When I found out that our assignment for this week’s journal was supposed to be a music video free-for-all I was elated. I missed class and thought we were supposed to journal on the usual articles and books we’d read so finding out about this was a nice change. I chose to look at Christina Aguilera’s video “Dirty” and Fergie’s video “Fergalicious” in order to point out a few of the more ridiculous and somewhat outrageous bits in both videos. While both Christina and Fergie play up their sexuality, each video has a distinct connection to the feminist community and how women’s lives are being shaped today.
In “Dirty” we first see Christina and several scantily clad women enter what appears to be a wrestling arena set in a sort of pit below the audience of all male spectators. The girls are encouraged to fight each other cage-match style in a sense (because they can’t just jump out of the pit) and are cheered on by the men above them who scream and throw things at them. As I mentioned in my discussion questions, this scene is reminiscent of when the Roman’s used to watch their slaves fight to the death or fight for their lives against lions and other animals. If looked at this way, Christina’s video advocates the battering of women. What’s worse is that it shows women encouraging it too, right along with the men who’d be just as happy to join in the fight themselves.
I can’t help but think of Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools when I watch this music video, and pretty much all music videos showing women in barely any clothing. The influence of the patriarchy is pretty evident in “Dirty” based on what the women are wearing and how they’re dancing. Everyone is hyper sexualized. Despite all of this, Christina and her gang of female friends seem to relish the attention they’re receiving from the men, as though they were the ones with the real power in the situation. This led me to wonder whether or not the video was a social commentary on men’s perception of women, almost like a “screw you!” being shouted out from Christina and her girls as they proudly flaunted their bodies. But I thought about it some more and realized that this is just another master’s tool, and a good one at that. It did its job after all. I was distracted by the women’s clothing and dancing and not focused on the real issue that we see in the video, and that is the making acceptable of battering and sexual exploitation. As Lorde says, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” (pg.38, FF).
In Fergie’s video, we again see women dressed in pretty much nothing and dancing ever so sexily, but that again shouldn’t be the main issue. After watching 30 seconds of “Fergalicious” I started to notice things I didn’t want to. First off, Fergie is dressed in a baby doll dress surrounded by brightly colored candy reminiscent of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Later we see her dressed up as a girl scout, saying things like, “Fergalicious (so delicious) but I ain't promiscuous, and if you was suspicious, all that shit is fictitious” all the while dancing seductively and eating candy in front of the camera. This just screams child pornography to me. That and that the ideal that women are supposed to be virgins and innocent has fully infiltrated society and probably isn’t leaving for a long time unless we start getting realistic about sex. It really bothers me that Fergie is using the innocent card to sell sex because it attracts perverts. In my discussion questions I talked about how this video sort of relates to Muscio’s Abortions, Vacuum Cleaners, and the Power Within because of some similarities I noticed between Fergie’s video and the reading both talking about innocence in two different ways, Fergie’s being that she was innocent and proud of it, and Muscio’s being ashamed of her sexual activity (to an extent). This idea that being sexually experienced is bad needs to go. We have to stop selling sexuality through innocence or we’ll mislead the next generation of girls and boys growing up in America and watching these things on TV, not to mention how many pedophiles we’ll make very happy if we continue.
It’s like Enloe says over and over again in her article Beyond the Global Victim, we must get involved and find out about what’s happening to the women of the world. Take the movie Senorita Extraviada that we watched in class the other day. Without documentaries like that being made and taught in classrooms, how many of us would know about the femicides in Juarez? If we keep letting the patriarchy define our lives, if we keep letting the master’s house be our only source of support, as Lorde says (pg.38, FF), we will never achieve anything. Videos like Christina’s and Fergie’s keep spreading the message that it’s ok for men to ogle women and see them as objects. That it’s ok—and even attractive--for women to be hurt and vulnerable. That it’s not ok to no longer be “innocent.” It’s time for a change. The last thing feminism needs is another setback.
~Paige
No comments:
Post a Comment