Willow Smith is 12. In her latest release, Summer Fling, she sings about a summer romance. She gives an older boy she has just met her phone number. It was only a few months, but they “do it anyway… “and say ”I love you.”
She is shown holding hands, hugging, cuddling and flirting with the older looking boy. Lyrics include:
“You tell me that I’m the one / I tell you it’s just for fun / Don’t really care what we do tonight / Good night kiss ’til the mood is right.”
“Laying by the beach with you / Wishing it would never end.”
The issue isn’t that it is impossible for girls this age to have crushes. But it is the outworking of this in the video. It appears to be a more mature and ‘adult’ expression, not appropriate for a pre teen girl.
The summer romance appears to be with a boy who looks significantly older than her. In fact everyone in the video looks older than her. At least one of the guys in the video is old enough to have a tattoo on his chest. She’s the little kid jumping on the trampoline. She looks tiny in over-sized clothes as she parties with the big kids – and has a ‘fling’ with one of them after willingly giving him her phone number.
It looks more like a graduation party for 17 year-olds at which a 12-year-old girl has tagged along.
Is this Willow’s adolescent dream? Is it her coming of age fantasy? Or is it the fantasy of male producers and music marketers? Will other 12 year-olds think they should have the same dreams and desires?
Here’s the clip
2 Responses
Hook ’em in young is the porn industry’s mantra as evidenced by Playboy. Music industry is part of mens’ porn industry and the same tactics are being applied here to show pre-teen girls they too can obtain an adult male as a boyfriend!
Note the lyrics are typical male dominant/female submissive wherein Willow sings about ‘doing it anyway!’ I note all the other females and males are clearly much older than Willow and she looks out of place.
Is this designed to normalise adult males sexually preying on pre-teen girls? Because that is the message I’m seeing.
This is on a continuum on the child beauty pageants wherein five year old girls are dressed as female adults and the contest is about judging the female child who is most ‘sexually hot to adult men!’ Same message – all females of whatever age are just ‘males’ disposable sexual service stations’ and hide this male misogynistic message by glamorising and sanitising what this propaganda is really about.
I had big crushes at 12. Although the one time a boy actually did like me back, it freaked me out completely and I shut him down, poor thing!
There are heaps of little things off here (how tiny Willow is in those grownup clothes, how young she is compared to the others she is partying with, etc) but it’s the commercial visualization of adolescent dreams that creeps me out most, I think. This isn’t HER dreamy summer romance, or any other young girl’s. It’s a grown up man’s fantasy of a girl’s first love and coming of age, and the thought of other 12yo girls conforming their own dreams and desires to match the script makes me feel ill.