Being born in the mid-eighties,
watching women gyrate behind hyper-aggressive rappers and spandex-clad hair
metal shriekers on MTV just prior to Nirvana’s ascendancy form some of my
earliest memories. As I wasn’t quite
inured to the ins and outs of sexuality (and puberty was still some years away)
I generally regarded this as a good time to ignore the television screen for my
toys until the next slapstick Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff or Biz Markie video,
which appealed much more to someone who regularly wrote and addressed letters
to (and was disappointed to never hear back from) Bugs Bunny and Mighty
Mouse. As hair started growing in odd
places and my general thoughts of female classmates and peers (generally
“yuck!”) gave way to, well, yucky thoughts about female classmates and
peers I found myself increasingly drawn to the music videos I’d have once
ignored. By the time I’d entered junior
high, the likes of Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” and Britney Spears “Baby One
More Time” videos not only held me at rapt attention, but undoubtedly contributed
to sexist behaviors and attitudes it would take more than a few years and
long-term romantic relationships to improve on.
I’m not saying Jay-Z, for example, is the reason I spent the better part
of my teens and early twenties exhibiting problematic behaviors towards the opposite
sex but growing up in an environment in which Dame Dash and the members of UGK
can pour champagne all over a reclining, bikini clad woman’s breasts in the
“Big Pimpin’” video certainly didn’t help matters. While in an age in
which children can readily find pornography on their phones before they can
even spell “boob” music videos aren’t quite the gateway drug they once were to
terrible ideas about women, the art form remains one made with a male gaze and
an attitude that women are accessories or adversaries; objects of lust,
ridicule, and even violence. It is high
time to examine an artform that, for all of it’s technical and stylistic
innovations remains firmly retrograde in its approach to women (even when female
artists are at the helm): the music video.
In Performing Gender: A Content Analysis of Gender Display in Music Videos, Cara Wallis found upon a review of 34 videos that had played on MTV and MTV2 that women were far more likely to sexually touch themselves, dance suggestively, and glance in a “seductive” manner (2011) when compared to their male counterparts. This should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with advertising: however much the music video is an artform, it is ultimately a promotional tool used to encourage the consumption of a product and, frankly, sex sells. So it is that when courting a heterosexual male audience, forging an association between sex and an artist’s tunes is one of the surefire means of ensuring success. That the sexual association is based around a commodification of objectified female sexuality in a way that appeals to male ego fantasies versus a more nuanced, realistic understanding of feminine sexuality shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Not only is a straight cis male the individual most often marketed to, but these are most often the individuals behind the camera creating the music videos. Amy Mole, of the Bird’s Eye Film Festival, estimates that only seven to twelve per cent of film directors are women, a statistic that must also be true of music videos. (Love, 2011) When men control the reigns of producing, directing, and shooting music videos, it goes without saying that the “male gaze” is the predominant one, and furthermore that a liberal injection of feminist theory, feminist film theory in particular (the concept of the “male gaze” specifically) is needed to truly grasp the reasons for and ramifications of this sad fact.
Coined by scholar and filmmaker
Laura Muley in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, the
concept of the male gaze is that women are positioned before the camera as the “object”
of heterosexual [cisgender] male arousal. (Loreck, 2020) While it can be argued
that there are attractive actors onscreen, there is no doubt that agency and
personality tend to be reserved far more often for men. In the non-narratives and
extremely abridged narratives of the music video, this is made all-the-more
apparent. Whereas the object of sexual
desire in a Hollywood movie might at least have a few lines of dialogue (even
if just to stroke the ego of the protagonist), music videos can blatantly use
women as props and be unapologetic in doing so.
One of the biggest (and most controversial, now almost universally
reviled) pop hits of the past decade was Robin Thicke’s date rapey Marvyn
Gaye-pilfering Prince-as-a-rich-white-actor’s-son “Blurred Lines” from 2013;
beyond the lamentable lyrics (“you know you want it!”) was the uncensored
version of the music video, which featured nude models dancing amid a white
background while Robin Thicke, producer Pharrell Williams, and rapper T.I.
grope, prod and gawk at the young women.
At one point balloons smell out “ROBIN THICKE HAS A BIG DICK” as though
it isn’t on-the-nose misogynistic enough.
(I’d link the video for a point of reference, but it (a) doesn’t deserve
the views and (b) you can get a pretty good sense of what entails in the video
if you’ve ever seen an American Apparel ad.
Just imagine one of those, in motion, but minus the clothing). In the wake of #METOO and Time’s Up, even some
of those involved in that risibly outdated video have come to regret their participation
in the song and video (and not just because the estate of Marvin Gaye sued and
won royalties for the wholesale pilfering of a far superior Gaye track for the
beat). Pharrell Williams later went on record as being embarrassed by the song
and video, pointing out how growing up in a culture in which he was surrounded
by advertising likely had an effect on his seeing nothing wrong in the moment
with “Blurred Lines.” (Shaffer, 2019) Mulvey’s discourse on the “male gaze”
includes expounding on the idea of scopophilia, the sexual pleasure one
derives from watching. Women provide “spectacle”
while men function as the “observer”. (Loreck, 2016) Voyeurism, my dear Watson!
In “Blurred Lines”, this is readily apparent- a nude woman clutching a lamb
draws the eye away from the besuited men being creeps on their periphery, and
the men in the video in fact because a stand-in for the viewer. They are signaling that you too must gawk at
these lithe, nude women, and perhaps imagine balloons announcing to the world
that you too have a large penis. This is
arrived at in a most insidious fashion, as film speaks in a language of
structures that are strong enough to allow temporary abdication of one’s own
ego, while simultaneously reinforcing said ego. (Mulvey, 1975) Simply put, the
music video you are watching encourages you to take a backseat and adopt its
viewpoint, and in doing so, it reinforces your belief in similar viewpoints by
means of momentarily “borrowing” your conscious attention. To paraphrase Nietzsche (not something I
expected to type when I began writing this) “If you gaze long enough into the
twerking posterior, the twerking posterior will gaze back into you.”
Even more troubling is when one looks at the intersection of race and gender in the music video. Women of color, black women, are reduced almost exclusively to sexualized portrayals, in not only videos by male artists, but by female artists as well, many of whom are ostensibly attempting to subvert the male gaze, but simply by means of mimicking and “owning” it instead of countering it in a way that is perhaps more meaningful? While one can make solid arguments that videos like Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ or Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” are sex-positive and are the work of women celebrating their own sexuality (which isn’t wrong), it is worth noting that both of the hypersexual videos are the work of male director Colin Tilley, and should one dub over the rapping with male rappers and maybe digitally insert one or two ogling at the behinds of the artists both videos would be all but indistinguishable from the kind of videos I once found myself transfixed by during the salad days of my pubescence. Even when extolling feminist or sex-positive messages, black women are still expected to do so by twerking and flaunting the kinds of sexual stereotypes that have hounded black women since the dawn of this country, when they were considered little more than property (the logical endpoint of objectification- out and out ownership). As Frisby and Aubrey put it:
“Hip hop scholars
have argued that the sexual stereotypes of African American women found in hip
hop music videos—such as the Diva, Gold Digger, Freak, and Baby Mama—inform and
reflect broader beliefs about Black women’s
sexuality (Stephens, 2007). In male artists’ music videos, female characters
are often used as props, there for decoration but otherwise ignored (Arnett,
2002). Yet even when women are the featured artists, they still put themselves in
sexually submissive positions in their own videos (Dixon & Brooks, 2002,
2007; hooks, 1992).” (2012)
In the wake of the five leaps back progress-wise
that was the Trump presidency, it seems that one of the net positives of that
era is the realization that only mild progress has been made in the entertainment
industry where women are concerned, in terms of representation, treatment, and power
behind the camera (or awareness, anyways). I hope that with the renewed attention on
these imbalances that female creators can take the reigns of how they are
portrayed in their own media and that they can do so in a way that is at a
remove from the tradition of the camera lens being a stand-in for the libidinous
male voyeur. And even if some of the
conventions remain the same, as in the aforementioned “WAP” and “Anaconda”
videos, perhaps get some female talent in the director’s chair? I know there have been major strides in terms
of the representation and popularity of LGBTQ artists, from Frank Ocean to 100
Gecs and beyond, who’ve have managed to push back at the cisgender, straight
male gaze that we’re typically forced to look at the world through, and I’m
positive that women as a whole will increasingly be able to do so, at least so
long as the media and industry are being kept on their toes and held
accountable for contributing to such a toxic environment. Additionally, I am hopeful that young,
impressionable men will be faced with more honest, complex depictions of women
and their sexuality, depictions that portray the women as, you know, human
beings, with autonomy, versus being “hos” and “sluts”, which was the attitude
that was Trojan horse’d into my head at a time when the women in my life could
have really benefitted from my not subtly absorbing the messages of,
say, Eminem or Limp Bizkit or whatever it was that was pushed on 12-year old me
as being “cool.”
Frisby, C., &
Aubrey, J. (2012). Race and Genre in the Use of Sexual Objectification in
Female Artists’ Music Videos. Howard Journal of Communications, 23(1),
66–87. https://doi-org.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/10.1080/10646175.2012.641880
Loreck, J. (2020,
April 22). Explainer: what does the 'male gaze' mean, and what about a female
gaze? The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaze-52486.
Love, E. (2011,
October 23). It's time for women to call the music video shots. The
Independent.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/it-s-time-women-call-music-video-shots-1920051.html.
Mulvey, L. (1975)
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6-18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
Shaffer, C.
(2019, October 14). Pharrell Says 'Blurred Lines' Controversy Educated Him
About Sexism. Rolling Stone.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pharrell-blurred-lines-sexism-chauvinist-898544/.
Wallis, C.
(2011). Performing Gender: A Content Analysis of Gender Display in Music
Videos. Sex Roles, 64(3–4), 160–172. https://doi-org.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/10.1007/s11199-010-9814-2
