In his documentary Dreamworlds 3, Sut Jhally, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, examines how women’s bodies are portrayed in popular music videos. Music videos, he argues, as a form of hyper-advertising have essentially one way to describe femininity, pretty much regardless of genre, and that is, not surprisingly, as a sex object. While the idea of the male gaze dominating visual culture is nothing new, Jhally’s documentary argues that the music video genre is a place where this imagery reigns almost exclusively.
Whether it’s video girls dancing around a male artist, or the female artist herself (see: Britney Spears; Hilary Duff in her new ”adult mode” and the queen herself, Madonna), music videos can only speak in sexualised terms.
As Jhally takes pains to point out, it’s not as if this way of portraying women is in itself wrong; this isn’t a moralistic argument. It is only human to enjoy desiring and being desired. It is when this becomes an entire genre’s only visual language that one begins to wonder about a sort of deeper paucity in our entertainment.
Jhally makes a harrowing connection between the imagery in music videos of all genres of women being doused in water and the images recorded at the 2000 Puerto Rican day parade in New York City, where women were grabbed, doused in water, and sexually assaulted by mobs of young men.
Then what is the ‘’so what” of how women’s bodies are portrayed in these videos? It hearkens back to a thousand similar debates: do video games make young men violent? Do romantic comedies make women have unrealistic expectations about relationships?
This must be true for some men and some women – to be sure, every individual reacts to this imagery differently, and studies have shown that across cultures the ”intended message” of a given cultural product (in the study, American soap operas) are reinterpreted and recast by the viewer based on her/his own contexts.
So is this Dreamworlds language part of the global language of music video?
Deepal and Britney, and etc.
As Jhally notes, the schoolgirl-as-sex object theme burst from porn and perhaps Japanese mainstream imagery into the American mainstream with Britney Spears’s One More Time. Porn aside (it’s difficult to put it aside when engaged in this discussion) what does it mean that there is mainstream titillation- acceptably so – in the schoolgirl?
Thai singer’s Tata Young’s mega-hit Dhoom Dhoom features a striptease, a sexy mud-fight, and the requisite ‘’sexy touching of own body” which Jhally highlights in numerous J. Lo videos, but which you can find in virtually any music video featuring a female performer. This becomes quite a hilarious trope once you start looking for it, because it is truly everywhere. Who does this in real life? Yes, let me pause to stroke my collar bone suggestively…
The Dreamworld tropes are pervasive: in Kaanta Laga by DJ Doll, the girls flash their underwear to the stern looking bouncer to get in the club, and visible thongs are a critical plot-point. More recently – Zara Zara Touch Me from the film Race ticks the boxes and introduces new ones (e.g. rolling around on a mirror while sexily gazing at oneself.) In Outrageous, Sherlyn Chopra enumerates for us the outrageousness of her various body parts ”my tender lips…my xxx hips…my wicked side…” This video also features the classic ”cleavage from above” shot as well as, of course, water.
And so forth.
So yes, this is a global language. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. These images can all be in good fun, or about the thrill of desire, or just having a night out full of flirtation and dancing.
But we shouldn’t assume that this is the only way they can be seen.
Violence
Jhally’s connecting of the water imagery in American videos with the image of women being attacked in Central Park brings me back to a point that I feel is critical. The image itself of a ‘’sexily” dressed woman being admired by a man is a reductive image, with potentially (but not necessarily) disturbing implications for relationships between real men and real women. But some videos glamorize (or perhaps just normalize) a kind of violent imagery that could be more pernicious. Take for example, in Khallas from the film Company, the roughness in the male touch toward the female singer.
Or here, in a promo for Dekhta Tu Kya from the film Krazzy 4, the men surround the woman (here Rakhi Sawant) in an encouraging crowd as she gyrates. This video actually reminds me a lot of the video for Britney Spears’ Slave 4 U - this sweaty, fleshy dance orgy, (which pioneered wet-look leggings ahead of the curve, I have to say) where Britney is watched and grabbed by men, women, and anacondas.
Fantastical in a music video, but let’s be honest, potentially terrifying if played out in real life.
An alternative language exists.
Surely this sort of entertainment shouldn’t disappear, but it could be looked at more critically. But unlike Jhally, I think alternative languages are being pioneered by female performers in particular.
I wanted to look within ”’young” and ”popular” artists because it seemed likely that women singing to an adult contemporary or classical crowd would obviously have a less sexualised image.
MIA is an example of an artist with worldwide crossover success who, from the beginning, seems to maintain control of her image as not necessarily hyper-sexualized. From the baggy sportswear of Galang, MIA has set up her image as fun, attractive, and yes sexy, but without using the obvious ”images of sexiness”; no rolling around on mirrors for MIA. (Though sometimes seen writhing around on branches somewhere in the midst of Sunshowers)
More female artists (and their labels) should pay attention. You don’t have to shout sex to be sexy and you certainly don’t have to speak porn to create a music video.
Picture Source: www.complex.com
The Author Jen, a history graduate from Yale is currently working in marketing and communications in London. She is interested in writing about media representation and public and sexual health concerns. She blogs at http://jenpaton.wordpress.com
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