'Fascination' Revisited: A Darker Reading of Possession and Control

After publishing my analysis of Tracey Thorn/Everything But the Girl’s ‘Fascination’ two days ago, and re-reading it, I sensed something was missing. I presented it as one of the most exact songs about jealousy: not jealousy as melodrama, revenge or eruption, but as inward strain, civility under pressure, the incapacity to metabolise feelings about another person’s past. I still think much of this is true, but that reading was written entirely from the perspective of the singer and her feelings. What if one listens from the perspective of the beloved, to whom it is presumably being sung, or even from that of the former lover? Neither of these figures have any voice, but they are presented as if real people. Then one can hear it not only as a poignant account of jealousy, but equally a soft, intimate, musically sugar-coated portrait of possessiveness which begins to harden into something more troubling.

I wrote at the beginning of the previous piece about ‘negative emotions’, including cruelty, revenge, humiliation, contempt and jealousy, and ‘how the existence of such emotions is acknowledged, rather than wished away, and how they might find expressive outlet without causing harm, is something often explored more fruitfully in art and culture, with their greater openness to the irrational’. That is a position worth holding. But honest acknowledgment cuts both ways. The same rigour that refuses to sentimentalise jealousy away should also refuse to aestheticise it into something merely beautiful and self-aware. The song may be both of those things at once: genuinely moving and genuinely problematic in its relational logic. The analysis earns the first conclusion rather more fully than the second. I want to consider here whether the limits of sympathetic identification with the narrator involve not merely an analytical gap but an ethical one, and draw upon wider work I have been undertaking on emotional abuse in relationships, which will be the subject of a subsequent Substack article.

Nothing in what follows requires retracting the musical analysis of the earlier essay; musically, too, it still stands, though its implications look different from this angle. The same ceaseless oscillation between harmonic poise and inner tension, the 3+2 beat patterns, the restricted tessitura, Thorn’s measured scansion and her refusal of overt vocal inflation all still matter. But they can now be heard not simply as signs of jealousy’s refinement or forms of emotional seriousness, but as part of the song’s aesthetic softening of possessive pressure: the means by which it is made to sound civilised, intimate and harder to hear for what it is.

The sources revisited

The literary and philosophical genealogy assembled in the original analysis was deployed largely in order to contextualise the narrator’s inner experience. Read differently, several of those same sources offer something considerably less sympathetic.

René Girard’s account of metaphysical desire was used to illuminate triangular jealousy: the predecessor as mediator who heightens the beloved’s value simply by having preceded the narrator. But Girard’s analysis does not limit itself to illumination. Metaphysical desire instrumentalises the beloved, who becomes the site on which the struggle with the mediator is conducted, rather than a person desired in his own particularity and freedom. That is already a form of possession.

Marcel Proust’s Marcel, invoked through Gilles Deleuze, is the supreme literary instance not only of jealous love but also jealous control. Throughout La Prisonnière, jealousy becomes surveillance, confinement, interpretation without end. Deleuze’s ‘delirium of signs’ can sound glamorous in a literary context; in terms of a relationship it is hypervigilance. The narrator of ‘Fascination’ does not physically imprison her beloved, but may be a softer, emotional analogue of confinement. She is attuned, with the song’s own stated precision, to where the beloved goes, what places remind him of, what names arise in speech. The difference from Marcel is one of degree, not kind.

Roland Barthes, whose A Lover’s Discourse was used to illuminate the fourfold suffering of jealousy, is harder on possession than the original analysis fully allowed. The jealous lover seeks to possess not only the present beloved but the beloved’s past — to occupy retroactively the whole of the other’s erotic history. ‘I mustn’t wish your life began the day we met’ is not the overcoming of that wish but its suppression. The wish remains, and the suppression requires ongoing effort that is fully visible to him.

Melanie Klein’s ‘good object’, invoked in the original piece to explain the song’s tenderness, need not soften the darker reading. In Klein’s earlier ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), love is bound up with anxiety, guilt, aggression and the fantasy of incorporation: one fears losing the loved object, but also cannot quite bear its separateness. Tenderness and possessiveness are not opposites here. The beloved may be cherished precisely in ways that make his freedom hard to tolerate. On this reading, the narrator’s gentleness does not cancel the wish to control; it is one of the forms that wish can take.

Simone de Beauvoir’s Françoise in L’Invitée was cited as a contrasting case — jealousy that escalates to the wish to manage, contain, possess and ultimately annihilate. The contrast was intended to illustrate the narrator’s restraint. But it is a contrast of degree and terminus rather than of underlying logic. De Beauvoir’s broader account in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) of idolatrous love as bad faith (‘her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships’) fits the song’s emotional logic more precisely than the original analysis acknowledged. Françoise’s jealousy of Xavière begins in precisely the register ‘Fascination’ inhabits: sovereignty felt to be threatened by the free existence of another – in the case of the song, not present now, but who simply came before. What distinguishes Françoise is that she acts on the wish that the other had never existed. The narrator of ‘Fascination’ forbids herself that wish - but gives it to us in the act of forbidding it. This may represent not the absence of sovereign possessiveness, but its softened, late-modern form: the urge to contain another’s freedom by way of tenderness, vulnerability and moral pressure rather than overt domination.

The Beloved

Let us be exact about what the narrator is asking the beloved to do. Even if the song is to be heard primarily as an interior monologue, there is plenty to suggest that she has made various demands framed as requests before, and if this is something sung to him, these become stronger.

He is being asked to provide reassurance about pain he did not cause. His former relationship preceded the narrator, involved no betrayal of her, and ended before she arrived. It is nonetheless the source of her ongoing distress, and he is its designated manager. He is asked to prove something definitionally unprovable: not that he is faithful, not that he loves her, but that she has achieved equanimity. The proof she requires is of her own emotional state, and she requires it from him.

What makes this recognisable as potential relational pathology rather than temporary difficulty is its structural character: the proof cannot be supplied, the wound cannot be closed, the demand therefore remains permanently open. The song itself discloses this. She asks again not because the asking worked but because it did not. In the UK guidance on controlling or coercive behaviour, what matters is not one isolated incident but an intentional pattern over time, often cumulative, often made up of acts that might seem innocuous when taken singly. CPS guidance frames the offence similarly, in terms of repeated or continuous behaviour with serious effect. That does not mean a three-minute song licenses a diagnosis. It does mean that the relevant lens is pattern, not isolated sentiment.

And the song strongly implies recurrence. ‘Doubt is over now’ suggests an earlier cycle of doubt. ‘See how I’ve changed’ implies prior conflict, apology, attempted reform. ‘You talk and tell me’ sounds like an already familiar exchange rather than a first disclosure. Most explicit of all is ‘once again’. Once again: not for the first time, but as part of a pattern. This is an established script both parties already know. If he offers reassurance, he reinforces a structure that cannot satisfy; if he withholds it, he looks cold in the face of admitted pain; if he speaks naturally of his past, he wounds her; if he self-censors, he edits his own history for her comfort. From his side, the field of action has been quietly enclosed - not by prohibition, but by the reliable consequence of distress. The line about places reminding him of when he was there before, and the narrator’s vigilant awareness of this, suggests an attentiveness that extends beyond speech into space, association and memory. Simmel’s distinction between envy and jealousy already pointed in this direction: jealousy turns not chiefly upon the desired object, but upon the rival possessor. Once jealousy is understood in this possessive way, one can see how it may trespass upon the beloved’s autonomy. He is no longer left simply to own his own history.

Naming as Self-Justification

There is a pattern in the abuse literature that the original analysis did not reckon with fully: self-aware acknowledgement of harmful behaviour can function not as the beginning of its cessation but as a mechanism of its continuation. A recent systematic review of denial, minimisation, justifying and blaming in intimate partner abuse (here, like too often, restricting itself to male-to-female abuse, but equally applicable to the reverse) found that such distorted accounts are common and can operate not only as self-protection but as facilitators of abuse and as tools used instrumentally to achieve goals.

That is not identical to what happens in ‘Fascination’, but it is close enough to matter. The narrator knows she is jealous, that reassurance will not hold, that she has no right to past details, and that she mustn’t wish his life began the day we met. She knows all these things, and yet she asks again. Her self-knowledge may be genuine, but it also alters the field of his possible responses. She has already named what is happening, and named it more beautifully than he could. His protest risks becoming redundant, even cruel.

Similarly Lundy Bancroft, in Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (2002) (which should really be Controlling People), draws a distinction between acknowledgment and accountability. Acknowledgment is the naming of what one is doing - ‘I know I’m being jealous’, ‘I know this isn’t fair’, ‘my courage fails’. Accountability is the cessation of the behaviour and the repair of its effects. Bancroft observes that controlling individuals frequently demonstrate the former while avoiding the latter, and that the acknowledgment functions as impression management - evidence of the controller’s self-awareness and reasonableness that makes the behaviour harder to challenge. If she already knows it is unreasonable, how can he object? Her self-knowledge pre-empts his grievance.

There is also the line ‘If you were in my shoes and scared I would do the same’. This can be read as an expression of mutual empathy and self-awareness – but equally as an enlistment device. It drafts him into ratifying the burden she places on him, while the hypothetical aspect of the formulation – suggesting that he is not in her shoes, or has not been so – is a projection of her feelings onto him.

Romance as emotional blackmail

There is a further dimension, and it may be the most double-edged of all: the song’s extraordinary intimacy.

‘Fascination’ is a love song in the fullest sense. It is vulnerable, tender, self-exposing. The narrator shows him her inner life with a candour that is genuinely moving - the courage that fails, the irrational wish, the gap between performed composure and private collapse. This visibility is an act of intimacy, and intimacy of this quality may draw the beloved closer. It makes him feel trusted, needed, uniquely admitted to her private world.

But the intimacy and the control are not easily separable. What she is drawing him toward, through the beauty and vulnerability of the disclosure, is the same relational structure that could give him equal reason to step back. The exposure of her inner life is both genuinely moving and a mechanism to bind him more tightly to the situation that constrains him. He is invited to feel the weight of her pain, the seriousness of her love, the depth of her need. These are powerful solicitations. They make withdrawal feel like abandonment and resistance feel like betrayal. This is why the phrase emotional blackmail is not wholly misplaced, even if it remains morally uncomfortable. The intimacy becomes a way of making refusal costly.

Susan Forward, in Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You (1997), identifies a dynamic in which the expression of genuine distress - fear, hurt, vulnerability - functions to obligate the other person to remain and comply, regardless of whether this is the conscious intent of the person expressing it. Forward is careful to distinguish between manipulation and the sincere expression of difficult feelings that nonetheless obligate the other person; the distinction matters morally, but not functionally. What ‘Fascination’ offers the beloved is intimacy so complete and so beautiful that refusing its terms becomes almost unthinkable.

The song therefore operates simultaneously on two levels. As an aesthetic object, it is, through its very performance, an act of love. As relational act it draws the beloved closer in order to perpetuate the conditions that make closeness painful for him. The vulnerability, the tenderness, and the binding effect are all real. The intimacy becomes the means of retaining the other inside the scene - and what sounds like naked emotional honesty may also be a way of making refusal morally costly.

The former lover

The former lover exists in the song only as wound and trace: not as a person with her own history, feelings or claim on what occurred, but as a problem generated by the narrator’s pain. That is not open attack, but it is a kind of erasure. And the jealous attention directed at effacing her may achieve the opposite. Monitoring, requests for reassurance, and heightened vigilance towards associated topics and places can keep the rival more alive than indifference would. Worse, if the beloved is ground down by the impossibility of his position, the predecessor — who makes no demands and is simply gone — may acquire a retrospective ease. Not because she was a better partner but because her absence is free of the difficulty that the narrator’s presence involves. The jealousy risks generating, through its own logic, precisely the comparison it fears.

Comparison with ‘Every Breath You Take’

At this point there is some overlap between ‘Fascination’ and Sting/The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ (1983). The overlap is not literal. Thorn is not singing a song of present-tense surveillance in the blunt idiom of ‘Can’t you see you belong to me?’ But there is a family resemblance in formal misdirection. Sting himself described ‘Every Breath You Take’ as ‘a nasty little song’ about ‘jealousy and surveillance and ownership’, and has expressed repeated surprise that many listeners took it for a love song. One possible reason for this is that its musical surface – the clean guitar figure, the polished production – created an atmosphere of lyrical tenderness which offset the underlying possessive logic.

‘Fascination’ performs a related trick in a different register. It is tender, poised, intimate, even affectionate on the surface; but beneath that surface lies a wish to occupy not only the beloved’s present but his memory, history and inward life. If Sting’s song is the overtly proprietorial version, Thorn’s is its quieter, more shame-soaked and plausibly deniable cousin, no less possessive for being more beautiful about it.

Female-Coded Control

The more controversial question is whether the possessive pressure in ‘Fascination’ can be read as female-coded – and it can, if that term is used with precision. It does not mean that women are uniquely given to manipulation, nor that coercive control is chiefly a female phenomenon. It means, more exactly, that the conduct is legible in registers culturally coded as feminine: vulnerability, self-questioning, shame, appeals for reassurance rather than commands, indirect moral pressure rather than direct prohibition, emotional need presented as intimacy, and self-implication presented as honesty. The song does not say ‘you belong to me’, but in effect: ’help me bear what I cannot bear’. That is precisely why it sounds romantic rather than coercive. The pressure is administered through care-claims - and it is harder to see and harder to name and harder to resist precisely because those claims are genuine.

This matters because the form of control the song embodies maps onto a pattern in the literature on non-physical intimate partner violence that remains poorly understood and is still actively resisted in parts of the scholarly and advocacy world. The broader literature remains strongly gendered. Key texts including Evan Stark’s Coercive Control (2007, rev. 2023), Michael Johnson’s A Typology of Domestic Violence (2008), and Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) all share a primary orientation toward male-on-female control, and the institutional architecture built on them has treated as settled what should remain empirically open: who exercises coercive control, and against whom. In a 2007 commentary, Murray Straus went so far as to identify seven methods by which, in his view, evidence complicating the male-perpetrator/female-victim model had been concealed or distorted, among them selective citation, suppression of contrary data, and intimidation of researchers. As Jamie Abrams has shown, the movement’s gendered framing also served strategic institutional purposes: preserving domestic violence’s iconic status as a women’s issue and protecting the funding and infrastructure built around that model. The men left illegible by that settlement are still paying for it. Why does this bear on a song? Because ‘Fascination’ performs exactly the kind of control least likely to be caught by a framework configured around physical violence and overt intimidation — and because the cultural conditions that make such control invisible in the song are the same conditions that make it invisible in life.

The evidence on prevalence is considerably less settled than the dominant framing implies. John Archer’s meta-analysis found broad sex symmetry in many acts of partner aggression. His findings were not simply debated, but repeatedly contested and minimised by researchers working within gendered accounts of IPV. Elizabeth Bates’s work notes that while a considerable body of IPV research documents bidirectional violence across multiple samples, intervention frameworks still tend to read perpetration and victimisation through a one-way gendered lens. The Australian Institute of Family Studies review of research on coercive control acknowledges both the debate over the gendered framing and the difficulty of establishing precise prevalence. If even physical aggression rates are this contested, the underestimation of female-perpetrated psychological and coercive conduct - which leaves no visible marks and is harder to document — is likely to be more severe still. A 2024 mixed-methods study found substantial stigma around male victims, who were judged more harshly and sceptically and doubted whether services would respond effectively. A NatCen report on female perpetrators records stakeholder accounts of male victims being misidentified as perpetrators and met with ridicule. In another article, Bates found that a common response to male victims disclosing abuse - including from police - was laughter. A 2021 study found that men who sought help and found it withheld faced documented outcomes including PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation; one participant described being reduced to ‘the least a person could be, contemplating suicide on several occasions’.

A point of moral clarity is necessary here, because it tends to be evaded by those most invested in the gendered framing. Whatever the aggregate statistics show, every individual case must be treated seriously on its own terms. To diminish a particular man’s experience of coercive control on the grounds that it represents a statistical minority, or that the policy apparatus was built for a different population, is not methodological caution. It is a decision that his suffering falls in the wrong category to count. What scholars, practitioners or policy-makers have constructed across decades is a tiered system of suffering: suffering that counts, because it fits the model, and suffering that does not, because it complicates it. Scholars who continue to defend that hierarchy against contrary evidence are not neutral scientists awaiting better data. They are the architects of a harm they have declined to count.

The relevance to ‘Fascination’ is direct. One 2020 study found that non-physical intimate partner violence was generally judged less abusive than physical violence, and that stronger endorsement of romantic jealousy was associated with perceiving non-physical abuse as less serious. The song actively solicits both responses: its beauty encourages a romantic reading, and its self-aware narrator pre-empts the identification of her behaviour as abusive. A 2021 study on relational aggression in young adults suggests that indirect, relationship-centred forms of emotional aggression may in some settings be more often self-reported by women and more often reported as suffered by men. This is, structurally, the song: he is the one being acted upon; she is the one acting, in the register of need. Some behaviours that would be immediately legible as controlling if performed by a man - persistent reassurance-seeking, vigilant attentiveness to a partner’s speech and associations, the deployment of one’s own distress as a constraint on the partner’s freedom - become invisible when performed within the conventions of feminine emotional expression. They look like love. The cultural coding of female composure-under-pain as virtue is precisely what allows the controlling logic to operate undetected, in the song and outside it.

The Relationship

Whether ‘Fascination’ describes a controlling relationship in any strong clinical sense cannot be determined from three verses and a bridge. What it does describe, with extraordinary precision, is the emotional logic from which a hard-to-identify controlling dynamic can arise: one that presents as vulnerability, operates through genuine distress, forecloses the partner’s responses through reliable consequence rather than explicit prohibition, immunises itself against challenge through self-awareness, and binds the partner more tightly through the beauty of its intimacy.

That is what makes the song so unsettling upon repeated hearing. It renders jealousy beautifully, but may render just as artfully the kind of possessive conduct that beauty can soften, romance can excuse, and gendered expectations can help conceal. The song is genuinely moving. It is also, from another angle, an account of someone being quietly enclosed — by a demand that will not resolve, by a pattern that has already recurred, by a self-awareness that names the problem without ceasing to enact it, and by a romance so persuasive that refusing its terms feels like refusing love itself. An analysis that arrives at the first conclusion without seriously entertaining the second has heard the music but not quite listened to what it is doing.