Lana Del Rey has hit out at the accusations that she “glamorises abuse” that have trailed her throughout her decade-long career. In a lengthy text post to her Instagram account, the 34-year-old singer criticised “female writers and alt singers” who she says have blamed her “minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships” for “[setting] women back hundreds of years”. She wrote: “In reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.” She said she had been “honest and optimistic” about her “challenging” relationships: “News flash! That’s just how it is for many women.” From the release of her major label debut album, Born to Die, in 2012, critics have dwelt on what they perceived to be Del Rey’s regressive sexual politics. The influential online music site Pitchfork said of the album: “You’d be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire.” In a leaked draft of Kim Gordon’s 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, the Sonic Youth co-founder claimed that Del Rey “doesn’t even know what feminism is”. Gordon wrote: “Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey … who believes women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross old men or getting gang raped by bikers. Equal pay and equal rights would be nice.” The section on Del Rey was deleted from the final published version of the book. In 2013, Lorde told the Fader: “She’s great, but I listened to that Lana Del Rey record and the whole time I was just thinking it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: ‘I’m nothing without you.’ This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff. That’s not a good thing for young girls, even young people, to hear.” Del Rey clarified on Instagram: “I’m not not a feminist – but there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me – the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes – the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves, the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women.” She invoked a wave of recent female-led US No 1 singles, predominantly by women of colour, to make her point. “Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc – can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money – or whatever I want – without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorising abuse??????” Reflecting on a decade of such accusations, Del Rey said she was happy that she had “paved the way for other women to stop ‘putting on a happy face’ and to just be able to say whatever the hell they wanted to in their music – unlike my experience where if I even expressed a note of sadness in my first two records I was deemed literally hysterical as though it was literally the 1920s”. At the end of the post, Del Rey announced that her seventh major label album will be released on 5 September and that it was likely it would contain “tinges of what I’ve been pondering”. She also shared a photograph of her FaceTiming Jack Antonoff, who produced 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! – hailed by many publications, including the Guardian, as the year’s best album – leading fans to assume that he would be working on the new album. She also confirmed the release of two books of poetry with Simon & Schuster, the second of which would further detail these feelings. She said the books will benefit Native American foundations.