[About Strange Little Girls and the concept.]
You cannot come up with this portfolio until you know the story of each girl in each song. So it was character building in a lot of cases. I had my think tank, and I talked extensively with each member of the team about each character before we staged the shots. Neil Gaiman wrote stories for each of the girls; they’re great. They were published in the Strange Little Girls tourbook. Neil, Mark, and I really felt, as I was nursing my little girl child in my arms right before Christmas in the year 2000, that a generalized image of the antiwoman, antigay heterosexual man had hijacked Western male heterosexuality and brought it to the mediocrity of the moment. At its core, this perverted male image was filled with malice and getting high off swallowing its own violent ejaculation.