In Defense Of Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand has every damn right to be Barbra Streisand. That is the argument. Literally, that’s it. Take a second if needed.

Not because she is perfect, and not because every story about her has to be flattering. Certainly not because fame makes anyone immune from criticism. But because sometimes the culture looks at a person with once-in-a-century talent, presence, intelligence, humor, command, taste, nerve, ambition and staying power, and somehow decides the problem is that she knows it. I reject the premise in the strongest possible terms.

Barbra Streisand is not simply famous, she is monumental. She is one of those performers who makes the whole idea of “performer” feel too small. Funny Girl alone would be enough to secure the legacy: funny, aching, strange, radiant, sharp, vulnerable, impossible to ignore. She did not walk onscreen asking permission to be pretty, charming, talented, or feminine in the approved way. She arrived as herself, and the camera had to learn how to deal with it.

That matters because Barbra Streisand’s whole career has been an argument against sanding yourself down to make other people comfortable. She was funny without becoming small. Beautiful without becoming generic. Powerful without becoming cold. Romantic without becoming helpless. Commanding without becoming dull. Vulnerable without becoming weak. And then there is the voice.

There are technically great singers, and then there are singers who seem to bend the emotional weather in the room. Streisand does not just hit notes, rather she narrates the interior life of a song. She has that rare ability to sound both impossibly controlled and completely human.

Her duets are deserving of their own wing of the museum. Babs with Barry on “Guilty” is not just a pop duet. It is velvet lighting with adult chemistry and two voices moving like they know exactly where the other one is going. Her duet work has this strange alchemy: she does not disappear into the pairing, and she does not swallow the other singer either. She creates a world with them and that is harder than people think. A great duet is not two people showing off at the same time, rather it is conversation and tension.

Also a duet requires generosity and timing and Babs knows timing. This is the thing people miss when they reduce her to “diva.” That word gets thrown around as if it explains anything and very often it does not. More frequently, it is just a lazy cultural container for women who have standards, confidence, control, and enough power to make people uncomfortable.

Barbra Streisand did not become Barbra Streisand by being casually excellent. She became Barbra Streisand through precision, vision, discipline, taste, force of personality, and a refusal to let the room decide her limits for her. If that made some people uncomfortable, perhaps the problem was the size of the room.

And then we have the phrase that must be addressed: “The Streisand Effect.” I understand the concept: trying to suppress attention can accidentally create more attention. Fine. Useful idea, but attaching her name to it as some permanent cultural shorthand for backfired control feels deeply irritating because if we are going to name an “effect” after Barbra Streisand, it should not be that.

The Streisand Effect should mean something became funnier, smarter, sharper, more dramatic, more musical, more charming, more emotionally literate, and somehow better lit. The Streisand Effect should mean the standard went up. It should mean a room got more interesting because someone with actual taste entered it. It should mean the note was not merely sung, but understood. It should mean the thing had wit, contour, and nerve. It had a point of view and it should mean excellence refused to apologize for taking up space.

That is the Streisand Effect I recognize. Because Barbra Streisand is not an internet cautionary tale but a cultural force. The woman is a singer, actor, director, producer, icon, comedian, interpreter, stylist, and a damn institution. She helped expand what kind of woman could be centered onscreen and onstage: not the softened version, not the market-friendly version, not the easy version. Her. Just her.

And that is probably why some people have never known what to do with her. She was not “too much.” She was abundant, and that is a much different thing. “Too much” is what people say when they are trying to make their own limited capacity sound like your flaw. Barbra is not too much. She is full-scale and Technicolor, theater lights and immaculate phrasing, comic timing and emotional command. She is the person in the room who knows the note, the angle, the line, the feeling, and probably knows the lighting cue too.

There is a kind of person culture loves only after it has safely turned them into a statue. While they are alive, active, opinionated, demanding, funny, brilliant, precise, and inconvenient, people complain. Then later everyone wants to pretend they always understood the greatness.

Act now. Defend the greatness while it is still breathing. Barbra Streisand has earned more than polite respect, she has earned the right to be particular and the right to have standards. She has earned the right to care about the work and has most definitely earned the right to be funny, dramatic, exacting, sentimental, glamorous, stubborn, strange, and fully herself. And yes, she has earned the right to be called Babs with affection, awe, and jazz hands.

Not every powerful woman is “difficult.” Sometimes she is just right, but the room is underprepared and the culture mistakes confidence for arrogance. Barbra Streisand did not owe the world a smaller version of herself, she gave us the full thing: films, duets, glamour, intelligence, humor, ache, nerve, standards.

The essence. The phrasing. The voice. The presence. That is the real Streisand Effect.