Third-Wave Feminism and Double Standards

Unblurring the Lines | STATIC

"A recent onslaught of tits-in-your-face (TIYF) music videos has catalyzed much hullabaloo in the blogosphere...

for years I was a more or less passive acceptor of the contradictions inherent in my favorite music genres. I love hip hop and R&B...

At Stanford I had the opportunity to learn from and connect with some of the world’s foremost hip hop scholars, who dropped more knowledge on me than I knew what to do with. They encouraged me to engage more critically with the voices in my earbuds, which in turn inspired some original musings about hip hop and feminism. The more I thought about the dissonance between my personal ideologies and the hot misogynist mess that is mainstream hip hop and R&B, the less passive I became.

Coming to terms with a genre that, as the fabulous Joan Morgan so aptly wrote, “repeatedly reduces me to tits and ass” has been a long and arduous process. “Sex positivity!” one of my many shoulder devils would tell me. “If the women in the videos are okay with it, then it’s fine!” Sure, but to what extent and on whose watch? Should we assume that video girls are formally debriefed on the risks and implications of their on-camera exposure?...

The women in each of these music videos are not the problem; patriarchy is the problem"


Apparently appearing in a music video is such a dangerous thing, and girls who appear in them are so stupid, that they need to be "formally debriefed on the risks and implications of their on-camera exposure?

Comments:

"Attacking “the Patriarchy,” from my perspective, seems like the squelching of male desire. And while you might think this has been a bad year for women, men haven’t had it that that great either for the past TEN years...

Having gotten back from a music festival where the majority of the women had no qualms putting some (or all) of their valued assets on display for every male (both wanted ones and unwanted ones) to ogle, it really did some quite like these lady festival-goers were all FOR blurring the lines as much as possible.

Me and my friends certainly had no issues with this, every woman has her choice to exhibit her body in any (legal) way they want, plus it was great eye candy to straight males like myself to complement the amazing music.

Where I did have a problem was that some of the OFFICIAL photographers for the event would walk through the crowd and thoroughly video tape the most attractive(and most scandily clad) women. They would walk around the girls dancing by themselves filming at all SORTS of angles, and I made sure to make goofy faces at the camera whenever I was in the shot.

I grew steadily more disgusted at the fact that some of them would even aim the camera directly at a girl’s ass as if this were an intro to a cheesy porn flick….to the point where I stopped my friends from raging to ask “Are these girls really okay with this?” And it seemed like they WERE, blowing kisses to the camera and shaking their asses right in the frame. These girls were not being paid for this, you know, voluntarily providing plenty of *free* footage of their ladyparts being accessible to any horny dude with an internet connection…..

Which brings me to my point: if, as an (articulate) speaker for Sisterhood, you really think you should call bullshit and unblur those lines, you should start by correcting the behaviors of your own kind. Men will always be men, and if women put their assets on display you have no right to be angry at them for looking at them. One thing I dont understand about this third-wave feminism is that it argues for gender equality yet holds men and women to completely different standards."


"these women (at least in “Blurred Lines” and “Tunnel Vision”) are technically not naked. They are wearing underwear. If a music video of a female artist came out and she had many beautiful men dancing around her and fawning over her–but in their underwear–would anyone blink an eye? Is addressing this issue of topless women in music videos creating MORE of a divide between genders? Topless men are socially acceptable, topless women could eventually be socially acceptable once the novelty wore off. I’m not 100% behind these videos and what they showcase, but I really don’t think drawing a lot of attention to the topless women in these videos is progressive to the feminist movement"

"You can shout about feminism and misogyny, but 50 Shades of Grey was the biggest best-seller in years and they’re making a movie of it. Without that, I don’t think these videos would be so bold and “in your face”. Thicke’s video doesn’t show women being harmed, it shows them teasing the men with their bodies and, importantly, not giving in. Try as he might to declare he knows she wants it, the women are often turned away from the men, giving them their backs. I don’t like the video but I’m not entirely sure it’s not a joke as the director says."