Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes in the right direction. It seems that this did in fact happen in India, where the horridness of rape was given much more attention in the aftermath of the event, which triggered a firestorm of protest. (As for mass shootings and gun control in the US, to my knowledge nothing much seems to have changed since last year...)
And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here). That millions and millions of young (and not-so-young) impressionable people should be exposed to the truly disturbing message of the song is very, very worrisome. The catchiness of the song (yes, I’ll admit to its catchiness, which is really the merit of singer, co-writer and producer Pharrell Williams -- who, unlike Thicke, is a talented musician) only makes it worse, as it results in millions of kids singing ‘I know you want it’, ‘good girl’, and other horrific bits of the text. (It is particularly surprising that the three singers all seem fairly adjusted, family-oriented people; but what doesn’t one do for success…) The video is equally appalling, featuring three scantily clad female models interacting in unflattering ways with the three fully clad male singers (I’ll just mention hair-pulling and puffing smoke on one of the women’s face – see the video for yourself if you have to. Oh, and there is also an uncensored version!).
What is perhaps most disturbing about the whole thing is that, while the song provoked some heated reactions when it was released in March 2013 (among other things, it was banned at student events in several UK universities), what really set things on fire was Miley Cyrus’ performance of the song with Thicke at the VMA in August, which became the most tweeted-about event in history. So, as long as it was only the three guys and the three less well-known models performing pretty much the same act on the video clip, there wasn’t that much of an uproar; but when young lady Cyrus did the same on TV, the horror! Soon it was all about how out of line she was, but virtually nothing about Thicke’s participation, or even the complicity of the other musicians involved in creating this work of art that is ‘Blurred Lines’.
Some dissenting voices called on the double standards, and at least one blog post I came across discussed explicitly the importance of talking to our sons about Robin Thicke, not only to our daughters about Miley Cyrus. (As the mother of two very young but precocious, avid consumers of pop culture, this is already something I cannot bypass.) But overall, the general reactions have been disappointingly one-sided, and failed to point out that the real issue is with the very existence of songs like ‘Blurred Lines’ in the first place (and I know there is a lot more where this one is coming from…). In conclusion, I can only say that one of my wishes for 2014 is for less sexism and less veiled violence in pop culture – is that too much to ask for? (Never mind, I know the answer…)
UPDATE (January 3rd): As pointed out to me by a number of people, both here in comments and elsewhere, here's an appropriate response to 'Blurred Lines' (parody by Law students at the University of Auckland).
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