world such as ours, and doubly for a patriarchal religion such as ours, wherein there is not a single woman leader in our Church bureaucracy who cannot have her decisions overruled by a man, who are by and large expected to be content as the “auxiliaries” of the men, who are taught from girlhood to find their fulfillment in being the “help-meet” of a male figure, that they will be subject to a celestial brainwashing that will render them happy with plural marriage in the next life, who raised to prioritize “modesty” and passivity, whose unique doctrine of a Heavenly Mother is passed over in “respectful silence.” How quick we are to forget that when Joseph Smith organized the Relief Society in Nauvoo, he stated openly that he intended to establish among them “a kingdom of priests,” that women gave blessings of healing well towards the end of the 19th century, that Utah territory was the second in the U.S. to pass woman’s suffrage after Wyoming, that there is no passage of scripture anywhere that prohibits female ordination.

For that matter, it is explicitly laid out in scripture that the Priesthood can only be operated via these supposedly “feminine” virtues: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile” (D&C 121:41-42). Ironically, even if you are still fully committed to the traditional doctrine that only men can be ordained to the Priesthood, a man can still only wield said priesthood if he behaves like a so-called “traditional” woman. As in Fiona Apple’s “Pale September,” it is the men per D&C 121 who must become like unto “a water lily/Gentle on the surface,” “Unweighed down by passion or intensity,” and “brilliant as the moon,” if they wish to exert any influence worth having over others, female or otherwise.

This, again, has been the exact opposite trajectory that our larger culture has been moving in as of late: a literal confirmed rapist was last year elected over a woman–and that for the second time within the past decade–and 60% of U.S. LDS voters joined in on voting for the same each time. We are clearly still collectively committed to a form of patriarchy that “undertakes to cover our sins, gratify our pride, our vain ambition, [and] exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness” (D&C 121:37). These are sins we must repent of, and it is songs like “Pale September” that carefully gesture us into a better, more godly direction, “without compulsory means.”