How Did Being a “Muse” or a “Groupie” Ever Become Something to Aspire To?

“I’m looking for a muse.” The go-to bio for almost every musician on Hinge (or really, take your pick of dating apps, they’re all the same.) Just last week, I matched with a guy who offered to “give me some strokes” because I liked The Strokes. Grim, right? I’ll admit though, at 18, that stuff used to get to me. Sure, let me be the muse of a guy playing guitar in his mom’s basement, fist-to-mirror in some tortured self-portrait of misunderstood genius. To me, it hinted at romance, the idea that someone would look over to me while I did something as ordinary as my 10-step Korean skincare routine and be struck by the inspiration to write a song about it. This notion of cool, of desirability, was mostly imported from my greatest enemy, the internet. 

When I was 15, I’d log onto Tumblr and scroll through a feed of pro-ana posts, The 1975 “Robbers” GIFs, and Harry Potter fanfics. And amid all that would be a black-and-white photo of Alexa Chung and Alex Turner, staring into each other’s eyes, crazy in love, blissfully ignoring the camera. That image would inevitably become a mood-board artifact, something that floated around for music-obsessed teenage girls like me to pin our fantasies on, imagining we’d find that for ourselves one day. I can’t judge. I spent my teenage years romanticizing exactly that. When you’re young, it’s easy to think you’re “different” because you like the things you like, things mostly celebrated by other self-absorbed people on the internet. If you’re here, I’d guess you’ve probably read I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres, or memorized the quotes from Almost Famous.

Even before I started Tonitruale, I’d worked in music for as long as I could remember. At sixteen, I was sidekick to a manager who I later found out was low-key a creep. I was also editing a music blog, trying to prove I was “beyond my age” by turning out sentences like Marcel Proust and managing writers over thirty who I wanted to take me seriously. Just a typical Tuesday for a sixteen-year-old, sounding like a French author and completely oblivious to how absurd it came off.

As time went on, I started seeing that “groupie”—crude and raw—and “muse”—sweet and ethereal—were really the same role, just two sides of the same coin. This might sound obvious, dear reader, but the idea of the “muse” still gets romanticized and filtered into daily life. Look no further than the “rockstar girlfriend” aesthetic on TikTok. Look it up, and you’ll find countless videos teaching you how to look the part, how to snag yourself a musician. Sure, there’s supposed to be a difference between wanting to date a musician and wanting to date some blue-eyed finance guy. But at its core, it’s the same game where you’re looking for someone to idolize, someone to make you feel like an extension of their brand. Finance and music might seem like opposite ends of the work-life spectrum, but the dynamic is eerily similar. Both seek to turn women into an Edie Sedgwick caricature, embodying some elusive “je ne sais quoi” that’s been painstakingly curated into the ultimate accessory, the first building block in constructing an identity. 

As a woman stepping into music, especially the so-called “golden era” of rock’n’roll, you’re confronted with an endless parade of representations of women. Representations being the operative word here, because that’s all they are. Not full stories, not explorations; just something to look at. The women in these images wear furs, their hair wild and perfectly disheveled, their eyes half-closed in a glazed look, standing next to some towering figure of a man, embodying a carefully crafted nonchalance. I’m not here to judge the women who inhabited those roles, why wouldn’t they? When someone calls you their “muse,” it’s tempting to revel in the idea that there are songs being written about you, that you’ve become a part of the art itself.

These representations of women still get stamped as muses today, celebrated as “inspiration” without a shred of interest in their actual ideas or opinions. It’s as if, wait, could they actually have a brain..? Being a muse still primarily serves men. I’m not trying to go full Andrea Dworkin here, but I think we can all agree on that much. Even you, bassist of the mid-level band who’s called at least three women your muse and cheated on them triple that. Wouldn’t you agree?

Andy Warhol, a figure in history who I hate, perhaps more than anyone, exemplified this damaging ideal. He built an entire cultural machine around beautiful women as living accessories, giving them visibility but withholding any real agency. Warhol’s fascination with the “women of the time” wasn’t based on their inner worlds or contributions, but on their capacity to enhance his brand of calculated disinterest. He inserted figures like Nico into his projects, not because of her creative voice but because she was “aesthetically” striking, an ethereal figure who could drape herself over The Velvet Underground’s noise and edge, making it more palatable, more "iconic." "As a women, being in the Facory was difficult. You have to be pretty, very pretty. Who could keep up with that?" recalls Amy Taubin. Nico, for instance, was recruited to the band, not to contribute musically but to serve as a beautiful shell, an ornamental fixture in Warhol’s Factory ecosystem. By reducing women to “faces” for his fantasies, Warhol reinforced the muse archetype in one of its most toxic forms, a role that’s prized for its beauty and mystery yet discarded when it loses newness. Ask Edie Sedgwick, she knows what I'm talking about. His world treated women as perpetual subjects, encouraging them to bask in the glow of his spotlight, only to abandon them when the allure waned. It’s a legacy that haunts the very notion of musedom today.

The “muse” is a deceptively insidious role, an archetype we’re handed as if it were a privilege rather than a reduction. I’ll admit that I once bought into it myself. Alexa Chung was simply an “it-girl” to me, a “muse,” whatever that nebulous term was supposed to mean. To me, she was more of an accessory to Alex Turner than a force in her own right. It took time and, frankly, some frontal-lobe development to realize her as the sharp, accomplished presence she truly is, a remarkable figure in fashion and television whose influence is meaningful and self-driven. But this is precisely the issue, that our culture loves to romanticize women as muses, as though passive admiration is as validating as active, visible achievement.

We’re still primed to be swayed by “it-girl” illusions, these roles that dress themselves up as novel but remain fundamentally unchanged. Trends may look fresh on the surface, but their core purpose, to cast women as inspiration rather than creators, is recycled endlessly, just packaged in ever more palatable ways. If you’re still debating a date with a musician, don’t. But if you insist on diving into that territory, go in understanding that you’re more than a mirror to his self-mythologizing gaze. Or, as FKA Twigs, ever subversive, says, “I’m not the accessory to the rockstar; I’m the rockstar.”