A cultural reckoning is decades overdue, as women long dismissed as “difficult” or “unstable” are finally recognized for telling the truth—often at great personal cost.
An excerpt from Allison T. Butler’s The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture (The Censored Press), published March 8, 2026.
In 1991, Sinead O’Connor announced that she would refuse any awards bestowed by MTV because the channel ignored Black artists.
Later that year, she refused an invitation to perform on Saturday Night Live because the scheduled host, comedian Andrew Dice Clay, often disparaged women in his routines.
In 1992, she asked that the “Star Spangled Banner” not be played before a scheduled New Jersey performance because she felt it clashed with her music’s larger message.
Later that year, in October, she appeared on SNL to sing two songs, including her adaptation of Bob Marley’s “War,” whose lyrics she altered to reflect her concern with child abuse, particularly sexual abuse by Catholic priests. While singing, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. With this one, seemingly salacious act, O’Connor catapulted to a type of fame far different from what her first two, commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums had brought her.
Within days, O’Connor was excoriated by the popular press and either praised or attacked for speaking out against the Catholic Church. She was called names and made the subject of a protest, in which her CDs were steamrolled. Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesci both threatened her with violence, and SNL founder and showrunner Lorne Michaels referred to her behavior as “inappropriate.”
In the SNL episode following hers, as part of his opening monologue, host Pesci commented that O’Connor was lucky he was not hosting the night she performed, saying, “If it was my show, I would have gave her such a smack,” then visually demonstrated the smack, to audience cheers and applause.
Ripping up the picture of the pope was not impulsive; O’Connor had planned it carefully as a protest against the abuse of children, which church administration had ignored or covered up for far too long. O’Connor used her voice and her platform as a public figure to speak out against the abuse in a carefully planned moment of activism.
The picture of the pope that she tore had been hanging in her mother’s bedroom; upon her mother’s death, O’Connor took down the photo, with the intention to destroy it because “it represented lies and liars and abuse,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings.
O’Connor was inspired by Bob Geldof who, in 1978, “ripped up a photo of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta on Top of the Pops because their shit record ‘Summer Nights’ had been number one for seven weeks and finally Geldof’s Boomtown Rats single ‘Rat Trap’ had taken over.” Because Geldof was male and because Newton-John and Travolta were not the heads of a global religion, she writes, no one remembers (or cares about) him tearing up that particular photo.
O’Connor was still a teenager—though she was never marketed as a teen pop star—when her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released in 1987. She became internationally known for the single “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written for O’Connor by pop artist Prince, off her second album, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
While O’Connor was labeled a pop star, she never saw herself that way. From Rememberings: “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I’m a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”
She wanted to be known as a protest singer. In her book Why Sinead O’Connor Matters, cultural critic Allyson McCabe asserts that while it was “totally cool for U2, Michael Stipe and Sting to flaunt their activist bona fides,” female artists were supposed to stick to “singing sexual come-ons, love songs, or songs about nothing, baby, baby, baby.”
Introductions of O’Connor invariably mentioned her shaved head, with many assuming it expressed her defiance of feminine beauty rather than being a political statement. When the press seemed ill-equipped to imagine any other angle, discussing her shaved head was a way to talk about her body.
While O’Connor was roundly criticized for ripping up the picture of the pope, the passage of time has revealed: She was right.
If it was possible to turn a blind eye to the actions of the Catholic Church in the early 1990s, doing so became impossible when legacy news organizations began to report on the abuses. When The Boston Globe published its “Spotlight” series on serial abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church, what had previously been dismissed as isolated incidents of abuse were shown to be chronic and systemic.The Globe published 800 articles on the scandal, demonstrating not only that the documented instances of abuse were in no way isolated incidents, but also that Church leadership had known about and actively sought to cover up the abuse.
O’Connor exemplifies the value, and the danger, of speaking out. As a woman, to speak first, or even early, in the effort to push against injustice or to expose an ugly truth, is to risk scorn and, almost certainly, to undergo scathing attacks. It took an entire team of investigative reporters at one of the most prestigious U.S. newspapers to do what one woman had attempted to do on her own—alerting the public to abuse in an effort to stop it and secure justice for generations of survivors.
Over the years, O’Connor has been called many names—including, but not limited to, variations on crazy, mad and insane—which, in her memoir, she accepts. She concurs that she did “sensibly and truly lose her marbles,” in part because she was so young when she started singing. The lesson learned, she observes, is that “after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.”
O’Connor owned her story and did not shy away from her commitments to stopping child sex abuse by Catholic priests and to being open about her mental health struggles and honest about the physical, psychological and sexual abuse she endured as a child. While the popular press framed O’Connor’s tearing up the picture of the Pope as the end of her career, she saw it quite differently.
In Rememberings he observes, “I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track … I wasn’t comfortable with what other people called success because it meant I had to be as others wanted me to be. After SNL I could just be me. Do what I love. Be imperfect. Be mad, even.”
