It seemed brilliant at one point, but it had really bad ramifications.
Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon recently said, "The idea of women empowering themselves by becoming sexual objects is backward. Does this mean that our music is no longer good? No, but it does make it harder to sell.Īs long as the music industry focuses on image, women are going to find themselves in a double-bind. I think this becomes clearer as we get older and are no longer considered attractive. As an older female-musician friend of mine pointed out, it isn't necessarily liberating or radical to see women in music using their bodies to sell records. While I agree that music is sexual, especially when you can dance to it, I also think that women are in a tough place when it comes to this stuff. It might make you feel powerful to look hot in your video, but it also sets a precedent that other female artists will feel a need to live up to (diet, plastic surgery), and it encourages music fans to think of you in terms of your body rather than your work. As long as we live in a society that uses sex to sell things, this is going to be tricky for women. While some female performers may experience sexual objectification as empowering, it may not be that simple. Madonna and Lady Gaga seem to be the rare exception to this rule by opting to comment on objectification as a part of the performance. If the mainstreaming of porn has meant more stripper-dancing in music videos - starting with heavy metal, moving to hip-hop and and settling in Top 40 -it has also meant that female artists are pressured to become those naked ladies in their own videos. This is true even in indie and underground bands, and is definitely the case in pop music. Any girl who has ever felt tempted to shave her head, or gone for a year or a lifetime without wearing makeup, knows how liberating this can feel, especially when you're young.Īll of this brings up the question of how women, and especially female performers, are judged on the basis of looks how our bodies are mediated by the marketplace. If you think what her hair meant to her and what it meant to a generation of little girls - she really did turn out a generation of little Britneys." Ditto concluded, "For this to happen is one of the most radical things ever." She went on to acknowledge that Spears was not in a healthy place, but noted that "it can be amazing and empowering" to get to that point. But isn't it interesting that, as a female performer, what she wanted control over was her own body her image?īeth Ditto, lead singer from queer indie-disco group The Gossip, read this as an act of defiance, saying, "I'm loving it. Obviously, she wasn't in a good frame of mind to be making any kind of decision. When no one would help her, she took clippers and shaved her own head.
I'm tired of everyone touching me" and demanded to be allowed to tear out her own hair extensions, bit by bit. I found it particularly intriguing that her freak-out was so tied to her image we watched, glued to our screens, as she said, "I don't want anyone touching me.
Clearly, she was losing her grip on reality, and there was a lot of money invested in her career, but maybe something else was happening beyond substance abuse and mental illness. What did it mean that her decline had been allowed to get to this point? Princess Diana-style paparazzi filmed her cracking up, and we watched it on YouTube. Like countless others, I watched Britney Spears' meltdown in early 2007 with an obsessive eye.
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