[Trigger warning for victims of violence]
When you look at this image, what do you see? An ambigious, complicated narrative? A post-modern analysis of culture? A man who loves his mothers and sistas? 
And what about this one? Do you see poetic form? Linear narrative fantasy?
How about this? Satire? Irony? A work of art?
These are the kinds of descriptions being employed to justify Kanye West’s Monster video clip, lyrics and general body of work. (You can find some of this analysis here and here).
When I see these images, I see violence against women. I see glamourised misogyny and eroticised violence. I don’t see Kanye’s carnival of carnage as an art form or as post-modern cultural commentary.
These images and more are available on-line (leaked version, no, I’m not providing the link) and coming to a TV screen near you when Kanye West’s almost 18-minute Monster video clip is officially released at any time.
Here’s another image.
That last one is from a ‘Behind the scenes’ You Tube clip. That’s Rick Ross by the way, tucking into a plate of raw meat while taking in the view of a spreadeagled dead woman on the table. Looks like those rappers had a blast making the Monster vid. I tried hard to see the satire but couldn’t find it.
Monster is a track on Kanye’s new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy which went platinum yesterday. His fans are calling him the best rap artist in history and a “genius.”
King Kanye has produced a carnage of female corpses, brutality, death. It is horror porn.
The Monster video depicts scenes of a murderous rampage with most of the dead being women. Dead women in lingerie swing from chains around their necks. Naked female corpses adorn the furniture. Two other female bodies are joined by West in bed. He kisses one. There are overtones of necrophilia.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates has asked, what if John Mayer decided to cut a video with dead black women strewn about?
Having viewed the preview and the behind the scenes clip, (which I first wrote on ABC The Drum/Unleashed) , I had wondered whether the full length version could possibly be more chilling. It is. There is the decapitated woman’s head scene (above). Nicki Minaj is a sword wielding dominatrix, terrorising her (at times) hooded female tulle-attired victim (Minaj doubles as both). Nothing like a bit of women-on-women violence to liven things up.
One exception to the dead-bitches-are-the-best theme is what appears to be a young boy being devoured by two female-like creatures. Of course this is to be condemned also.
The album’s one million sales will no doubt drive even more interest in the Monster video. Which makes the petition we have going against it even more important.
Sharon Haywood and I started a petition sponsored by Adios Barbie, Collective Shout, and the Coalition Against Trafficking Australia, (since also sponsored by Coalition Against Trafficking International and Media Watch) calling on Universal Music Group to withdraw the video.
The petition is directed to CEO/Chairman of Universal Music Group Doug Morris (umpg.newmedia@umusic.com) and CEO of MTV Judy McGrath. (judy.mcgrath@mtvstaff.com). It can be found here . (You can also read an interview with Sharon Haywood about the campaign, at this link ).
We believe that the mainstreaming of videos like this increases desensitized and callous attitudes toward violence against women. Young people are seeing images and absorbing harmful messages which glamorise misogyny and brutalise women. Women are reduced to sex-doll like playthings. The Monster video conveys a message that women are slaves and bitches who can service a man’s sexual needs, even when they are dead. Men are brutal and dominant, and have no empathy for women. Men enjoy dead women as sex and entertainment.
We decided to run this campaign because we wanted to challenge the status quo – the increasingly common view that women’s pain and suffering is perfect for entertainment.
We believe West’s work will contribute to a culture that is already dangerous for women and girls. West just paid $200,000 for a custom- made watch made with his face on it . Think what that could do to address violence against women. Violence against women we believe his work is contributing to.
Violent lyrics, combined with brutal visuals, are socialising young people and helping form their view on relationships and sexuality. Monica R, commenting on the Care2 petition site, wrote on the weekend:
…I am in the hood Monday through Friday. I teach there, in a very rough zip code. This crap is the ONLY music these kids listen to, so it has everything to do with violence against women because it forms their opinions.
OK, it’s just a video to you. But I have to hear the high school boy say “b–ches are only good for three things, f—ing, cooking, and cleaning.” I have to hear the high school girls refer to each other (their FRIENDS) as “b–ch” and “ho”, and hear them explain how you know a boy really loves you if he hits you.
I’d love it if rappers would come clean about their college degrees, but instead they pretend to be “hood” while living a wealthy lifestyle. They promote the ideas that the measure of a man is how many b–ches he can f—, or how much violence he can do, and that women’s only value is what’s between their legs, and as a punching bag. And that harms women and men.
While not specifically naming West, international recording artist Moby may as well have in this article from 2005.
In it, Moby asks why is racism seen as bad but misogyny seen as cool? He says anyone creating or promoting music which glamourises misogyny should be ashamed: “you have blood on your hands, and you should be deeply, deeply troubled at the culture that you’ve helped to create”.
i’d like to write about misogyny. a few years ago when the prodigy released ‘smack my bitch up’ i spoke up and criticised the song for being overtly misogynystic and irresponsible. i was in turn criticised on radio for ‘being too uptight’ and not being relaxed enough to appreciate the ‘humor’ in misogyny.
then 5 years ago i spoke up about the pernicious and pervasive spread of misogyny in popular culture, and again i was crticised for making a big issue out of something that no one else seemed to care about.
i respect the prodigy and i respect eminem as talented and relevant musicians, but i spoke up because i found the misogynystic content of their lyrics(among many others) to be deeply offensive. even if they themselves are not misogynysts
i found it irresponsible that they, and many others, would release music that glamourized misogyny.
2 months after ‘smack my bitch up’ was released i went to visit a friend of mine who was in hospital after being beaten by her boyfriend. she had brain damage and multiple fractures due to his pushing her down a flight of concrete stairs.
misogyny is not funny. it is not a joke. and it should not be treated lightly.
and now we find out that a british man who is obsessed with eminem killed a woman with a metal baseball bat
and stuffed her body into a suitcase.
am i being ‘too uptight’ for not seeing the humor in this?
should i ‘relax’ and see the comedy in a misogynyst beating a woman to death? Read full article here
Bob Herbert in an article titled ‘Women at Risk’ in the New York Times in 2009, made this point:
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment. Read full article here
Let Universal and MTV know that the victimization of women as a valid form of entertainment is never acceptable and the video needs to be withdrawn. Kanye West and his management should also apologise.
Join crime writer Tara Moss (who became signatory 2000 yesterday!) and add your name to the petition today.
13 Responses
I can’t even read this… the images disgust me so much I could puke
Well done MTR: you’ve learned not to provide the link.
Now how abut you do something about disguising those children’s faces in your Vogue piece?
Thanks Catherine. No, I didn’t provide the link, I have no desire to increase the hit rate for Monster which numbers in the thousands. However you may have noticed I did provide some graphic imagery, including a picture of a man holding a woman’s decapitated head, women’s bodies hanging by chains and an especially disturbing scene of a spread-legged dead woman in front of a rap artist eating a plate of raw meat. I found the images deeply disturbing – actually chilling the first time I saw them. I hesitated to show the depiction of woman’s decapitated head, but wanted my readers to see just how violent and brutalised this clip is, to hopefully mobilise more people to sign the petition.
The fact remains that the images of the girl models in Vogue are in the public domain. They are not graphic images of child sexual abuse or images of naked children. They are fashion images – mainstream fashion images. A large number of parties signed off on their creation and publication. In order to put them up for discussion, we have to show them. Disguising them would reduce some of the shocked response – hide the extent of the adultification, given the degree of heavy make-up, and the expressions on the children’s faces.
Another thing to consider is – yes, they could be used for evil purposes. But so could many images on my blog – images of young girls for example, even where not overtly adultified. Bare in mind large numbers of men who find sexual pleasure in images of children prefer them not to look like adult women in any way. They want them to look exactly as the children they are. I have had men tell me they get off on children in K.Mart catalogues. So should I remove all images of children from my blog because they may be misused too?
I do try to weigh things up though and understand the sensitivities. I walk a fine line with my work most days. I may not always get it right.
I can see why Melinda didn’t provide a link to the video. This because she’s omitted a lot of facts and taken a lot of images out of context. The women are obviously all zombies (mostly) in the video. At one point two zombie women are seen eating the intestines of a white male. Anther scene has one woman in stilettos dragging what seems to be a dead white male. She stops and implants her heal into his stomach. There’s also the scenes of Mr West trying to stop the zombies coming through a window as they’re obviously trying to break through and eat him in the vein of scenes from George Romero zombie films. Also note in the six minute leaked video, the scene with Rick Ross eating the raw meat is completely absent. I also note that all the depicted violence is done by females to males or other females. There are no scenes of violence by males to females. The aftermath, yeah that is what is implied, but there is no actual violence. I readily admit it’s weird, rather sexist and has creepy erotic horror overtones. I readily admit that Melinda should be able to criticise Kanye West. However when she misrepresents what the video contains, her argument starts to fall a bit flat. Melinda you say that you “have no desire to increase the hit rate for Monster which numbers in the thousands”, but thanks to you, you have. I really wouldn’t have seen this crappy video has it not been for the “controversy” by people like you. I try to avoid anything Kanye West related as much as possible usually.
This article has a good point. Although I believe these videos are just a projection of the environment we are all living in . Sex sells. Violence in sex sells too. People sell themselves every day, we sell our skills in order to get job to feed ourselves. We live in the world where money rules, these singers earn their money this way, the girls in the videos are also selling themselves, I definitely don’t consider it to be any good, I just believe that this behaviour is a product of tour environment.
Thanks for your reply, Melinda.
My point is, these are little girls. My instincts are to protect them from any further exploitation and exposure. Personally, my ethics would not allow me to be responsible for publishing their pictures. The fact that so many other people have done this, and so many other people were involved in the production doesn’t make it right for me to do it, or for someone who is protesting their exploitation to do it. Out of respect for them and concern for them, I would not contribute to their exploitation, no matter how good I believed my motives to be.
They are in the public domain – well, isn’t that the fundamental problem?
Feminists protested these about these kind of things long before the Internet allowed instant global illustrations of the subjects of their disapproval. They did it with words. It worked very very well. You do not have to reproduce the exploitation in order to protest it. Especially in the case of little girls.
No of course you should not have to remove all images of girls from your blog. I am speaking to specific sexualised images. I think you are being disingenuous now.
Well said FrankB.
What makes me more irate is the fact that amid all this, no one bothers to mention the fact that Nicki Minaj (a woman) is also a big part of this song/film clip, and, in comparison to Kanye and Jay-Z is little known, BUT – she proceeds the wipe the floor with both of them! She is amazing in this song and in the film clip she is simply FIERCE.
The fact is; if this was Lady Gaga parading half naked men around like animals, wearing high heels and calling it “art” – everyone would be fine with it. Oh wait, she already did.
Wink and Frank B are exactly right. I don’t find anything disturbing in the video, but that’s because I’ve seen these sorts of images so many times. We all have, so why this outrage now? Is it because these dead sexy young white girls are now surrounded by black guys? The only thing disturbing about this whole movement to prevent the release of this video is the latent racism it reveals. You older white ladies will only alienate the young women you’re trying to protect. They aren’t afraid of black people. You shouldn’t be either.
Come on Andy these women are DEAD! Doesn’t matter if the men using them are white black or yellow. It ‘s rather cheap to hurl racism at Melinda…it’s called a reversal and it doesn’t work. Also Catherine re images: People opposed to pornography have always used images because sometimes words alone can’t encompass the unspeakable horrors that pornographers come up with, eg the famous Hustler cover with a woman pushed into a meat grinder. Best example is Diana H Russell’s 1993 Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (check it out on Amazon). It consists almost entirely of pictures: dreadfully shocking but at times necessary…alas.
Alas, nothing, Freya, these are little children.
You’ve got no right to keep on using these children’s images in your campaign. You’re no better than the people who exploited them in the first place, in fact you are worse. At least they were honest in their miserable exploitation. You dress it up as doing something good.
if someone tells me about a women in a meat grinder I get it. I get right away. I don’t need to give the thing energy and life by looking at it and saying god, how awful. I already know it’s awful.
There’s nothing anybody can do to help these little girls except to have enough concern and respect for them to stop perpetuating their pictures. You don’t even offer a link to Vogue where people can protest. You only want to show it to shock people and that, Freya, is what pornographic exploitation is all about.
Monica R,
As a communication and media student i must inform you that there is a widely accepted sociology theory that the media do not define what you think, but what you think about.
So if misogyny is treated in the media, this will make society think about misogyny. Then is is the task of socializing agents to make sure, that especially the youth will have the right standpoints on these things.
isnt it just ridiculous that these children listen to a distanced celebrity, and their parents and teacher learn them nothing?
Very well said Frank B and Wink is right with his Lady Gaga argument.
If you posted the actual video we could all see that there are numerous “acts of violence” against males by females found in this video. However, it seems that you conveniently overlooked that fact and only took what you found to be offensive out of it.
Dear Melinda,
It’s so exciting that Tara Moss signed this petition! I know her from her excellent book Fetish, a “steamy thriller” that shows, on the cover, a stark image of the disembodied, sexualized legs of a woman wearing stiletto heels. The book is about a serial killer targeting fashion models, and the hero is a model who in one scene finds the “mutilated body” of a now-dead friend.
Two cheers for hypocrisy! If Tara Moss doesn’t see anything ironic about adding her signature, why not add yours?