In the particular decades of the twentieth century that ranged from the 1940s to the 1960s, emphasis on a girl being devoted to her man (and yes, always the word “girl” placed with “man” for optimal Lolita effect) was of the utmost importance to pop culture output. With songs as sappy in their dotingness as “Give Him A Great Big Kiss” and “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss),” the one that still takes the cake for arguably most pathetic in terms of clearly being the one more into it than the object of her affection is Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him.”
That the music to the song was originally composed by a man, specifically French arranger Franck Pourcel, in 1961 didn’t give much hope for the track transforming into anything other than some obsequious rant, the precedent for it being as such set by the fact that its instrumental incarnation appeared on an EP called La Voix de son Maître. And indeed, Little Peggy March (the “little” adding just enough of a belittling slant to her name) most assuredly treats the voice of her “loved one” as the voice of her “master” on this track as she sings with genuine earnestness, “I will follow him/Follow him wherever he may go/And near him I always will be/For nothing can keep me away/He is my destiny.”
And no, even Whoopi Goldberg as Deloris Van Cartier a.k.a. Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act could not transform the track into an anthem more geared toward free will. If anything, she makes the codependent cut even more worshipful by capitalizing the Him for the sake of repurposing the lyrics in honor of God. The thing is, Little Peggy March and her ilk of that time were already treating men like gods unnecessarily–and what had they done to even warrant such reverence apart from beat and deride? One supposes, “provide.” That was, in all likelihood, what got women on board with the delusion of obsessive l’amour: having their shit paid for since they weren’t permitted to get a high enough paying job them damn selves.
So it is that March insists, “There isn’t an ocean too deep/A mountain so high it can keep/Keep me away, away from his love”–his “love,” in this case, actually being his bank account. Therefore, like a creditor, she will chase him down throughout the globe in order to get the cash she’s owed for her emotional and physical labor, declaring that no phenomenon of nature can shake her off his scent. Not exactly what a man wants to hear when he’s either trying to 1) cheat or 2) full-stop abandon so he doesn’t have to pay for this bitch anymore.
In the present, of course, with men being unable to be pay for much of anything, least of all contraception, it would seem, that this level of devotion is even more unnerving on the part of a woman (prone to sustain said “adoration”–read: psychotic fixation–and attachment via the medium of social media stalking that can easily send a man into Unabomber-league hiding). For what has a man really got to offer these days to not only attract the interest of a woman but also sustain it to the point where she would chant, “I love him, I love him, I love him/And where he goes I’ll follow, I’ll follow, I’ll follow/He’ll always be my true love, my true love, my true love/From now until forever, forever, forever”? What’s more, the only type of man who would actually desire this tier of “ardency” in a woman is likely of a cult leader variety (surely Charles Manson secretly loved this song more than “Helter Skelter”). For no person allegedly packing a penis can handle such scrutiny or pedestal putting without going slightly insane–just look at the male products of Italian and/or Jewish mothers. Or really the male products of any woman who did not have an aspiration of her own other than child-bearing.
