Slut-shaming in Popular Music & Song

I guess I just figured a necessary pit stop on the road to empowerment was reealizing that other people were going to make unfounded assumptions about you, and there was no good reason to let the approval of people you don't know dictate how you live your life...?

This is an interesting case...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvAMEaWgTQ

It's very obviously giving both barrels to the cheating man, and one of the absolute canonical archetypes of blaming the man rather than the woman, and I think it manages to express the anger and the betrayal that indicts both halves of the cheating couple, and yet still, there are lines that make me uncomfortable. (Though I think the whole *point* of the song is to make the hearer uncomfortable, so there's that.)

I think this is the same baton that a lot of the white middle class indie brigade used to beat on nu-metal during the turn of the century was as well? Insofar as slut-shaming isn't just aimed at women, but was also an attack weapon against the likes of Limp Bizkit and similar who refused to kowtow to a moralistic view of what's "acceptable" sexual behavior.

― Inspector Anthony Slade, Friday, October 29, 2010 7:43 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

eh i dunno. i'm sure the young men of limp bizkit ran through a bunch of groupies, but who cares, their "unacceptable sexual behavior" in my understanding was cheering on a bunch of sexual assault at woodstock

p.s. the "pretty is not a rent" thing is brilliant, but I can't claim credit for it...

http://www.dressaday.com/2006/10/you-dont-have-to-be-pretty.html

i can't really take any of the lyrics of electrik red seriously, they all read to me as what t. nash would like a hot girl to tell him

Sub question, can you slut shame yourself? Are there lyrical examples of this?

i was gonna mention a lot of madonna's erotica - which "thief of hearts" is taken from - certainly "bad girl" would count (although that song is complex and psychologically true enough that just calling in slut-shaming wouldn't be enough)

I think Erotica is a good example of a singer taking pretty much every possible stance on this issue.

i can't really take any of the lyrics of electrik red seriously, they all read to me as what t. nash would like a hot girl to tell him

Yeah this was my problem. I don't really buy the "they bullied me into taking their approach" party line. He would say that.

Sub question, can you slut shame yourself? Are there lyrical examples of this?

OP cites 'Fuck And Run' up there which seems pretty textbook if I understand this whole thing correctly

Also re: the Pussycat Dolls there's a world of difference between "this is my sexuality, good or bad, it's mine and I own it" (Lil Kim, Madonna, Trina) and being packaged as male wank fantasy. They overlap as well but it's not one and the same thing.

Re self-shaming, Ani DiFranco's "Light of Some Kind" has some of my favourite lyrics on this kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-s-qiCrk-M

Also re: the Pussycat Dolls there's a world of difference between "this is my sexuality, good or bad, it's mine and I own it" (Lil Kim, Madonna, Trina) and being packaged as male wank fantasy. They overlap as well but it's not one and the same thing.

and how exactly do you judge who is on which side of the boundary? as erika's post said, the pussycat dolls' lyrics were mostly quasi-feminist in their female solidarity/male gaze/non-submissive stance - certainly a lot more so than destiny's child or, for that matter, lil kim or trina, who explicitly sell themselves as male wank fantasies.

Also re: the Pussycat Dolls there's a world of difference between "this is my sexuality, good or bad, it's mine and I own it" (Lil Kim, Madonna, Trina) and being packaged as male wank fantasy. They overlap as well but it's not one and the same thing.

That also kind of fits into what Ariel Levy's book was actually about (and yeah, I can understand how a poor understanding or a skimmed reading of her arguments could make it seem like she was slut-shaming) - the difference between the two.

And I have read and acknowledge a lot of the criticism of Ariel Levy which was saying "but what about the women, where is *their* Agency in all this?" But that was kind of Levy's point, that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum, and even though it might be an individual's choice, that choice is shaped by the options that *are* available.

Levy was certainly NOT saying "women who choose to pole dance are sluts" - what she was saying was actually "A culture in which women are paid/valued more for dancing topless on a bar than for being called to The Bar has really fucked up priorities and we need to change those priorities, not shame women for their choices." Like, if your choice is make ££££££ for dancing on tables vs £ for waiting on tables, how much of a choice is that? And how it's really hard to even have a conversation about Agency when you are dealing with a moneymaking organisation (like Girls Gone Wild - given their recent lawsuits) that doesn't even bother with *consent* let alone Agency. But the commodification of sexuality is a much bigger and thornier issue than slut shaming and probably not within the remit of this thread.

I think Erotica is a good example of a singer taking pretty much every possible stance on this issue.
― Tim F, Friday, 29 October 2010 14:22 (43 minutes ago)

yeah, & "thief of hearts" is a great take on the slut-shaming, because she's so knowingly dressing up and playing such an extreme role, it's almost a parody. she doesn't care that's she's lost her man at all really (if there ever was one even), she just wants to role play, act ridiculously camp & dramatic (like "bye bye baby" she's almost morphed into some draq queen-esque figure), and set up some completely depersonalised figured just so she can say "bitch", break some glass a few times, and exercise some bravado. it's more like she's throwing yet another persona out there to hide behind, to disguise how much of a wreck she actually is, and it's "bad girl" that shows this reality - she's the thief of hearts (or at least similar to her), and it's not just the lifestyle but the weight of the personas she's been creating that is crippling her.

Best line in "Thief of Hearts" is "Here she comes, litte miss think she can have his child, well anybody can do it..."

Sort of deliberately self-deluding in the same way as "Irreplaceable".

and then there's "thinks she'll get respect if she screws it", because of course so much of these slut-shaming songs is about status - losing it & needing to reassert it.

so much of these slut-shaming songs is about status - losing it & needing to reassert it.

^^^^^^exactly.

social status, too: often slut-shaming is barely-veiled snobbery, in that brazenly sluttish behaviour is held to be common or vulgar

it's interesting that we haven't yet discussed the (many, many) songs by MEN which slut-shame! maybe because there's less "point", it's what we expect of them, esp taking genre into account...?

Yeah I think you answered your own question Lex. It's still interesting, but not in the same way as women shaming eachother.

Because it's somehow inherently more interesting when women do it, because of the asserting status/power thing and the whole political jostling thing of it.

When men do it, it just seems gross.

Also I do think it's actually more common in women than in men, because of the "slut shame the other angle in a love triangle" aspect and that competition over sexuality in that way is one of the few ways in which our society *allows* women to exercise power - men have so many other ways in which they can demonstrate power over others, while women have this tiny constrained space in which to do it, so they use it more like a fine tuned weapon rather than the blunt dismissal of when men do it.

nothing to add, great thread. request to tim & lex, though. if you wanna highlight specific lyrics, could you, you know, post them (instead of youtubes)? way more efficient.

^this was my idea behind the thread. sigh...

this is like 50% of Zeppelin's catalog

Got a little woman and she won't be true...

Except it seems that the point is rather that the shame comes from female peers.

i didn't realize for a long time that dolly wasn't praising jolene's behavior.

jolene isn't slut shaming at all though. POV hasn't an unkind word to say about her rival. she's humiliating herself herself in desperation, different kind of thing.

Loretta Lynn "Fist City" (love this song)

You've been makin' your brags around town that you've been a lovin' with my man
But the man I love when he picks up trash he puts it in a garbage can
And that's what you look like to me and what I see is a pity
You'd better close your face and stay out of my way
If you don't wanta go to Fist City
If you don't wanna go to Fist City you'd better detour round my town
Cause I'll grab you by the hair of the head and I'll lift you off of the ground
I'm not a sayin' my baby is a saint cause he ain't
And that he won't cat around with a kitty
I'm here to tell you gal to lay off of my man if you don't wanna go to Fist City

Come on and tell me what you told my friends if you think you're brave enough
And I'll show you what a real woman is since you think you're hot stuff
You'll bite off more than you can chew if you get too cute or witty
You better move your feet if you don't wanna eat a meal that's called Fist City
If you don't wanna go to Fist City...
I'm here to tell you gal to lay off of my man if you don't wanna go to Fist City

Shakey OTM x2

is jessie's girl the opposite of this?

Here are the "Light of some Kind" lyrics:

i wish i didn't have this nervous laugh
i wish i didn't say half the stuff i say
i wish i could just learn to cover my tracks
i guess i'm not concerned enough with getting away with it

'cause every time i try to hold my tongue
it slips like a fish from a line
they say if you want to play
you should learn how to play dumb
i guess i can't bring myself to waste your time

'cause we both know what i've been doing
i've been intentionally bad at lying
you're the only boy i ever let see through me
and i hope you believe me when i say i'm trying
and i hope i never improve my game
yeah i'd rather have these things weighing on my mind
and at the end of this tunnel of guilt and shame
there must be a light of some kind
there must be a light of some kind

i must have blown a fuse or something
cause it was so dark in my mind
she came up to me with the sweetest face
and she was holding a light of some kind
and i still think of you as my boyfriend
i don't think this is the end of the world
but i think maybe you should follow my example
and go meet yourself a really nice girl

'cause we both know. . .

in the end the world comes down to just a few people
but for you it comes down to one
but no one ever asked me if i thought i could be
everything to someone
there's a crowd of people harboured in every person
there are so many roles that we play
and you've decided to love me for eternity
i'm still deciding who i want to be today

This song's like...a sea urchin. Some people love it and some people are disgusted by it.
-Todd Rundgren

I hate more or less everything on the fourth side. Or, well... No... I don't, but I hate the idea behind side 4.

I'm seeing a WHOLE lot of slut-shaming in the reaction to Keri Hilson's sluttastic new music video

is it possible to clearly separate slut shaming directed at pop performers from more general objections to sexual explicitness & crassness, or from complaints about appropriateness of content to venue/audience?

nope

What is this the nineteenth century?

i'd agree, NV, given the inclusion of the word "clearly" in my question. take it out, though, and there's a lot of room for equivocation - room enough to recognize that some instances of what might look like slut shaming might be better attributed to other impulses.

and yeah, it is the nineteenth century. and the eighteenth and the 12th and the 22nd. at least some of the time, somewhere, in this or that mind or culture. standards & values are hardly lockstep universal.

hey, I was v. ambiguous at my daughter singing along to "If You Seek Amy" but I guess my response to that wasn't exactly "OMG that Britney's shameless".

the keri hilson video in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xES7NPeZS2k

idk, i don't get any particularly desperate vibes from it - but maybe that's cuz i'm familiar with keri hilson, her boss-bitch persona and the amount of control she probably has over these things. it's in keeping with the song, too.

the only issue for me is that control - whether "alutty" videos (and photoshoots &c) are a genuine expression of what the artist wants to convey, or whether it's something they have to resort to when they don't want to do it, or whether they're just being wheeled out by record label bosses and told to take their clothes off. or a mix of all three! it's kinda impossible to actually judge this, and in many cases it's more insulting to assume that the female artist doesn't have agency. obviously there are times when it rings more true than others but that's pretty subjective.

as for sexual explicitness and inappropriateness - they're not bad things per se and i totally welcome them. it's up to parents to parent.

i thought it was amusing earlier this year when (dancehall mc) lady chann tweeted about how much she loved rihanna's "rude boy" and doing a guest verse on a remix of it. and then the following week tweeted something like "HOLD UP my 8-yr-old daughter is singing "come here rude boy can you get it up" around the house :/ "

i mean that video is certainly O_O but it's also about the best visual representation of a song that goes FUCK ME FUCK ME IT'S THE WAY YOU FUCK ME in the chorus

the shaming probably has something to do with the fact that the singles off this album so far have been non-starters -- i haven't read any criticisms of it myself, but i imagine that if this was the first single it would've been seen just as a new direction for her, as opposed to "desperation slutiness!!" (which is how i took it at first too)

she has previous for explicit songs, though - it's never been an integral part of her persona (and i'm guessing won't be after this) but it's enough to make me think she's comfortable with songs like this, rather than resorting to them out of nowhere. and she just seems too smart and level-headed and versed in the ways of the industry to be anyone's puppet here.

did "pretty girl rock" tank? i thought that hadn't even been properly released yet. sad if so.

This song isn't even good, please wake me for commentary when the song is worth listening to. I hate reading a lot of p.c. political commentary over a song that isn't that good. It makes it look like critics or academics don't know what good music is.

well i'm pretty sure u don't

hey, I was v. ambiguous at my daughter singing along to "If You Seek Amy" but I guess my response to that wasn't exactly "OMG that Britney's shameless".

― 3:10 to Your Ma (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 3:12 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

You shoulda been there when my son started singing along to "3".

the only issue for me is that control - whether "alutty" videos (and photoshoots &c) are a genuine expression of what the artist wants to convey, or whether it's something they have to resort to when they don't want to do it, or whether they're just being wheeled out by record label bosses and told to take their clothes off. or a mix of all three! it's kinda impossible to actually judge this, and in many cases it's more insulting to assume that the female artist doesn't have agency. obviously there are times when it rings more true than others but that's pretty subjective.

Yeah, I know this is opening a whole can of worms, but I do think that there are other options than just those three. That when you are operating in a culture whereby women are rewarded for how well they *perform* sexuality (in a way they are not rewarded or even discussed, for their technical skills such as to production skills, writing music, lyrics, etc.) you create an environment whereby the perhaps excessive display certain aspects of womanhood (looks, sexuality, etc.) are totally normalised in a way that precludes other choices.

So I don't think it's always just a case of "well, this particular woman had agency and made a choice to present herself in this way" so much as "what were the other choices that were available to her within a culture that values women for looks and sexuality above all else?" Agency doesn't happen in a vacuum.

But, you know, I'm just a boring old feminist who's read too much Ariel Levy. And it's really hard to ask these questions without descending into slut shaming, which I don't want to do.

tl;dr: Lex, it's more complicated than that, and you of all people should know it.

Something I guess where the individual could have agency/power over their own choices - and exercise that - but at same time the exercizing of that choice reinforces what choices there actually are.

yeah i get your points karen, but

a) i'm not going to criticise a performer for performing - keri hilson made a deliberate choice to be a performer as well as a songwriter - but on the other hand her songwriting is kinda the hook on which she found that success as a performer, so i'd disagree that that element of her career hasn't been discussed

b) "precludes other choices" - again talking about keri hilson specifically, i don't think this is the case at all. raunchy videos like this get people all aflutter but her biggest hit came with this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_RqWocthcc

in which she basically wears normal, casual clothing throughout and bar a few doe eyes at the camera (in a song about love) doesn't "perform" sexually. just to reiterate, that was her biggest hit. so i wouldn't say that performing non-sexually is an option that's closed to her.

i'm kind of wondering how keri hilson herself would respond, say if an interviewer brought it up, to the theory that her choices in her career are limited - that she doesn't hold that power - given how much of her public image is of a business-minded, in-control woman. i find it hard to believe that someone who's worked behind the scenes in the industry for as long as she has doesn't know exactly how it works - it could come off as slightly patronising to assume otherwise.

don't think that came out 100% well :/

also EVERY career involves biting the bullet at times and doing things you're not 100% into or comfortable with. and that's ok! not that i'm saying that keri's uncomfortable with this - i have no way of knowing.