Nina Funnell, who I’m happy to say is become a regular contributor here on the MTR blog, has written a thoughtful analysis of the dead-women-are-sexy Monster video clip soon to be officially released by rapper Kanye West. It has been encouraging to see the issue attracting global coverage. Here’s Nina’s piece.
Sex, death and Kanye West: music clips need to get realSupposedly “sexy” music videos are usually not, writes Nina Funnell.
What do you think of music video clips these days? Too sexy? Too raunchy? Too smutty? Not me. I’m going to go out on a limb and say today’s video clips are not sexy enough. In fact, they are not sexy at all. And they never have been.
Watching heavily made-up women squeeze into too tight clothes and ridiculously high heels before grinding back and forth on an imaginary phallus, all while trying to maintain their contrived ‘come-hither’ look and big hair, does not make me think about sexual intimacy, true sensuality or deep and satisfying physical pleasure. It just looks like hard work.
Video clips said to be too sexual rarely offer anything other than a contrived, heavily choreographed and deliberately manufactured version of a hollow and artificial sexuality. It’s all so sad and so predictable.
Advertisement: Story continues below While many commentators argue that video clips over-sexualise women, the real problem is they actually deny the sexuality of women all together. Instead of analysing the clothes and dance moves within these clips, we should look at how desire functions.
As so often in popular culture, women are expected to appear desirable, but to be completely lacking in all desire of their own. The best example of this is Britney Spears in her Hit me baby days and Jessica Simpson circa 2002. Both Spears and Simpson stated they were virgins and intended to remain so until marriage. Meanwhile, they would grind back and forth wearing tiny outfits all designed to titillate. In other words their sexuality was to be consumed and enjoyed by everyone except themselves.
The “sexually rapacious virgin” is just one paradox of our sexualised pop culture. But a while back I began to wonder where our sexualised pop culture is really heading. At some point all the bouncy hair, big boobs and tiny skirts just gets old. These days humping a pole is not so much risqué as passé.
So once sex (or rather, the limited and stereotypical representations of pop-culture sex) gets tired, what becomes the new frontier in risqué representation?
Well, if the new Kanye West clip for his single Monster is anything to go by, sexualised death might just be the answer. In the teaser to the clip, two dead women in lingerie and high heels swing back and forth from a metal chain, hanging from the ceiling. Another two young women are slumped on a bed, like lifeless mannequins. A man advances on them. His intentions are clear. The whole clip is littered with eroticised female corpses.
It’s not surprising really. If sexualising live women has become boring, why not sexualise dead ones?
Of course many people will defend the clip in the name of art. Others will say viewers have the capacity to differentiate between dark fantasy and reality.
But others will disagree. Recently commentator Melinda Tankard-Reist criticised the blatant erotization of female death. In it she writes: “The men don’t seem horrified at all by the female corpses littered through the haunted mansion, the apparent victims of a serial killing. In fact, they seem to quite like it. It seems to turn them on.”
“The clip is not only interested in fetishizing female bodies – it revels in fetishizing female pain, female passivity, female suffering and female silence. The ultimate female is the quiet, passive female – a mannequin – who accepts violence, abuse and suffering while remaining hot and sexy.”
Since then a petition has been set up against the full clip being released.
So what are we to make of it? Is this just another articulation of our Twilight and True Blood inspired preoccupation with death and the eroticization of lifeless flesh? Or is there something unusually twisted, grotesque and misogynistic about depicting and sexualising dead looking women in this context?
Perhaps Kanye West is merely trying to be controversial and daring in an industry where sex (at least sex with living women) has become passe and predictable.
If so, he’s a bit behind the times. After all, the fashion industry has been depicting and sexualising passive, pale, expressionless and lifeless looking women for eons. Models with skeletal bodies and vacant stares have been the standard in high-end fashion advertisements for some time now.
The irony is that if we’re talking about what most red-blooded heterosexual men actually find attractive, it is rarely a sickly looking corpse. Most men I know are attracted to women who are active and confident in exploring their own sexual pleasure.
Maybe one day, video-clips will get truly radical and start offering representations of actual, three-dimensional females complete with realistic sexual agency.
Nina Funnell is a researcher in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of NSW. Read the piece online here.
3 Responses
Totally agree that raunch culture and pornography are remarkably UNsexy. I’ve been making this same argument for years. As genres, they are also strangely old-fashioned in their sexual politics – i.e. that men are active, while women are passive; that men DO, but women are DONE TO. It’s as if the whole sexual revolution and women’s movement never happened.
Yet those who produce and/or defend this kind of cultural portrayal of sexuality actually consider themselves sexually and culturally progressive, and that their critics must hate sex or men or both. Yet cultural genres that portray men sexually degrading women are innately regressive. Not only that, they ultimately degrade men even more than they degrade women.
My vote is that this obscene trash gets censored faster than you can say “tack-y”.
If anyone wants to object on the grounds of freedom of expression, I doubt censoring Kanye West will compromise the liberal democratic process. I want to be free FROM this stuff.
But a key reason why I think these video clips exist is because the Australian people actually want it. How sad.
Good point Nina – female sexuality seems to be becoming more and more misunderstood.