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| Oops! My underwear shows! "Toxic" |
Without a doubt, in our days Media has come
to be perceived as a creative and powerful form that has been used through our
contemporary society to manipulate the general public in views on politics, law
and order. But it doesn’t stay up to that. Media is not only the message but
the messenger as well. All the information we need, all the messages that need
to be delivered can nowadays be found on the screen of either our TVs or our
laptops and not only. News, shows, movies, series, webpages, Facebook and video
clips are some of the “formats” this information can be delivered. I will be
focusing mostly on video clips (music), as it is one of the strongest “means”
to affect people and especially the minds of the young ones.
Watching video clips of different artists,
both male and female, in various music genres, it is so striking how women and
their bodies get exploited in order to attract the male population in a society
that is still patriarchic. Women are portrayed as objects of sexual pleasure
and desire, with appreciation shown only to their youth and body, leaving
behind skills they possess (physical and mental), their academic abilities or
leadership skills (for example) limiting their potentials to the eyes of the
general public. Even if we look at video clips in which the artist is a female
(you would think that being a female the video clip would have a totally
different character and meanings), most of the times the artist is still
hyper-sexualized. And then I wonder: why is that?
According to Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, women are portrayed in the films (video clips
as well) as an object of pleasure to the “male gaze”. This is because
(according to her) everything is structured unconsciously by a patriarchal
society. Everything is created and taken into consideration under the male
skeptic and desire. Having a look on pop video clips (pop is one of the most
likeable genre of music) this sexualized attitude is pretty obvious. Britney
Spear’s (pop music’s most favourited) music and video clips are quite good
example. In her song “Womanizer”, Britney is singing about a man who’s been
with her and she has discovered as time went by that he is a total womanizer.
She might like him, she might find him beautiful (“…You got me goin’, you are
oh so charming…”) but she can’t stay with him due to the fact that he is who he
is, a womanizer. Thinking about it and trying to put myself in her shoes, I
would be mad and disappointed, wanting nothing to do with him. So you would
think that the video clip would portray a strong woman, taking her life in her
hands and making a stand for her, leaving any pain he might have caused and
moving on. But that is not what happens. Britney throughout the video is
dancing in around in the office “torturing” her so-called boyfriend by pulling
and pushing him around. All this is done in a quite sexy and erotic way, with
Britney giving non-stop captivating looks to the camera and dancing by grinding
her body on the guy’s. As if this was not enough, there are scenes where
Britney can be seen in a kind of sauna (?) completely naked. These scenes are
completely incompatible and inappropriate with the general meaning of the song.
It is clear that the video is not concerning the female audience (with Britney
making an example of moving on from a womanizer) as much as it concerns the
male population. It is completely directed towards pleasuring the male eye in a
“secret voyeuristic way, in which the pleasure is gained by looking without
being seen” (according to Laura’s essay).
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| Scene From "Womanizer" |
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| "Womanizer" - a nude Britney in the Sauna |
Further on, Britney’s “Toxic” is another
stunning example. Being a song with weak and
“cheap” lyrics, what make this song a hit were not only its music and
rhythms, but its video as well. It is lying exactly between those lines of the
whole “idea” of depicting women as pleasure objects for the men to look at. In
the video clip, in specific scenes, Britney is almost naked wearing sparkling
costume revealing most of her body while at the same time she is on the floor
in some really sexual and provoking positions. As far as it concerns the scenes
on the plane, Britney is wearing her airhostess costume, with the latest being
short enough to expose her underwear. Adding to that is the clumsy moment where
she spills alcohol on a man’s groin area ending with the singer wiping of the
liquid in an erotic way (her giving sexy looks on the camera once more). Even
at the very end of the video, where Britney is out of her so-called fantasy and
she is back to normal, her posture and clothes are evoking sex and pleasure,
not for her or any other woman but for men and men only.
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| A revealing Britney in "Toxic" |
“Everytime” is one of Britney’s saddest
songs with the video clip, up to a generic volume, being sad and upsetting one
could say. But again, we can see a half naked Britney, wearing only a shirt
running in the corridors of what it seems to be a hospital, passing by her bed
where doctors are trying to bring the dead Britney back to life. So the running
Britney is her spirit. Why would one dress a spirit in a sexy and provoking
way? Not only this but at the beginning of the clip Britney is dressed quite
sexy as well, with her siting in a limo and the camera focusing on her nude
legs. The video ends with Britney waking up in her bathtub, apparently having a
bad dream. The whole angle of the camera is focusing on her upper body,
obviously an angle which if desired otherwise could be different (the capture
could be done sideways with the sides of the bathtub covering Britney’s body,
showing just her head for instance).
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| Coming fresh out of the bath... |
So my question is why so much
over-sexualization of the female in general and why so much exploitation of the
female figure? Why the depictions of men being sexy, sexual and evoking are so
scarce? Aren’t women sexual beings too? Aren’t they attracted to the exposed
male body? Well that is the tricky part. One of the reasons that the female body
is so exposed is not only because we indeed live in a man-controlled world, but
also because it sells. And it sells a lot! Producers and
men in high places in the film and music company take into advantage the male’s
population strong desire for pleasure. Men are more likely to pay for their
pleasure than women are, with pleasure being not just direct sex but any kind
of sexual pleasure even if it is just a look. That is where patriarchy comes
giving a hand on the completion of this purpose. With men having neuralgic
places in the media and society in general, this sexualization and misuse of
the female is much easier to achieve. For example Britney was “used” in way to
achieve such levels of eye pleasure in order to sell, with no-one standing up
to this, not even her. As a result women are set aside, or even worse pushed
back in the background only coming at the front to pleasure the dominant male.
Women are perceived weak in their nature, with no-one (concerning the male
population) caring about their true worth and potential rather than just a few
exceptions to the “rule”. The identity of the female is constantly getting
deformed and deteriorated. According to Butler “ […] Femininity and masculinity
are not expressions of ‘nature’, they are ‘cultural performances in which their
“naturalness” is constituted through discursively constrained performative
acts.” In a way femininity is affected
by the way it is performed and portrayed. So having in mind the above and
recalling representations of the female in videos and films (but also in every
kind of media) one can say that femininity and the female in general is there
to please the man. So how do we put an end to this or how to we reduce it? I believe
that women should make a stand for it. Female celebrities could give the
strongest example by changing the way they agree to be portrayed and focus on
the true nature of women and what they actually worth. Artists like Pink (who
you can read more about in my co-writers Charlottes blog) give new meaning to
women. Even when she is in a sort of lave; portrayed sexy she has that feminine
power and potential that every woman has. Beyonce is another example. Though in
quite a few occasions she is plain sexy and provoking, there are those
promising songs and videos where she clearly shows the female empowerment.
Reference List:
Storey. J. 2009, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction, 5th ed, Harlow: Pearson
Sturken M. and Cartwright L., 2001, Practises of Looking: an introduction to visual culture,
New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMqayQ-U74s - "Womanizer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzabSdk7ZA - "Everytime"
http://www.metrolyrics.com/womanizer-lyrics-britney-spears.html - "Womanizer" lyrics
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