Wandering From Point A To Point B

The Wanderer
A song by Dion

Oh well I'm the type of guy who will never settle down
Where pretty girls are, well, you know that I'm around
I kiss 'em and I love 'em 'cause to me they're all the same
I hug 'em and I squeeze 'em they don't even know my name
They call me the wanderer yeah the wanderer
I roam around around around...

Oh well there's Flo on my left and there's Mary on my right
And Janie is the girl that I'll be with tonight
And when she asks me which one I love the best
I tear open my shirt I got Rosie on my chest
'Cause I'm the wanderer yeah the wanderer
I roam around around around...

Oh well I roam from town to town
I go through life without a care
'Til I'm as happy as a clown
With my two fists of iron and I'm going nowhere

I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around
I'm never in one place I roam from town to town
And when I find myself a-fallin' for some girl
I hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world
Yeah I'm the wanderer yeah the wanderer
I roam around around around...

Oh yeah I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around
I'm never in one place I roam from town to town
And when I find myself a-fallin' for some girl
I hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world
Yeah 'cause I'm a wanderer yeah a wanderer
I roam around around around...
'Cause I'm a wanderer yeah a wanderer
I roam around around around...

---

Wandering Away From The Point

Am I imagining things or are the lyrics to this catchy old song somewhat misogynistic? You know, like

I kiss 'em and I love 'em 'cause to me they're all the same
I hug 'em and I squeeze 'em they don't even know my name

I know we all think more crassly in this day and age than we used to, but it sounds to me like Dion thought all women were all the same twats, thoroughly interchangeable, and unworthy of his manly loyalty. In any other fashion, though, women are distinctly different from one another, don't you think? Dion? Dion!

If he'd meant that they were all alike because he loved them all equally, the lyrics actually indicate to me that he does love them equally, but Not Much. He's celebrating HIS sexual being, prowess, and success, not his love of women. If he gets fond of one, he gets out of town in a hurry. Dion had a good fun tune to work with and, the year being 1962, he could not only be rude about women (though not crude), he could get away with it. Since he could, he did.

Yeah, that Dion, he's a real slick dick, isn't he? That must be what we thought at the time. Excuse me for saying so, but I'm just interested in the phenomenon. If he'd said what he meant more plainly (which was something like "find 'em, fuck 'em, and forget 'em"—the puerile fantasy of any teenage boy) in 1962, he'd have never gotten on the radio at all. I understand Dion became a born-again Christian in more recent days. I wonder what he thinks of his lewd young self now? I admit it's sort of funny, but it's also sort of sicko. There's always been things men or boys thought about the opposite sex without thinking they could get away with saying it. This wasn't always a society where when you told women to "Shut up", you could also address them as Ho or Bitch—not without getting a golf club in the groin.

I don't blame Dion too much, for that would require thinking about him longer than the length of this post, and I don't want to. I'm just shocked to realize that it took 40 years for me to run across the lyrics again and wonder why I never took the least exception to them. After all, I used to be a regular bushy-tailed liberal before I became this disappointed and cynical liberal. These days I don't care much if self-serving men and women kill each other with machetes if I don't personally know them and have to clean up afterward. But I used to care.

---