Slut shaming, porny pop stars and Rashida Jones

I've been thinking a lot about slut-shaming over the past few months, possibly more so than usual because I've had my first unpleasant experiences of it in my own life, and nothing makes you realise how the personal really is political quite like your personal experience of being negatively labelled by other women. Rashida Jones learned the hard way that people are a lot less tolerant of public slut-shaming these days when she tweeted "This week's celeb news takeaway: She who comes closest to showing the actual inside of her vagina is most popular. #stopactinglikewhores".

 

Naturally there's been some major facepalms, a lot of vocal objection and many articulate takedowns from the feminist community on why Jones' choice of words and targets were extremely ill-judged, so I don't feel like there's a lot to add to it. However, when I read Jones' response in Glamour magazine, I did find myself agreeing with some of her points. I certainly don't agree with all of it, especially the unfortunate decision to use Lily Allen's recent cringeworthy video in her defence. I also don't buy her claim that she wasn't hating on sex workers by connoting 'whores' with despicable, undesirable, anti-feminist behaviour. I think she was probably just using the word without even thinking, so entrenched in our culture is a hatred and suspicion of women who don't have sex in the same way as us (i.e. those who have 'too much' sex, or too little, or kinky sex, or sex with women, or sex for money). I think that, unfortunately, much as I can believe that she really is trying to be a feminist, in using the word 'whores' to condemn other women, Jones has fallen victim to the kind of respectability politics that I wrote about in my last post, the ones which make women clamour to differentiate themselves from "other" women who are too slutty/fat/poor/working class/whatever just in order to get a pat on the head from society.

 

All this said, I do feel Jones is right on the money when she says "...let's be real. Every woman's sexuality is different. Can all of us really be into stripper moves? The truth is, for every woman who loves the pole, there's another who likes her feet rubbed. But in pop culture there's just one way to be. And so much of it feels staged for men, not for our own pleasure". I agree with these words so much, but I feel wrong-footed by the fact that this kind of thinking often comes from anti-porn, anti-sex work feminists (sex-negative, if you will). I feel like as a sex-positive feminist, I often end up stuck between a rock and a hard place when I try to suggest that there must be a middle ground between draconian, right-wing censorship and neoliberal acceptance of the total pornification of culture. Yes, I want to see female sexuality celebrated rather than shamed. But as Jones points out, what we're seeing is not real female sexuality - it's prepackaged, heterosexual, slim, white (or occasionally, horrendously stereotyped hypersexual bootylicious black), abled-bodied, young, cisgendered sexuality. It's hairless, it's odourless, it's flawless. It's also soulless, and bears very little relation to the experiences or bodies of the vast majority of women in the world.

 

You may say it's not my right to decide what version of sexuality is 'acceptable', and while that's true, I think it's just utterly insincere of any feminist to pretend that the saturation of popular culture with the same tedious writhing, panting image of female sexuality is not problematic. Yes, I want to support other women's right to do whatever the fuck they please and not be judged for it. I may not like what other women choose to do with that right, I might not even like the women themselves, but none of that should matter. Men enjoy the privilege of the unexamined life - when did you last hear a man upbraid Robin Thicke for 'letting the side down' by being such a consistently sleazy douchebag? - and if we want true equality, we should be supporting the right of women to make their own choices, even make their own mistakes, free of finger-wagging from the sisterhood.

 

But. But but but. I remain sceptical of 'choice feminism' precisely because no choice takes place in a vacuum, and as I pointed out in a recent post, this supposed 'freedom' that Miley, Britney, Beyoncé, Rihanna et al are supposed to be emblems of actually boils down to the freedom "to wear little, say even less and do whatever's going to sell records." And yes, those women have the right to do all that without judgement, but don't call that a feminist victory. Call it a capitalist victory, call it a neoliberal victory. Call it evidence that pop culture is ultimately about nothing but the lowest common denominator. But until Janelle Monae appears on my video screen in a tuxedo as often as Rihanna does while clothed in a few scraps of cloth, or Adele is considered as sexy as Miley, don't tell me feminism still doesn't have far to travel. Female pop stars are doing what they can within the restrictive parameters they're allowed, and fair play to them - it's not up to them to carry the weight of responsibility to all women on their shoulders, and Rashida Jones may well have missed the point and fucked off a lot of people in the process of expecting them to. But she was right to point out that it's utterly fucked up that women in the public eye are still offered such limited choices if they want to be successful, and she was right to demand better.

Rapey lyrics, Thicke and the dangers of oversimplifying

So, I hate pretty much everything about Robin Thicke's song and video, Blurred Lines. What feminist doesn't, right? I don't need to go into everything that's creepy, douchebaggy and borderline rapey about the song and video, because plenty of writers have already helpfully outlined it for me. I don't even need to bother satirising its tired, predictable retro-sexism and insidious endorsement of rape myths, because plenty of humourists have already created their own parody videos, and freakin' hilarious they are too. However, when I read this article, which draws links between the song lyrics and the words of actual rapists, I began to wonder if the Thicke-bashing has gotten a little out of hand.

 

Not that the twatty-sunglassed one doesn't deserve every term of abuse in the book every time he purrs 'I know you want it/But you're a good girl' and endorses the concept of 'blurred lines' that every vile git who claims women all mean 'yes' when they say 'no' uses to justify their misogynistic behaviour. But, I get a little uncomfortable when I read the following - "women, according to Blurred Lines, want to be treated badly.

Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you.
He don’t smack your ass and pull your hair like that.

In this misogynistic fantasy, a woman doesn’t want a “square” who’ll treat her like a human being and with respect. She would rather be degraded and abused for a man’s gratification and amusement."

Yes, I bridle at the notion that it's 'square' not to want to have rough sex - I've written extensively about how being 'vanilla' should not be a source of shame, mockery or used as evidence that you are somehow less sexually 'cool' than people who like it ker-razy in the bedroom. Shaming men who don't want to play rough with their female partners definitely seems to be part of a toxic cult of masculinity that defines manhood only in relation to violence. However, I object to the notion that a guy smacking a woman's backside and pulling her hair equals 'degradation and abuse'. I object to the notion that this could only be done 'for a man's gratification and amusement'. I object to the assumption that this is necessarily non-consensual. I object, overall, to the idea that rough sex is something that is degrading, only ever initiated by men, and only ever forced, non-consensually on female 'victims'. (And yes, I've written about that).

Now, I'd rather spend eternity chewing on broken glass than ever consider sex with a douchebag in Ray-bans who comes on to me by saying 'You're an animal, baby it's in your nature', but that doesn't mean that every single word that said douchebag sings must necessarily be sick, wrong and misogynistic. I also feel that to equate Thicke's lyrics with words that rape victims actually had to hear during their assault (even if some victims were happy to collaborate in this article) is to trivialise their ordeal somewhat. It's also just a bit meaningless. If I say 'I know you want it' next time I temptingly offer a spoonful of ice cream to a friend seated next to me at a restaurant table, am I also guilty of perpetuating rape culture? If one of my roller derby teammates calls me a 'good girl' when I finally get a skating move right after the 74th attempt, is that simply bolstering the 'Madonna/whore' divide? I'm being facetious of course, and I know that what happens in life and what happens in sex can't necessarily be conflated (I know also, of course, that rape is not 'sex'). But Thicke's video isn't sex, either. It's media. Dumbass, lowest-common-denominator media at that. It's three men and three scantily-clad women twatting around in a studio. And whatever terrible things we feel it may reflect or encourage in our society, it's not the worst, or the only perpetrator.

Just off the top of my head, I can straight away think of probably ten different lyrics from popular songs that contain potentially shitty attitudes to women. How's about "Turn around bitch, I got a use for you" from Guns n' Roses It's So Easy? Or the same band's Used to Love Her, subtitled But I Had to Kill Her? We could argue about whether the fact the latter song was apparently written not about a woman, but Axl Rose's pet dog, negates the fact it sounds like an endorsement for murdering your spouse, for as long as we can argue about whether the 'ass-smacking' in Thicke's lyrics is consensual or forced, and I guess we might not get very far. But if, like the author of the Sociological Images article seems to be saying, we're not going to give artists the benefit of the doubt, then I guess I'd better start deleting all my G n' R MP3s. By this logic, I guess we'd better ban Britney Spears' I Was Born To Make You Happy too, not just because it's a godawful song, but because of the female subservience that its title and lyrics are advocating. We should probably also go after Alice Cooper's big-haired, chains n' whips-themed 80s classic, Poison, for the lines "I wanna hurt you just to hear you screaming my name". And maybe we should also take to task Wham's Edge of Heaven for the moment where young George Michael trills, "I would strap you up, but don't worry baby - you know I wouldn't hurt you unless you wanted me to" although at least the violence there is premised on consent and desire.

Which makes me think, where do we draw the lines (and not fuckin' blurred lines, either)? If we're going to cite any song with remotely rapey lyrics as intricately bound up with the traumas of real live women who have been assaulted, it's going to be a very long and sickening journey. Jason DeRulo made the charts in 2010 with a song that contained the lyrics "You'll be screaming 'no'''. Not long after, Dizzee Rascal rapped "I'm not forceful but I'm still hardcore/You're gonna give me everything I ask for". And if we assume that the line "I'm gonna give you something to tear your ass in two" must necessarily refer to 'violent, non-consensual sodomy', then we're gonna have to retrospectively condemn pretty little Pharrell Williams for promising to 'tear your ass up', 10 years ago in his duet with Jay-Z 'Frontin'. Personally, I think this assumption says more about the author's determination to wring every last drop of rapey-ness out of Blurred Lines than it does the actual song. Taken in the context of all the other rapey lyrics, I can see why one would assign this meaning to that particular line, but I don't think the lyric refers to anal rape any more than I think the line 'Burn this woman down' in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest means that McMurphy is actually encouraging Billy Bibbit to set fire to his sexual partner.

 

It sometimes feels like feminists are required to take one of two very simplistic sides when it comes to sexist media - either condemning it utterly, as the SI article does, or jumping to its defence and claming that said media can somehow be twisted to be 'empowering', however much evidence there is to the contrary. I don't want to do either. I want to encourage people to see the utter pile of bollocks that is Robin Thicke, his songs and his videos, in a wider context. I don't think it's helpful or wise to employ the shock tactics of placing rape victims' real-life trauma alongside silly lyrics from a shitty song that is one shitty song amongst millions that will be infecting the airwaves this week. I also don't think it's helpful to anyone, male or female, who enjoys consensual BDSM and is tired of what they enjoy being immediately labelled abuse.

 

Pop culture is powerful, insidious and can influence us all in ways we may never be fully aware of. But like a short skirt or a flirtatious smile, it doesn't cause rape, and neither does a stupid hashtag or a douchebag in sunglasses.