By Daniela Elser, Entertainment Editor
IS this the sickest video ever?
The most misogynistic? Racist?
Kanye West’s shocking new video clip for his song Monster has split critics, fans and commentators since it leaked online recently.
The nearly six-minute clip features an onslaught of depraved scenes: hanged models dangling from the ceiling on chains; West rapping while casually holding a woman’s severed head that is still dripping blood; a bloody amputated hand; and Jay-Z spitting rhymes while a semi-nude woman in heels is splayed across a couch with the first signs of rigor mortis setting in.
The clip is the work of Jake Nava, the mastermind behind Beyonce’s Single Ladies, Kelis’s Milkshake and Usher’s Burn.
Some critics have denounced West’s dark fantasy as pushing the women-hating envelope so far as to reduce women to just flesh.
Social commentator Melinda Tankard Reist has denounced West’s work and started a petition against it, partly sponsored by the Coalition Against Trafficking Women in Australia, which has sought to ban the official release of the video.
“The music industry’s portrayals of women’s pain, suffering, abuse, objectification, and victimisation as valid forms of entertainment are not acceptable,” Reist writes. Read more here.
At the time of writing, there were 5,845 signatures on our petition protesting the Monster video. Let’s see if we can double it. Please sign the petition if you haven’t already, and share through your networks.
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2 Responses
Though I respect what you are trying to do and are completely for equal rights I think that you need to calm down. Kanye has become the media whipping boy since the MTV incident and too me this video is no worse than most of the other videos featuring half naked girls dancing. You can also tell by the title card that this is done in a more artistic way and is in no way just a publicity stunt trying to provoke a reaction. It actually resembles an art film in my opinion except…you know the rapping and stuff.
You probably won’t agree with what I wrote but please just give him a break, you might aswell go on about the half nakedness in runaway, and the provocative poses in the POWER videos.
Kanye is not a monster but he certainly promotes men’s continuing hated and contempt for women. But once again men are banding together, denying this latest piece of women-hating violent misogyny matters since men are not the ones portrayed as dehumanised sexualised commodities. Instead we have men once again claiming they know what is and is not male hatred and male contempt for women and once again it is men telling women to ‘calm down’ because it is just a video and poor Kanye must not be subjected to a so-called witch hunt. Would we hear the same claims if it was men who were being portrayed totally naked, bound in chains and hanging from the ceilings? I guarantee there would immediately be a mass of hysterical men all claiming such images are men-hating and it is the fault of those ‘nasty men-hating radical feminists.’
But because women continue to be portrayed and perceived from the male centric perspective as not human, we do not even supposedly have the right to condemn Kanye and his male cronies who are profiting from depicting women as dehumanised, sexualised commodities.
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Kanye is not being demonised but he is being held accountable for promoting women-hatred and he is only one of innumerable men within the music and film industries who continue to profit by depicting women as men’s dehumanised sexualised commodities and because we are not human men can commit whatever sadistic sexualised torture they wish upon women because it is just supposedly ‘fantasy’ and we must not challenge men’s right to view images of male sexualised violence being committed against women must we?
Remember in men’s view women are not human and hence Kanye has simply collaborated in an ‘edgy’ video which is certain to gross huge profits. No need to ask why so many men continue to deny fact this video is women-hating because to do so would make innumerable men very uncomfortable and men’s feelings must not be upset must they?