Gender, Objectification and Reappropriation in the Dreamworld of Music Videos
By Nicky Ribbers
“Nelly ft. The St. Lunatics – E.I. (The Tip Drill Remix)” Press Ctrl and click on image to view music video
S1849492 LAX999M20
03/23/2015
MA Thesis: American Studies Supervisor: Dr. A. L. Gilroy
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I hereby state that this thesis is my own work except where indicated otherwise with proper use of quotes and references.
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Table of Contents
∞
Introduction p. 4
Chapter I: “Welcome to the Dreamworld” p. 14
Misogynistic and Pornographic Elements in Music Videos
Chapter II: “Still Not Asking For It!” p. 26
The Effects of Social Counter Movements and the Failure of Reappropriation
Chapter III: “I’m a Free Bitch” p. 40
Reconstructing Femininity and Breaking Free of the Dreamworld
Conclusion p. 51
“Somewhere in America, Miley Cyrus is still Twerking”
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Introduction
∞
Ever since the launch of MTV in 1981, which brought the world its first televised 24 hour music video station, the phenomenon of the music video has been exceptionally popular and thus increasingly important to recording artists and record producers. MTV did not by any means invent the music video genre, as music and motion pictures have a strong alliance that goes back as far as the invention of the latter, but MTV was the first to create a stage intended solely for the purpose of presenting music videos. MTV was described, before it was even named, by MTV executive John Lack as “a video radio station” and since record companies already made promotional music videos for internal use that could be used for free, MTV had little to no material expenses.1 The first ever song that MTV played was “Video Killed the
Radio Star” by The Buggles, a fitting choice as video did indeed take over and MTV managed to grow from a small novice TV station into a highly influential and international corporation. Whereas initially most music videos like “Video Killed the Radio Star” and Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” were straight-forward and unremarkable, it did not take long for the first ‘dirty’ video to make its introduction and pave the way for the sexualized music video culture that dominates MTV today. Marks and Tannenbaum, authors of I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, credit Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” with being the first dirty music video and claim that, in this narrow sense, it is the most influential music video ever made. “Girls on Film,” released in 1981, is a precursor to the many dirty music videos of today, not in the least because it also shows the first integration of porn film techniques in the world of music videos. Director Kevin Godley has commented on the racy video, saying, “Someone mentioned that at porn shoots, in order to get an erect nipple, you put some ice on it. So we said, “Why not?”2 This and other elements of the
1 Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
(New York: Dutton, 2011), 26.
5 controversial music video, such as graphic nudity and suggestive dancing, required it to be edited before MTV could air it; however, Duran Duran greatly benefited from the attention and controversy that the video inspired.
“Girls on Film” may have been the first dirty music video of the MTV era but it was not long until it was in good company. It became apparent to directors and producers that video was a medium that could greatly benefit and boost the popularity of a musical act, and sexually provocative music videos started to appear more and more frequently. During this period we see the first outlines of what Sut Jhally will later call the ‘dreamworld’ in his series of documentaries on sex, power and gender roles in music videos. The idea of this dreamworld is that music videos of all genres, whether it is pop, rock, country or rap, have created a male fantasy world where female bodies are a currency and male dominance is a given. The dreamworld is in fact a highly influential system of discourse largely solidified around the personification of male adolescent experiences and desires, which represents and influences how western society thinks about masculinity and femininity.3 As MTV and the
pop culture have grown tremendously in size and influence, the dreamworld has become all-encompassing, while the depictions of women in music videos have become increasingly explicit and pornographic. Examples of this can be found by merely turning on MTV or looking up popular music videos on YouTube by artists such as Pitbull, Jay Z, Miley Cyrus or Rihanna, many of which I have included in the digital version of this thesis.
Katherine Kinnick rightfully wonders how we got here in her entry in the book Pop-Porn: Pornography of the American Culture, as it is only a few decades since Elvis Presley could not be filmed from the waist down on The Ed Sullivan Show because it was deemed too racy. She mentions the concept of ‘ratings-inflation’ and claims that experts believe that what qualifies for a PG-13 rating today, would have been rated R several years ago as popular
3 Jennifer M. Hurley, "Music Video and the Construction of Gendered Subjectivity (or How Being a Music
6 culture contains a definite increase in sexual explicitness. MTV underwent a similar change in its attitude towards nudity and graphic language in music videos; even though some videos still need to be edited before they are allowed to air by the Federal Communications Commission, the overall explicitness of videos has also notably increased since “Girls on Film” and the decade of the early eighties.
Popular music videos, arguably more than any other medium, have portrayed male dominance and subsequently female submission during the period of the increase of televised sexuality. This is especially noticeable in videos of male artists because of the presence of the so-called ‘video vixen.’ There are many definitions of the term ‘video vixen,’ the differences mostly based on details, but for the purpose of this research it is defined as a female in a music video who is there to function simply as a prop through dancing, undressing, walking around in revealing outfits or performing other activities, without being affiliated to the artists or contributing to the actual music in any way. A good example of video vixens can be seen in the music video “E.I. - The Tip Drill Remix” by Nelly and The St. Lunatics that can be accessed on the front page of the online version of this thesis. Video vixens seem content within the boundaries of their limited role as a prop in the video and because they allow themselves to be portrayed the way they are in videos such as “E.I. – The Tip Drill Remix,” they are often considered the primary example of oppression and male dominance in popular culture. They accept their subordinate role in the video. Many videos, most explicitly of the rap genre, but definitely also within other popular genres such as pop and rock, show these scantily-clad women while they are doused with dollar bills or champagne as the male artists refer to them “in terms normally reserved for prostitutes and canines.”4 While it would be too
shortsighted to argue that this behavior is per definition harmful, Jhally rightfully discusses the poignant lack of counterbalance against this sexual aspect of the female identity.
4 Mardia J. Bishop and Ann C. Hall, Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
7 It is important to distinguish between the levels of empowerment and entitlement of the video vixen and the female artist. Many contemporary scholars and audiences believe that female artists in music videos, contrary to video vixens, should often be seen as “communicating a feminist view and promulgating feminist messages.”5 Robin Roberts is one
of the scholars who claims that in music videos, the politics of feminism have moved to the front row, as she writes that women are increasingly presented as strong and positive in her book Ladies First: Women in Music Videos. Roberts’ argument is based mostly on examples of music videos by artists such as Janet Jackson, Pat Benatar and Salt ‘n Pepa to name a few, and she encourages her readers to reconsider what she calls the standard, reductive dismissal of music video depictions of sexuality, especially female sexuality, and the assumption that any depiction of that sexuality will be exploitative.6
While Roberts is certainly right that not all depictions of sexuality are exploitative or harmful, I disagree with her when she claims that these female artists can reappropriate female sexuality with such great ease. While female pop stars may feel like they are empowered through reappropriation, they are still moving, behaving and dressing within the existing paradigms of the dreamworld. They still conform to the male adolescent fantasies and desires that MTV was designed to express, because even though female artists may act and feel feminist, they fit seamlessly within the existing portrayals of a female as perpetuated by the dreamworld and apparently have to be naked to convey their messages. Female artists are a definite step up from video vixens in terms of influence and empowerment, but with the music of the videos muted, it is often difficult to distinguish one from another, especially if in the video the female artist collaborates with a male artist. Even when female artists actively choose to embrace their sexuality and express it because they want to, which, in an ideal world they should be able to, they presuppose that their audience understands the statement of
8 reappropriation. As the current generation of MTV viewers has been raised amid the ever-present hypersexual female imagery in commercials, videos, movies, games, billboards and so on, this is a debatable presupposition. Anticipating my above mentioned argument, Roberts addresses this in her book by saying that “elitists such as Jhally” believe that music video viewers and artists can only be the dupes of media images rather than informed consumers.7 While the term ‘informed consumers’ raises an entirely new set of questions on who these consumers are and how many of them there are, which I will attempt to explore later on, the most important question remains whether reappropriation, which Roberts is a clear advocate of, can be done at all.
The fact that gender equality has not been attained in western society is significant in the rise of social counter-movements, some of a feminist nature and others quite the opposite. One of the most interesting contemporary social counter movements is a group of third-wave feminists who have organized the so-called ‘Slutwalk’ in several major cities all over the world. The Slutwalk movement was triggered by a remark made by a Canadian police officer who was speaking at a safety forum at York University in Toronto: “I’ve been told I am not supposed to say this. However, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”8 This remark outraged two local feminist campaigners who were shocked at this
account of victim-blaming, also known as ‘slut-shaming.’ They organized a march to the Toronto police office after they learned that this was not the first time that police officers had behaved in this fashion, often even in the presence of victims of sexual abuse. The first Slutwalk was an immediate success and inspired women all over the world to organize walks of their own, while each walk represented a local theme of importance for women.9
The most interesting aspect of the Slutwalk is its attempt at reappropriating the word ‘slut’, and while the walks have been dubbed by some as the most successful feminist action
7 Robin Roberts, Ladies First: Women in Music Videos (University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 61.
9 of the past twenty years, the movement is also exemplary of how difficult and challenging reappropriation is.10 This is mostly visible in the differences of opinion and attitudes the Slutwalk organizers have towards the word ‘slut,’ as some feel empowered by calling themselves sluts as they believe sluts are women with healthy sexual appetites, while others are bothered by the term’s negative connotation and its usage to oppress and shame women and thus they feel uncomfortable reclaiming it.11 A black women’s movement that wanted to feel included by the message of the Slutwalk felt uncomfortable reclaiming the word because it reminded them of its historical use by white men to denigrate black women.12 While these women all agree on the fact that women should never be ostracized or assaulted physically or verbally because of their sexual behavior or the way they choose to dress, a message that unifies them beyond borders or culture, they appear to be divided over the reappropriation of the word slut.
The concept of the Slutwalk ties into the discussion on music videos as it is the depiction of women and how they are generally treated by men in the dreamworld that the organizers are protesting against. While it should in no way be suggested that music videos determine the way adolescents and young adults view their own sexuality and that of the opposite sex, the sexual innuendo does influence them in one way or another. The lack of reliable information on the influence of the media will become apparent as this thesis progresses. Jhally draws a comparison between the way women are treated in music videos and the behavior of the attackers in the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City in 2000, where women were groped, doused in water and stripped naked by a large group of men in Central Park, behavior which eerily resembles the behavior of male artists in the average music video. These normal-looking men displayed a disturbing sense of entitlement to the
10 Symon Hill, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the Internet Age (Oxford, England: New Internationalist, 2013,
93.
10 bodies of their victims and completely disregarded the women’s attempts to fight them off and to escape them, nor were they affected when they cried. This is just one example of many vicious attacks on women that seem to have a misogynist foundation.
The sexual iconography of the contemporary music video often draws heavily on that of pornography.13 Music videos have strongly contributed to the normalization of society’s pornofication which caused hypersexual imagery to become rampant and part of our daily lives. These hypersexual norms have leaped over to other platforms of entertainment, such as Oprah and The Tonight Show, who both claim that dancing around poles is the latest and greatest in cardio fitness and thus try to convince women that activities that originated in strip clubs should be adopted as a cultural norm.14 Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs and the Rise of Raunch Culture, explains how women embraced rampant stripper chic as a form of rebellion while using the “rhetoric of feminism”.15 This is in a nutshell what we see in most female artists who consider themselves or have been called feminists. I will argue that it is therefore necessary for female artists to actually break away from the existing paradigms of beauty and femininity to be able to reappropriate their bodies and sexuality, as it is impossible to do this within the dreamworld. This requires a renegotiation of the concept of femininity, a daunting task to say the least. As we are all immersed in the dreamworld and often have come to accept its concept of femininity as our own, it is extremely difficult to attempt to think outside the dreamworld.
However, arguably there is one contemporary female artist who has come very close to breaking with these paradigms of female beauty, and that is Lady Gaga. She chose to construct her body in a way that is interesting and artistic rather than in a way that is considered traditionally beautiful and by doing so she stands out from the crowd of famous
13Jennifer M. Hurley, "Music Video and the Construction of Gendered Subjectivity (or How Being a Music
Video Junkie Turned Me into a Feminist)" in Popular Music vol. 13, no. 03 (1994): 331.
14 Meredith Levande, "Women, Pop Music, and Pornography," in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism
vol. 8, no. 1 (2008): 299.
11 female artists and is often described by the media as ‘weird’ or as merely ‘seeking attention.’ It seems as though Lady Gaga’s construction of her own divergent feminine identity has resulted in many people developing feelings of cognitive dissonance, which they resolve by labeling her as unattractive and crazy. Lady Gaga is the only female artist who comes close to stepping outside the dreamworld, as she challenges what female sexuality looks like. In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam, calls the singer a symbol of contemporary feminism and argues that this is mostly visible in how Gaga normalizes the abnormal in terms of gender construction. She shows her audience that it is acceptable to diverge from the standard depiction of males and females as perpetuated in the dreamworld and portrays a more fluid concept of femininity and even masculinity. Although this is why she receives the most of her criticism, it also makes her greatly loved by many others;
"The great thing about Gaga is she always wants to push for the most extreme option," fashion designer Gary Card said. "She's brave enough to let herself be a canvas for a designer to go and really express themselves. Nothing is off limits! With Rihanna and Beyoncé there is an end result of desirability and unattainable sexiness, whereas Gaga is a really interesting bridge between the desirable and the grotesque."16
Finally, I would like to elaborate on why I chose this topic for my thesis and explain why the debate on the role of women in music videos is relevant in my eyes. I believe that there is a ruling conviction that feminism is something that our society no longer needs, that there is nothing left for women to fight for after the previous generations of women ‘cleared the path’ for us. This is a conviction that originates from the post-feminism school of thought. In my generation, which consists of men and women in their twenties, the word ‘feminist’ is a
16 Ann Powers, "Frank Talk with Lady Gaga" Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2009,
12 dirty one, and I know very few women who would identify themselves as such. This is also illustrated by most young female pop stars who do not dare identify themselves as feminists due to misunderstandings on what being a feminist actually means. As a devout popular culture enthusiast, I like to watch a lot of music videos but I struggle to allow myself to appreciate the vast majority of them as they are so irreconcilable with my deeply rooted feminist beliefs. However, it is not in any way my intention to suggest in this thesis that people should stop watching music videos, as I know I have not, but I do hope to encourage young viewers to think about origins and intentions of whatever they are watching and consider the importance of feminism.
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Chapter I
“Welcome to the Dreamworld”
Misogynistic and Pornographic Elements in Music Videos ∞
The influences of pornography on music videos have been visible as early as in Duran Duran’s video for “Girls on Film” in 1981. As this video was an enormous success, porn and pop continued to become more closely intertwined, and by 1992, 63 per cent of the videos on MTV contained sexual imagery and that number has strongly risen in the years following.17 Similar to the development in music videos, porn has infiltrated almost all aspects of our popular culture, such as regular television, advertising, video games, movies and mainstream magazines.18 Sexual imagery in these various forms of media have become so common and frequently visible, that it can be considered normalized and unremarkable. The rise of MTV has helped create the dreamworld, a world where women are depicted as willing and subordinate nymphomaniacs that far outnumber men.
For real women that grow up in a dreamworld-influenced reality, these sexual images and stories have worked their way into their inner identity, desensitizing them and urging them to embrace objectification and misogyny. It must be said that theories surrounding the influence and effects of the media on the public have both been celebrated and questioned, and I recognize the simplicity and challenges of these theories. However, I would argue that being exposed to graphic nudity and explicit gender roles from an early age does influence what we consider to be the norm. Katherine Kinnick’s example of Elvis Presley being filmed only from the waist up in the 1950s because his dancing was considered too sexually provocative again comes to mind, while it is now fairly common to see naked breasts or more in a music video. Being more exposed to sexual content can therefore make us push our own
17 Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop, Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture, (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
2007), 10.
15 boundaries in judging what is acceptable. Ariel Levy exemplifies this sentiment in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, when she describes how she witnessed two young women on the beach being surrounded by men who were trying to convince them to expose their breasts and buttocks. Even though the women had repeatedly refused, after the promise of a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ hat and some perseverance, they complied. While ‘Girls Gone Wild’ has never been aired on MTV, it does enter into the world of popular culture by having artists such as Eminem and Snoop Dogg star alongside the women who bare their bodies. Levy has dubbed the development where explicit sexual content is pushed into the mainstream the rise of “raunch culture,” a culture where women are highly objectified and sexualized by both men and other women while being erroneously convinced that this is characteristic of female sexual empowerment. Raunch culture should be considered an important factor in contributing to and perpetuating of the dreamworld, with contemporary male and female artists as its (most likely unintentional) gatekeepers, while the dreamworld in its turn also influences and perpetuates raunch culture, creating a reciprocal relationship between the two.
Of all the forms of media, the lines between fantasy and reality have never been as vague as they are in the world of music videos as there is now a multitude of porn stars and musicians who venture in each other’s line of work. Adult entertainers such as Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy, Lisa Ann and Sasha Grey have all starred in music videos, while musicians such as 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Lil’ John and Ice-T can be seen hosting and rapping in the triple-x-rated adult videos.19 These crossovers have not just yielded an enormous amount of revenue, but also helped pornography emerge from its sleazy, back-alley reputation and elevate it into mainstream entertainment. Sut Jhally argues that other significant influences of pornography on the music industry can be clearly found in the use of certain filming techniques and stereotyping. The latter is most visible in the characters played by
19 Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop, Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
16 women in music videos, which are derived straight from male adolescent fantasy, such as nurses, stewardesses, schoolgirls, police women, strippers, maids and teachers. These hypersexual stereotypes were for a long time uncommon outside the realm of pornography, but can now be found in almost any music video, whether it is from Britney Spears, Blink 182 or Rihanna, and are portrayed by both video vixens and female artists. Apart from the harmful use of hypersexual stereotypes, it is perhaps even more disconcerning how women in music videos are filmed and fragmented. Jhally calls the visual techniques we see today in almost every video ‘the male gaze,’ when the camera slowly pans over a woman’s body or films her from above so that the viewer can look down into her cleavage. Other examples of the male gaze are women filmed from between their legs, women filmed while wet or close ups of female body parts which provoke objectification to an even larger extent, as this fragmented portrayal of women further allows for dehumanization.20 This is combined with male behavior in videos that often suggests their dominance over the women, such as money being showered on women’s bodies, credit cards that are run through their buttocks, men referring to women as ‘bitches’ or ‘ho’s’ and watching them dance provocatively. This macho behavior implies that the female body and sexuality can be bought, handled and controlled by men.21 The use of stereotypes, pornographic visual techniques and misogynist language serve as a less than subtle foundation for the dreamworld.
The dreamworld is so closely intertwined with our popular culture that it can be difficult to realize exactly how much influence it has on young women. Music videos make it clear that the most important aspect of a woman is her sexuality and young women are exposed to this ideology from a very young age. As 90 per cent of music videos are directed by men, our society continuously views depictions of female sexuality through the eyes of male authors, which results in women being defined by a sexual identity that is not
17 created.22 This is such a gradual development that many women do not question the construction of their sexual identity, but there are a lot of women who do feel uncomfortable when trying to conform to the standards brought on by dreamworld. Ann Wilson, singer of the band Heart, speaks about how she and her sister and fellow band member Nancy Wilson experienced the pressure from their record company to look and dress in a way that was considered sexy, while the male members of the band were not pressured in the same way: “When I watched them objectify Nancy, it broke my heart. (…) It hurt our feelings, and we felt jealous. The guys didn’t have pressure to be sex kittens.”23 This example of typecasting
women in the role of sex bombs is exemplary of what women have to do to fit in the dreamworld. Especially female artists have to match the imagery of the existing set of stories about what is feminine in order to remain relevant.
If we consider video vixens as a part of the male contribution to the dreamworld, because of their role as props used to decorate videos of male artists and assert their masculinity through their dancing, it would be logical to consider the videos of female artists as part of the female contribution. However, female artists in their own music videos do not use separate, female-oriented visual techniques that are different from those that stem from the male contribution. They use the male-oriented visual techniques that are already available and familiar to the public and themselves, which means that the contemporary female aspect of the dreamworld is accepting the vision of the pornographic imagination.24 This has resulted
in videos where the female artists are dressed like video vixens, that is, dressed like hypersexual stereotypes, while often singing about girl power and being strong, independent women. A compelling contemporary example of this behavior can be found in the video for the song “Pour It Up,” in which Rihanna sings about her monetary possessions and strippers
22 Dreamworlds III, directed by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2007), DVD. 23 Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
(New York: Dutton, 2011), 267.
18 sliding down poles, while wearing a thong, shaking her buttocks and opening her legs for the camera. She also pole dances, rolls around in four inches of water on a dance floor and dances with dollar bills sticking out of her underwear. The use of feminist rhetoric with sexual commodification is not incidental; the equation of stripping, prostitution, and pornographic imagery with power is the most popular myth of the dreamworld.25 The unbalanced objectification and sexual imagery in music videos have helped form the notion that demeaning women's bodies in exchange for profit is acceptable. What makes it tolerable for these women to perform the myth is that they are portrayed as powerful, like Rihanna in “Pour It Up,” as she imitates dominant masculine behavior by smoking a cigar and throwing around dollar bills at strippers.26
“Rihanna – Pour It Up”
Press Ctrl and click on image to view music video
25 Meredith Levande, "Women, Pop Music, and Pornography," in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism
vol. 8, no. 1 (2008): 301.
19 Robin Roberts would strongly disagree with the above-mentioned arguments and has claimed in her book Ladies First: Women in Music Videos that this “is a version of a critique of sexuality that can be traced back to nineteenth-century debates about the role of woman as either angel or whore.”27 Robert’s comparison between the virgin/whore dichotomy and
male-oriented female sexuality in music videos is interesting, as it seems that she considers the critique on the pornographic image of female pop stars a direct criticism of these women’s morals. That is a misinterpretation, as unveiling the dreamworld and the construction of female sexuality in popular culture is intended to create awareness among women of who is behind the camera and through whose eyes we see female sexuality. The question that the theory of the dreamworld raises is not whether an image, or a woman, is good or bad, the question is: whose story is being told?28
Arguably, it is wishful thinking that Roberts claims that feminist music video performers expose the tradition of the male gaze by reversing it and by appropriating the gaze for themselves, as there is no notable difference between the traditional male gaze and the appropriated one. Appropriation is a complex and difficult strategy for many reasons; for one as it is dependent on the audience to recognize the irony of using a technique, such as the male gaze, in a music video to assert a negative stance towards that technique. Almost in anticipation of this argument, Roberts claims that the theory of the dreamworld assumes that music video viewers can only be the dupes of media images rather than informed consumers. I argue that the theory of the dreamworld does believe in informed consumers, but it also believes in the desensitizing nature of the pornographic images that are present in almost every music video that children, teens and young adults watch. Our ideas of how a woman or a man behaves and what they look like have not been biologically determined. These ideas of femininity and masculinity stem our western culture and society, in the sense that they come
20 from the stories of our cultural expressions that tell us what is normal and what is not.29 Because they are so popular, a large portion of these stories are told to children and teens by music videos, and many others they learn from their parents, who in their turn have grown up influenced by music videos as well. This is a pattern of influences that has a significant impact on how gender differences are perceived and it is such a gradual development, that it often goes unnoticed. This does not mean, however, that audiences cannot become aware of what influences their ideas of femininity and masculinity. If the theory of the dreamworld did not invest in the possibility of informed consumers, it would not be intent on informing media consumers about the objectification and misogyny present in our daily lives.
An interesting contemporary example of the ironic use of dreamworld elements that backfired due to a misunderstanding of her intentions is Lily Allen’s video for the song “Hard Out Here”. Allen’s video begins with a scene where she lies on an operating table while undergoing plastic surgery as she watches music videos. Her manager and the surgeon discuss her physique and utter their disgust over her size, as Allen comments that she has given birth to two babies. After the surgery scene she appears to be making a music video accompanied by predominantly black, scantily-clad video vixens as they do a raunchy dance routine, only to be interrupted by her manager who then shows her how to properly shake her body, and in a later scene how to seductively eat a banana or wash the rims of a car. The video vixens are present throughout the entire video and engage in cliché dreamworld demeanor such as dousing each other with champagne, slapping each other’s bottoms, explicit dancing, throwing money in the air and bending over in front of the camera. These images are accompanied by lyrics such as: “Don’t you want to have somebody who objectifies you?” and “Inequality promises that it’s here to stay.” Allen also sings: “We’ve never had it so good, we’re out of the woods, and if you can’t detect the sarcasm you’ve misunderstood,” which
21 makes the ironic sexist intentions of her video and song seem obvious. However, she received a substantial amount of backlash because of it.
“Lily Allen – Hard Out Here”
Press Ctrl and click on image to view music video
Race and feminist campaigners have publicly stated their concern at how Allen, who describes the video as “a satirical swipe at sexism in pop music,” uses her black backing dancers as “nothing more than jiggling material.”30 It is unfortunate, but also realistic that the
majority of audiences do not understand that Allen has indeed used her black backing dancers as ‘jiggling material’ to demonstrate the misogyny behind all the music videos that constantly do this without the sarcasm. The fact that the women in Allen’s video are black is not because she is racist, but because in her parody she stays true to the fact that black women feature more prominently as video vixens in music videos than white women, especially in the hip-hop genre.31 Fans have also uttered their disgust over the video on social media, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, exemplifying the risks and difficulties of the ironic use of
30 Laura Cox, “Lily Hit by Race Row over Sexist Video ‘Parody’” Daily Mail Online,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507615/Lily-Allen-hit-race-row-sexist-Hard-Out-Here-video-parody.html, (accessed April 18, 2014).
22 dreamworld imagery and visual techniques. This is especially poignant because “Hard Out Here” is quite an obvious satirical video and it struggles to deliver its message to an audience, while Roberts even goes beyond that and argues that the male gaze can be reappropriated by singers such as Beyoncé, who make regular dreamworld-style videos, and claims that this will be understood by the audience without a problem. An example of such a video is “Video Phone” by Beyoncé featuring Lady Gaga. In this video a dancing Beyoncé is observed by men in suits with cameras where their heads should be, which is the ultimate visualization of the male gaze, but there is no clear indication that Beyoncé uses this differently from, for example, Sean Paul, who captures a video vixen on his own camera phone.
“Beyoncé – Video Phone ft. Lady Gaga” Press Ctrl and click on image to view music video
“Sean Paul – Ever Blazin’”
23 Lady Gaga participates in Beyoncé’s video and behaves in a similar way as the latter, which raises questions about whether she is the artist that manages to challenge the existing paradigm of the dreamworld. In Chapter 3 I will discuss this further. Roberts states that the method used by Jhally to argue his theory in the documentary Dreamworlds III, which consists of stripping the videos from the music to showcase the offensive nature of the images used, is a “cheap, easy and sloppy way to condemn the depiction of sexuality in music videos.”32 She continues by arguing that Jhally needs to “distort the normal viewing practice
(…) in order to create a false unity of image, implying a seamless construction of sexuality.”33
Roberts appears to be convinced that Jhally strongly dislikes the display of female sexuality in general; an extension of her previously mentioned argument about the virgin/whore dichotomy. While both Jhally and Roberts are interested in feminism and the advancement of gender equality, one feels that the latter has already been achieved while the other believes that there is a lot of work to be done still. I would argue that feminism achieved is a myth that (unintentionally) distracts us from the fact that we need feminism now more than ever.
Ariel Levy also attempts to embrace Roberts’ post-feminist stance, but she keeps coming back to the same questions that arguably challenge post-feminism as a movement: “How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? (…) And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job it is to imitate arousal in the first place – going to render us sexually liberated?”34 With these
questions Levy illustrates that the problem is not female sexuality in itself, but in fact the problem is that the stripper chic behavior, which is just one form of sexual expression, has become so ubiquitous that it apparently has become synonymous for female sexuality as a whole. Following Roberts’ thought process, when one feels uncomfortable with the hypersexual, allegedly empowering stripper chic role of a woman, it automatically means that
32 Robin Roberts, Ladies First: Women in Music Videos (University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 61. 33 Ibid., 61.
24 one is uncomfortable with female sexuality. This is an unfortunate notion as the stripper chic stereotypes are not created by women, and therefore should not be the main example of what a sexually liberated woman looks and behaves like. The word ‘liberation’ in this case implies a liberation from the sexual control of men over women, and thus for a third-wave feminist it will seem very odd that Roberts encourages women to identify themselves with a sexual identity that is inspired by the male adolescent fantasy, especially considering how first and second-wave feminists have demonstrated against these sexual stereotypes for decades. A fact that has also not gone unnoticed by Levy: “Only thirty years ago, our mothers were ‘burning their bra’s’ and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?”35
It is important to clearly define that the critical theorizing about the dreamworld is a feminist theory, intended to educate women on the objectification and misogyny that is present in their everyday lives. However, there is not just one type of feminism around; there are in fact many feminisms and feminist theories who differ in opinion on what we should do to further advance womanhood. As a critic of post-feminism, I argue that while there is nothing wrong with exposure of the female body, there is something wrong with being led to believe that taking off one’s clothes and complying with sexual commodification are signifiers of sexual liberation. There is also little wrong with music videos that use titillating, male-oriented, sexually stimulating imagery of women when there is sufficient counterbalance against that. However, the problem is that there is nowhere near enough counterbalance against this type of imagery in the world of music videos. One of the major issues regarding feminism is that there is little unity between different scholars such as Roberts, Jhally and Levy, who are all interested in the advancement of female imagery and
25 identity in popular culture, while strongly disagreeing with each other’s theories. As J. Jack Halberstam summarized an argument made by Susan Faludi, American feminism has a mother-daughter problem: daughters keep fighting with mothers, mothers keep being undercut by their daughters, and this, apparently, is the real reason that feminism never quite gets its revolutionary interventions right.36 This makes for a very interesting theory that I will further explore in the third chapter.
26
Chapter II
“Still Not Asking For It!”
The Effects of Social Counter Movements and the Failure of Reappropriation ∞
The constant presence of objectification and gender inequality in our western society has of course not gone unnoticed by many feminists, and has concerned and triggered them to action for many decades despite the fact that it has been ascertained in the previous chapter that different feminist movements do not always agree with each other on how to further advance womanhood in society. It complicates the achievement of the mutual goal of gender equality when one feminist would label certain music videos as “communicating a feminist view and promulgating feminist messages,” while another would see them as degrading and misogynistic.37 The theory of the dreamworld has quite a pessimistic viewpoint concerning the impact of contemporary feminism, or rather the lack thereof. The idea that the lack of sexual boundaries signifies female power is what maintains and contributes to the inequality between men and women, instead of showcasing feminism achieved. The dissidence between different feminist movements and the absence of a moral common ground has led to the rise of several social counter movements that protest against the cardinal imagery of the dreamworld.
One of the most interesting recent counter movements is that of the Slutwalk, a protest designed to shift the paradigm of mainstream rape culture, which the protesters believe focuses on analyzing the behavior of the victim rather than the perpetrator.38 As mentioned in
the introduction, the first Slutwalk was organized after a Toronto policeman in 2011 had publicly stated that women should avoid dressing provocatively in order to prevent being sexually assaulted; by doing so, the policeman placed the responsibility of being attacked with the (prospective) victim rather than with the (prospective) assailant. The first Slutwalk was
37 Robin Roberts, Ladies First: Women in Music Video (University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 3. 38 Mary Pharr, Of Bread, Blood, and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy
27 organized in Toronto via Facebook as a response to this insensitive remark and the thought process behind it and generated a lot of interest among like-minded individuals. The protest march has since gone global as it inspired women, and also some men, from all over the world to challenge the belief that women would somehow provoke sexual assault with their clothing or behavior by organizing a march of their own. Different local Slutwalks target specific problems that local women face in that area, such as the right to breastfeed in public or protesting against corrective rape against lesbians.
28 a woman with a strong sexual appetite and multiple partners, may for many women be an important goal but it is definitely not the reason for everyone to partake in a Slutwalk.
The disunity over the word ‘slut’ can also be applied to the interpretation of the name ‘Slutwalk.’ Is it a walk of sluts: women who enjoy casual, consensual sex, who fight for the right to do so without being judged by society, like men are also able to do? Or is it a walk of victims of sexual assault and their sympathizers who have wrongfully been labeled as sluts in the conventional definition; slovenly women with loose morals, because they did not actually desire sexual contact with their attackers? The latter would imply that there are in fact ‘real sluts’, real slovenly women with loose morals that the victims of sexual assault do not want to be associated with because they do not deserve to be. This is a dilemma that plays a key role in the Slutwalk movement, as the definition of the word ‘slut’ is exactly where protesters differ in opinion. Yolande Robson, a 17-year-old Slutwalker in London, said that “the word is often used to demonize women for having a healthy sexual appetite. So if you take ‘slut’ and you say ‘this is who I am’ and you reclaim it, it no longer becomes an insult. It becomes a source of pride.”39 Jackie de Paz, a 19-year-old Mexican-American organizer of Slutwalk
Riverside in California, does not think so lightly of the word as she claims that it “has been used to oppress us, to demean us, to dehumanize us, so it really is a difficult word to reclaim.”40 However, both sides intrinsically agree that a woman should never be shamed or
victimized in any way because of her sexual history or the clothes that she does or does not wear.
The attempts to reclaim the term ‘slut’ are further complicated for a lot of women because of its connotation of inequality, racism and its historical use by men and even other women as a silencing tool. The word ‘slut’ in the Oxford English Dictionary describes primarily “a woman who has many casual sexual partners,” and secondarily “a woman with
39 Symon Hill, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the Internet Age (Oxford, England: New Internationalist, 2013),
54.
29 low standards of cleanliness,” a more dated definition originating around the 17th century.
Thus, according to the Oxford English Dictionary men cannot be sluts, and unsurprisingly, it is a fact that there is not a similar word specifically targeting men and their sexual behavior. The sentiment that sexual promiscuity by men does not hold the same negative connotations as it does for women is also highly visible in music videos, where women are commonly referred to as sluts, or synonyms of that word, such as whores, hussies or bitches, and men are often referred to as pimps, hustlers, dogs or gangsters. Needless to say, the latter have entirely different connotations and imply a completely different balance of power than the former. Both the male and the female above-mentioned terms can be most frequently heard in hip-hop and rap videos, two musical genres that are dominated by African-American male artists, although it is used in popular videos of all genres. It is its historical usage by white men against African-American women that further complicates the reappropriation of the word ‘slut.’
An organization called Black Women’s Blueprint suggested a change of name for the Slutwalk because they felt that the term was a tool used by white men to denigrate black women. Black female sexuality is historically constructed as oppositional to the normative model of innocent white virginal femininity, which meant that the former could be used for men’s pleasure and the latter should be protected against it.41 Nineteenth-century sexual
ideology posited that prostitutes and black women provided men with the kind of physical safety valve that virulent male sexuality required in order to spare reputable white women.42 Therefore, according to the BWB, most black women would never be comfortable to refer to themselves as sluts, which they argue causes the Slutwalk movement to become less accessible and inclusive for ethnic women. However, the word ‘slut’ was important enough
41 Sikivu Hutchinson, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebel (Los Angeles: Infidel Books, 2013), 76. 42 Alecia P. Long, “"A Notorious Attraction": Sex and Tourism in New Orleans, 1897-1917,” In Southern
Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press,
30 for the founders to decide on keeping the name intact, and both parties agreed to disagree on friendly terms. Had the founders of the Slutwalk agreed on a name change, they could have expanded their reach and impact which would have helped them get closer to their goal of gender equality.
Apart from the racial connotations, there is another reason why the long-term reappropriation of the word ‘slut’ is unlikely to succeed. By reappropriating one derogative term, one cannot prevent the rise of new ones with a similar meaning to replace it. Even though the word ‘slut’ itself may indeed end up as a reclaimed term that many women will choose to embrace, its negative connotation will simply shift to a new word because the desire for such a derogatory term will remain. However, in the past reappropriation has helped with the necessary strides towards acceptance of people in the LGBT community, specifically with the word ‘queer.’ Queer was once an defamatory term, but even though it is still sometimes used as such, today it is also a legitimate academic term for studies that focus on sexual diversity and gender identity and a word that is used by LBGT people to describe themselves. An organization not much different from the organization behind the Slutwalks, called Queer Nation, started with the reappropriation of ‘queer’ and managed to disconnect it largely, though not entirely, from its homophobic connotation.43 While one should acknowledge the value of the reappropriation of ‘queer’, there are still many derogatory terms to describe people from the LGBT community, such as ‘queen,’ ‘faggot’ or ‘fairy.’ The reappropriation of ‘queer’ has therefore not eliminated the thought process of the people who use these pejorative words, which is essential in changing societal norms. A contemporary example of a degrading term ready to replace ‘slut’ is the neologism ‘thot,’ an acronym for the phrase ‘that ho over there,’ which is rapidly growing in popularity. This is an equally disparaging term as ‘slut,’ and therefore I largely reject reappropriation, not because it holds
31 no merit at all, but simply because it does not have enough leverage, since wanting to reclaim all words that are synonymous to a pejorative term would be highly unrealistic.
While the Slutwalk is making necessary strides towards the banishment of rape culture, one should wonder whether this culture can be sufficiently erased while western society is still influenced by the dreamworld. Without a proper balance between current dreamworld imagery and more positive representations in popular culture, it is inevitable that mainly children and young adults keep being influenced by the gender relations that they are exposed to on a daily basis. Teenagers are highly susceptible to external influences and pressures and more likely to be attracted by illusionary, immature and faulty thinking, represented by celebrity culture, which can eventually lead to premature sexualization, self-objectification and low self-esteem among teenage girls.44 At the same time it is possible that teenage boys adopt a sense of entitlement to female bodies and feel superior to women, because of the ever-present display of willing and eager women and their subordinate behavior in music videos. However, it should be mentioned again that theories on media influence and effects are quite controversial. Although there have been valid studies that show a significant impact of the media on kids and young adults, one should not be too quick to only point the finger at the media, as parents will always play a crucial role in the development of self-esteem and healthy sexual identities for their children.
With this nuance in mind, it is important to mention that the hypothesis of media influence is underlined by a comparison drawn by Jhally between dreamworld imagery and the attacks during the Puerto Rican Day Parade of 2000 in New York. What sets these attacks apart from others is not necessarily the gravity of what happened, as the attack on the Central Park Jogger in 1989 for example was far more brutal, but rather that these attacks were partially filmed by bystanders and perpetrators, which allows us to see and study the
44 Nikki Giant, and Rachel Beddoe, Surviving Girlhood: Building Positive Relationships, Attitudes and
32 similarities between the attackers’ behavior and the behavior seen in music videos. An important prelude to the attacks is that the men shower the women with bottles of water and spray them with squirt guns, leaving them soaking wet, which is one of the characteristics of the previously discussed visual technique of the male gaze. Even though the women clearly signal that they do not appreciate this behavior, let alone enjoy it, the men continue by chanting, “Soak her! Soak her!” and “Get that bitch naked!” Because of the warm weather that June, most women were wearing shorts or skirts and tank tops or t-shirts, which the frenzied mob started to pull violently in an attempt to disrobe them. Unfortunately, because of the fact that surrounding groups of men often isolated the women, many were indeed disrobed and exposed while the men were laughing, cheering and groping at their bodies as they tried to secure their clothes.
The similarities between a standard music video and this scene are the women who are scantily dressed, although not in the stripper-fashion of a music video, men dousing women with liquids and clothes that are torn off women’s bodies. The key differences are that none of the women in Central Park were smiling; in fact many of the victims were crying and everyone was trying to escape. The video footage of the attacks show that while the women desperately try to leave the scene, men violently grab their buttocks and breasts, which is a grotesque example of their apparent sense of entitlement. However, even more striking is how little the New York police did to help the victims of these attacks. An 18-year-old British tourist who had been molested ran to the police, but they told her only that she could file a report, while numerous reports on the news showed that the police stood around while the attacks were taking place.45 A similar story exists about the police during and shortly after the horrible attack on Trisha Meili, otherwise known as the Central Park Jogger, who was raped, severely beaten and left for dead in a ditch.
33 The reason behind the lack of action of the police is unknown and can only be speculated about, but it certainly seems to fall in line with the comment made by the Toronto police officer, and the claims made by the organizers about our contemporary rape culture and tradition of victim blaming. The prevalence of victim blaming and slut shaming in our society is once again illustrated by what happened in the case of the Central Park Jogger. After her grueling road to recovery, which consisted of waking from a coma and having to relearn how to walk, Trisha Meili faced several of these accusations. Oprah asked her during an interview if Meili thought she was invincible or if she was plain nuts for running in Central Park alone at night, apparently hinting that Meili has herself to blame for it, to which Meili responds that “it was not a smart thing to do, but that it is absolutely no justification for what happened to me.”46 She also recalls how the defendants’ attorney tried to trivialize what had happened to
her by trying to make her seem like a loose woman. “He was right in front of my face and, in essence, calling me a slut by asking questions like ‘When’s the last time you had sex with your boyfriend?’”47
One of the event organizers of the Puerto Rican Day Parade told The New York Times shortly after the attacks that in the future, rap music might be limited at the parade, asserting that some rap music had obscene lyrics that attracted potentially unruly youths.48 While several people, among them Puerto Rican rapper Fat Joe, immediately defended the hip-hop genre by stating that it is a convenient scapegoat for the parade organizers, there have been
46 “Oprah Talks to the Central Park Jogger,” Oprah,
http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-the-Central-Park-Jogger, (accessed June 21, 2014).
47 This case does deserve the side note that the five young black and Hispanic boys who were convicted for the
attack on Meili were all acquitted after it was disclosed that they were coerced into making false confessions, while there was no DNA evidence of the boys’ involvement. In 2002 the actual perpetrator confessed to the crime and this set in motion the acquittance of the five young men who were incarcerated for varying periods of seven to thirteen years. In June of 2014 it was reported that the men have agreed to a settlement of about 40 million dollars from the city of New York for the tunnel vision and racial profiling that occurred in this case. So while sexism, the main focus of this thesis, is an important issue among law enforcers, racism is definitely one too.
48 Will Comerford, “Puerto Rican Day Parade Organizers May Limit Rap,” MTV News, August 4, 2000,
34 several scientific researches that show the relation between hip-hop and increased sexual and criminal activity. Professor Murray Foreman from Northeastern University claims that “to say there is no influence and no effect is naïve (…) Hip-hop listening correlates with increased criminal behavior, sexual activity and drug use (…) Rap’s greatest effects are on children, where its influence can be particularly strong. A lot of young people listen to their (rappers’) lyrics and take their word as law.”49 Frequent watching of music videos has been related to an
increased risk of developing beliefs in false stereotypes and an increased perceived importance of appearance and weight in adolescent girls, according to a study conducted among a group of 837 ninth-grade girls of different ethnicities in San Jose public schools.50
Results from this study found that the total media use was not significantly related to perceived importance of appearance or weight concerns, but when media use was separated into distinct media genres, only the hours of music videos watching were related to perceived importance of appearance and weight concerns.51
Another study has been conducted by Emory University, and consisted of tracking 522 Alabama girls’ hip-hop video consumption and behaviors. This study has revealed that a higher consumption of hip-hop videos corresponded negatively with higher frequency of sexually transmitted diseases, alcohol and drug abuse (60 per cent) and multiple sex partners (twice as likely).52 There are very few studies that look at the objectification of women in music videos of different genres, even though I would argue that this also occurs in the vast majority of pop, R&B and rock videos.53
49 Jerry Kroth, Duped! Delusion, Denial, and the End of the American Dream (Santa Clara: Genotype
Publishing, 2012), 152.
50 D.L Borzekowski, J.D. Killen, and T.N. Robinson, “Does the Camera Add 10 Pounds?” National Center for
Biotechnology Information, January 26, 2000, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10638716, (accessed July
28, 2014).
51 Ibid.
52 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women (New York:
New York University Press, 2007), 26.
53 It is unfortunate that most studies are quick to adopt the idea that hip-hop is a bad influence on the youth,
35 While Fat Joe is quick to defend hip-hop against those who say it is a bad influence, he himself is hardly the example of a reputable role model, as for one he has a criminal record, and secondly, his songs contain the following and other similar lyrics: “I never seen an ass like that, I’mma beat it til tomorrow. And all I keep telling her is ‘shut up bitch, swallow!’ Your legs is shaking, I won’t hurt you”54 Of course these lyrics do not make Fat Joe guilty of rape or assault in any way, nor does it mean that if you like hip-hop, you are automatically capable of rape or assault. Statistically speaking, however, it would be silly to disregard the influences of hip-hop culture on society with fallacies such as “I love hip-hop and you don’t see me harassing women.”
“Fat Joe – Porn Star ft. Lil’ Kim” Press Ctrl and click image to view music video
One way in which rappers could take their responsibility for the above-mentioned statistics, is to make their beloved musical genre a more positive one by rapping about different themes, making other kinds of videos and using more respectable language. Tricia Rose, author of The Hip Hop Wars and Black Noise, argues that this is the way hip-hop used
findings are valid to a certain degree, I do believe this causes researchers to attribute too much of the youth’s unruly behavior to hip-hop, as they fail to discuss other factors and other genres.
54 Fat Joe, “Porn Star,” in Jealous Ones Still Envy 2, Terror Squad Entertainment, 2009,
36 to be before the economic imperative took over. Music by artists such as Chris Brown, Lil’ Wayne and 50 Cent is saturated with stereotypes of pimps and ho’s, in lyrics as well as in the videos. Rose discusses how there was a community-regulating factor in early hip-hop, because the music was created for multigenerational consumption, which meant that the language and the themes were very different from what they are today.55 She argues that, unlike contemporary hip-hop, early hip-hop had a lot of political content; it was focused on education, history and trying to change society. However, while Rose is critical of mainstream male hip-hop artists and the messages they convey to their young public, she is more positive about female hip-hop artists, who she believes address sexual power, the reality of truncated economic opportunity, and the pain of racism and sexism.56 She also argues that while male rappers often focus on social criticism against police harassment, female rappers focus mostly on sexual politics.57
In the previous chapter I recognized how some female artists are attempting to make feminist strides, but that these attempts have a contradictory effect due to the usage of the male gaze and often a lyrical focus on the female body that is very similar to way in which male artists refer to the female body. Arguably, this behavior preserves and confirms female sexual objectification, rather than challenging it, and Rose acknowledges this. She names Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown and Nicki Minaj as examples of female rappers who confirm sexual objectification, while she, like Robin Roberts, praises Salt ‘N’ Pepa for their female-oriented lyrics. I recognize and admire the efforts made by female artists such as Salt ‘N’ Pepa and Queen Latifa; however, there are not nearly enough artists like them, and they are not innovative enough to have a noticeable influence on the dreamworld, let alone that they offer an alternative. A remark made by Rose herself when dissecting the song “Tramp” by Salt ‘N’
55 Gilbert Cruz, “Tricia Rose, Author of The Hip Hop Wars,” Time, December 11, 2008, , 2014,
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1866048,00.html, (accessed August 1).
56 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1994), 146.
37 Pepa describes this problem on a small, song-based scale: “Tramp” is courtship advice for women who choose to participate in the current configuration of heterosexual courtship, it does not offer an alternative paradigm for such courtship.58
“Salt ‘N’ Pepa – Tramp”
Press Ctrl and click on image to view music video
While the organizers of the Slutwalk have made noble attempts at reappropriating the word ‘slut,’ reappropriation as a concept has proven itself once again unattainable, and arguably even undesirable. By fighting for the right to be a ‘slut,’ the organizers unintentionally divert the attention away from their true feminist cause; protesting against victim blaming and our contemporary rape culture, in which a women is held responsible for the sexual attacks made against her. Reappropriation signifies that we are willing to stay within the boundaries of the dreamworld, that we as women are willing to be defined by terms that are historically male-oriented. Terms such as ‘slut’ do not necessarily need reclaiming; they could also vanish and be replaced by something that is truly empowering, something that signifies that the female sexual identity is constructed by females and not males. I would suggest that feminists not seek empowerment in being called a slut and acting like a slut, as
58 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: University
38 the pressure in the dreamworld for women to embrace their inner stripper is already so prevalent. What would then be the drastic change for young women between the empowered slut and the repressed slut? How should they recognize the difference? Female empowerment could lie with a break away from dreamworld-based terms and imagery, and for that it is necessary to break away from the word ‘slut.’
The previously discussed attempted reappropriation of the visual technique of the male gaze struggled with the exact same issues. If there are two videos, both using the male gaze, but one from a standpoint of reappropriation and one from the traditional, male standpoint, how will viewers recognize the difference? Or perhaps an even more important, and slightly painful question: is there really a difference at all? Arguably, reclamation will not start the feminist revolution that is necessary, even though those who attempted it had the best of intentions. I have previously included the videos of Lily Allen, which was designed as a satirical representation of the dreamworld, and Beyoncé, which was intended to reappropriate the male gaze. Unfortunately, while Allen’s video was relatively obvious in its satire, many missed this completely and were outraged because Allen used her back up dancers as ‘jiggling material.’ Beyoncé’s reappropriation of the male gaze, executed in a far more subtle way than Allen’s satire, blended in effortlessly with regular, non-appropriated videos. To illustrate my argument even further, I will include two more videos.
40
Chapter III
“I’m A Free Bitch”
Reconstructing Femininity and Breaking Free of the Dreamworld
∞
In the previous two chapters it has been argued that the dreamworld and its pornographic, hypersexual, misogynistic imagery and lyrics are important factors in the rise and popularization of gender inequality and slut shaming. However, it is relatively easy to recognize the faults in a society, while it is much more challenging to offer a feasible and attainable alternative that can exist outside a utopic version of that society. This alternative may possibly start with a woman who is one of the most interesting and fluid personalities in the contemporary music industry, an artist who manages to confuse and shock her audience and fellow artists; Lady Gaga. This name is aptly chosen, because Gaga, derived from the Queen song ‘Radio Gaga,’ is synonymous with crazy or insane. Lady Gaga’s ability to shake the dreamworld to its core has also not gone unnoticed by gender theorist J. Jack Halberstam. In fact, he has even based an entirely new ‘type’ of feminism on Lady Gaga’s unique character. In his book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, Halberstam explains this new concept of gaga feminism, and how it is based on a lashing critique on the fixity of roles for males and females.
