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Dreamworlds 3
Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

[SINGING] I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty-Two; Lying awake intent at
tuning in on you. If I was young it didn't stop you coming through. Oh-oh…

SUT JHALLY: Since MTV first started operation in 1981 by playing this video
from The Buggles entitled “Video Killed the Radio Star”, music videos have
become a central and vital component of the music, entertainment, and media
industries. No longer limited to just one channel they have spread out to the
entire culture and across musical genres from pop, to rock, to metal, to rap and
hip-hop, to country. They have moved from the margins of the culture and
relative innocence to its very center and it’s a caldron of controversy around the
nature of the sexual imagery that came to define it as a genre.

[MTV2 Promotional Video]

SUT JHALLY: In fact from the very origins music videos, like other forms of
advertising, have relayed heavily on stories concerning female sexuality to fulfill
their function of selling CDs and albums for record companies. This Duran Duran
video from 1983 shows how sexual imagery was an important part of music video
from the start, as is this one by Van Halen in 1984. The same strategy is used by
Prince in 1991 and by Aerosmith in 1994. Right up to the present it is clear that
women’s bodies have functioned as an important currency through which the
stories of music video are told. Of course, as essentially promotional vehicles
themselves, they’re closest in form and content to advertising, which has used
depictions of female sexuality to draw the attention of viewers in a crowded and
noisy environment. Across the whole range of our media culture the link between
a woman’s identity, her body, and her sexuality is told in the most compelling of
forms. But, nowhere in popular culture is the story more focused and told in such
relentless fashion then in music video. Examining the stories that music videos
tell us about both male and female sexuality, about what is considered normal,
allows us to do more than just understand one aspect of our culture. It gives us a

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way to think about how the culture in general teaches us to be men and women.
It gives us a way to understand ourselves.

TECHNIQUES OF STORYTELLING

[VIDEO CLIP] LFO’s Brad Fischetti: Like before the video, right, they hand us
these two huge poster boards filled with Polaroids of girls in bikinis, and they’re
like yea, pick the one’s you want.

[VIDEO CLIP] Kid Rock: Do we have enough girls? We never have enough
girls…all about the girls.

SUT JHALLY: As Kid Rock notes, music videos are all about the girls and
indeed, the presence of sexualized female bodies is so prevalent that the major
conventions for achieving this goal are relatively easy to identify. The most
obvious way is to cut in shots of women into a band performance and it seems
the more bizarre, the better. In this case, not merely bikini clad, but coated in
silver or in a variation, gold plated. This is common across genres. In this country
music video, a whole panoply of female characters is used including a blow up
female doll. Even the geriatrics of rock, the Rolling Stones, are still at it, trying to
make themselves relevant by using women’s bodies. But age is not the
determining factor as the video from a younger band demonstrates. In fact,
showing women as dancers or just around the artist is perhaps the most frequent
convention used across all genres. Whether it is rock music, or country music, or
pop, or hip-hop, the presence of female’s bodies has become one of the easy
solutions found by the creators of music videos to the problem of how to both get
attention and tell a compelling story that connects the music to visually arresting
images. Other strategies include introducing them as background musicians as
the artist performs or, more frequently, showing them as members of the crowd
at live performances, sometimes exposing themselves in the hope of getting
attention. In the most obvious failure of creativity, women are also shown as
simply hanging around male artists, their only function being to draw in male
viewers into the fantasy created by the producers and directors of these videos.
Sometimes, women play a key role in the narrative of the fantasy being told.
Here, Kid Rock gets to live out one of the major fantasies of the male dream
world, group sex with glamorous airline stewardesses, where he joins an
exclusive and envied club. Or, in this Limp Bizkit video, an underwear clad
woman turns into an alien unleashing a fierce weapon. But even beyond a single
video there is a consistent story about masculinity and femininity being told by
the system of music videos as a whole. Identifying these stories, where they
come from, and the possible effect they could have is thus an urgent task.

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CONSTRUCTING FEMININITY

SUT JHALLY: Our ideas of what it means to be a socially acceptable man or

woman have not been genetically encoded in our biological genes. They come
from the stories the cultures tells us about what is normal and what is not and
music videos make clear that the most important aspect of a woman is her
sexuality. In fact, women are presented as ravenous creatures who desire sex at
all times and it seems with any man who happens to be around. Sometimes this
can happen in a mechanics garage where a simple sip of whiskey conges forth a
fantasy image. Given the role that cars play in the lifestyles depicted in music
videos it should be no surprise to seem them as the venue for some of this
activity. In the same way public bathrooms are a frequent location where these
figments of the male imagination, these nymphomaniacs operate. No place is out
of bounds, even a therapist in her office only obsesses about one thing and as
they care only about one thing the movement towards sex is quick and instant
and women are presented as aggressors who won’t take no for an answer.

But one of the strange aspects of the world depicted in music videos is that often
women far out number men which means that many times women have to share
the men. This visual strategy, multiple women draped over a man, has become
one of the more enduring techniques in music videos, something that directors
and artists can go to in the absence of creativity. Told over and over and over
again however, this cliché helps to construct an understanding of femininity
always being defined in terms of a powerful man. And sometimes, the man can
be just a boy. At times, even just seeing men on TV is enough to arouse the
women of music video, whether projected on large screen or even small ones,
the sexual response enlisted from the females, often lounging around in lingerie
on beds is powerful and unmistakable. These women are so desperate and
dependent and need men so badly that when men are absent acceptable
substitutes have to be found and being sex-crazed nymphomaniacs almost
anything will suffice as a replacement from pieces of fruit to their own fingers to
ice cream cones to hood ornaments, the affect of this cliché is to further
sexualize women’s behavior even without the presence of men. And when men
are truly absent this becomes a really bleak world for women, they fall apart
emotionally not being able to cope, disintegrating in bathrooms, moping around
endlessly on beds, lamenting their loneliness and isolation until a man returns to
catch a falling tear and make the world right again with his presence.

Apart from telling us that women are in a constant state of sexual arousal,
dependent on men for their emotional stability, what other stories do the makers
of music videos tell us about these fictional creations? For example, what
activities do these women engage in? Given their perpetually aroused state in
music video it should be no surprise that the women is this male dream world
spend a lot of time undressing to first capture men’s attention and also to make

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sure that when an opportunity presents itself they are ready, stripped for action. If
we ask, what is the major thing that these women do the answer does not exactly
need a rocket scientist. They party, endlessly it seems in every conceivable
venue, on yachts or boats, swimsuit and bikini clad women dance, sunbath, and
frolic carefree. At the beach, they party enthusiastically; in hot tubs they invite
men to join them. By the sides of swimming pools they sway seductively. At
house parties they hang out in their underwear. In clubs they can’t resist stripping
down and dancing on tables. When not partying, the women in the dream world
are diligent and helpful to men. They spend quite a lot of time, appropriately
dressed of course, playfully washing cars and motorbikes. Sometimes the duties
of airline stewardesses even extend to washing airplanes and of course for
exercise there is always mud wrestling. All this energetic activity obviously takes
a lot of effort because after it is all done they also spend a lot of time just relaxing
by the sides of swimming pools and even more time in the shower and bath
cleaning up and music videos show us these grooming activities in a great deal
of detail with a camera exploring the female bodies on view. This eroticization of
water in music video should surprise no one as wet female bodies are one of
the corner stones of adolescent, male sexual fantasy as reflected in the wet T-
shirt contest which here takes on varied forms. Whether it is Beyonce, Christina
Aguilera, or Britney Spears, the fantasy is the same. When the women of this
fantasy world do get around to wearing clothes the choices, given everything else
we know about them, are quite predictable. Low-cut skimpy tops, stockings and
lingerie of various kinds seem to be pretty standard fair.

But what do these women when they’re not cavorting or frolicking at parties on
the beach actually do? What roles are they shown in? Given the fantasy nature of
this dream world some of these roles should come as no surprise. From the
inevitable cheerleaders, airline stewardesses partying on planes, hotel maids in
short skirts, repressed librarians just bursting to discover their inner sexy babe,
school teachers in lust with their male students, sorority girls just having a great
time pillow fighting with each other, or authority figures like police women or SNM
chicks with whips or school girls in uniform in lust with anyone, these characters
are drawn straight from adolescent sexual fantasy. The condensation of this is
found in this video where a peep show runs us through the gamut of these
stereotypical characters; a nurse, policewomen, a dominatrix, and of course a
school girl. In fact, peep shows and strip clubs are the main hang out for one of
the major female characters who populate the dream world; the stripper. From
playing a small part in the early history of music videos, they’ve evolved into one
of its major components, sometimes shown as lap dancers, most of the time they
are wrapped in various ways around a strippers pole which now seems to be a
standard prop in the dream world. The compliant stripper is of course the ultimate
heterosexual male fantasy and her ubiquitous presence should tell us something
about the imagination that propels this part of popular culture. And where as in
the past bisexuality was sometimes hinted at, now girl on girl action is highly

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visible across the landscape of music videos and there is nothing at all subtle
about it. Indeed, some videos are entirely based on wild parties involving only
women. But, looking closer at why so many women now appear in this way in
music videos, as opposed to, for example, gay men who are literally invisible, will
give an answer as to the source of the imaginations from which the cultures
stories or normal masculinity and femininity are told.

THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

SUT JHALLY: One of the genres where girl on girl action is a stable commodity
is the world of male, heterosexual pornography and rap videos and hip-hop
videos especially have increasingly come to closely resemble its form and its
content. However, alone with the voyeurism has come hatred, disrespect, and
misogamy. While in the early year of music video black women were virtually
invisible, the widespread popularity of hip-hop has allowed their entry into this
part of the culture. But the price of entry is very high indeed, as they have literally
been reduced to one part of their bodies. This is the essence of the commercial,
male, heterosexual pornographic imagination, thinking of women as being
defined only through their sexuality and that sexuality to be at the service of
men’s desires. The video Tip Drill by Nelly achieved a great deal of notoriety
because it made explicit what is implicit in much of the rest of the culture. That
women’s bodies are there to solely please men and be under their control, to be
bought and sold like so many pieces of meat. Here a women’s body is used to
swipe a credit card and indeed the term “tip drill” signifies women who will allow
man after man to have sex with her for money. But this is not an isolated
example as a Snoop Dogg video shows.

Indeed, many hip-hop videos are full of shots where money is showered on
women’s bodies signally that they are regarded with a contempt reserved for
prostitutes or strippers, that their bodies and sexuality can be bought and
controlled by men. And while black men in mainstream rap and hip-hop videos
are largely presented as violent, savage, criminal, and drunken thugs interested
in molesting and insulting any female that happens to be around we have to
remember that these representations do not reflect the reality of African-
American masculinity but how someone has chosen to represent it at this point in
history. As such, they constituted the most racist set of images found in decades
in American media and resemble most closely D.W. Griffith’s 1915 white
supremacist film The Birth of a Nation where black’s are portrayed as
irresponsible, drunken buffoons and as out of control, lust filled rapists of white
women and just as there was a powerful white man who created and controlled
those images as an argument for white supremacy and the glorification of the Ku
Klux Klan we have to focus our attention on these contemporary images of a
threatening and out of control, black masculinity and the role played by the

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largely white men who control our current media empires. We have to ask what
functions do the racist and sexist images in hip-hop and rap perform for the
corporations who control our media culture and why are these images of black
masculinity so connected to the abuse of women and what role does the
pornographic imagination play in this? In fact the link between the sexist images
in hip-hop and pornography has been made quite directly by rap artists such as
Snoop Dogg and his best selling DVD The Diary of a Pimp produced in part with
Hustler and the porn entrepreneur Larry Flint. The narrative involved a female
journalist spending a weekend exploring the self-described pimp lifestyle of the
rap star. In the first song of the film Snoop Dogg explains exactly what this
entails.

[VIDEO CLIP] Snoop Dogg: You gotta break these hoes for Snoop, you gotta
break these hoes for Snoop. I said I bend the bitch over, get the chip off her
shoulder. I don’t let her hit the doja ‘til she prove that she’s a soldier. You gotta
break these hoes for Snoop, you gotta break these hoes for Snoop.

SUT JHALLY: By the end of the film, the journalist predictably has been
overcome with lust and succumbs to join his so called “hoes” and Snoop Dogg
sums up the essence of the male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination.

[VIDEO CLIP] Snoop Dogg: Mission accomplished: another bitch broke.

SUT JHALLY: While hip-hop has the most obvious and direct connection to
pornography it is far from being the only musical video genre to have this
relationship. In fact, historically rock music has lead the way as this playboy issue
shows and VH1 pointed out the porn and rock connection as early as 2001.

[VIDEO CLIP] Reporter: Rankin’ File, rock and porn.

SUT JHALLY: The worlds have intertwined in many ways from female porn
starts appearing in music videos to directors such as Gregory Dark who switched
from making films like Hootermania and New Wave Hookers to shooting videos
for artists such as Britney Spears, Mandy Moore and Counting Crows. The
worlds of music and pornography come most explicitly in the Matt Zane film
Backstage Sluts where a number of prominent stars such as Mark McGrath from
Sugar Ray and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit are shown playing out their fantasies.

[VIDEO CLIP] Fred Durst: Rock and Roll is all about this. Right baby? Right. Tell
‘em See she knows, I don’t let her talk too much. I think we should make a porno
right now, you know, since I’m a rock star.

SUT JHALLY: The film also shows how lunchmeat is a key role in how some of
these bands warm up backstage for their performance

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[VIDEO CLIP] Naked girl (while lunchmeat is being thrown at her): Am I

going to get a free pass for this?

SUT JHALLY: It is this male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination based on

the degradation and control of women that has colonized commercial culture in
general, although it is more clearly articulated in music videos. Even when video
makers have the freedom to experiment with other techniques such as animation,
the view of women as being there solely for male pleasure and to be controlled in
line with men’s desires remains constant. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this
is the essentially adolescent, pornographic world is to be found in the video
Stacy’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne, which features a 15-year-old boy obsessed
by his friend’s mother played by supermodel Rachel Hunter. While the teenage
Stacy herself certainly looks like the rest of the women in music video the boy
only has eyes for her mother who obligingly undresses in full view of anyone who
happens to be watching, receives a public, full body massage, and of course
practices her stripper moves in the dining room table and as he pleasures himself
while in the bathroom watching and fantasizing about the mother, it is clear who’s
dreams and desires we are supposed to identify with.

It is important to be clear about the nature of this analysis. This is not a critique or
dismissal of sexual images. It is not a moralistic point of view that regards all
sexual representation in a negative manner. The question if not whether an
image is good or bad, the question is whose story is being told? Who’s eyes do
we see the world through? Who’s eyes do we not see the world through? Who is
behind the camera? Who’s visions and values guide us through the process by
which we learn what it means to be a man or woman? And whose fantasies are
these? Are they supposed to be ours? Given the narrow story about sexuality
that is repeatedly told in mainstream culture the real issue is not that there is too
much discussion of sex but that there is not enough. That is, there is simply not
enough diversity in the stories of sexuality that circulate in the culture because
the commercial, male, heterosexual. Pornographic imagination monopolizes
virtually all of our media terrain.

WAYS OF LOOKING

SUT JHALLY: The stories of the dream world are told in many ways. The explicit
images of what men and women are shown doing is just one way. There is also a
story told by the visual techniques and forms that are used by the makers of
music videos. That is, there is a story of the camera itself, which tells us that
femininity is connected to sexuality and the body and that women find their own
identities in terms of how pleasing and desirous they are to men. The most
obvious strategy to communicate this is by actually showing then posing before a

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camera, inviting the viewer to gaze at them. Even when there are no cameras
directly present in the scene, the women invite the look from the viewer behind
the camera that is filming them. They are presented as wanting to be watched,
inviting it, desiring the look, enjoying being on display. This is not the mere
invitation but literally open and willing for whatever men want to do to them.

To communicate in even more explicit terms that it is okay to watch and to desire
another common technique shows women softly touching themselves while men
look on. The filmic invitation is clear; women are nothing but sexualized bodies
who live for male attention. In the absence of a man or a camera, women turn the
gaze inward and watch themselves in mirrors, strengthening the idea that they
are legitimate objects of desire. It is okay to look. It is okay to desire what you’re
gazing at because she is looking at herself the same way. Even walking away,
looking back over her shoulder, the object of the gaze explicitly invites the desire.
She wants to be possessed by the gaze of the watcher. Far from objecting when
men look at them in sexual ways, the women of dream world revel in the
attention. They want to be looked at by men. They deliberately position
themselves for maximum visual affect but the images we see in music video are
never innocent; they are never accidental. These ways of looking have been
directly chosen by writers and directors and editors. Understanding them can tell
us a great deal about how the person or thing being watched is regarded by the
viewer. In music video, the person being watched it regarded as a passive thing.
A common filming technique that reflects this view of the woman is a passive
thing to be consumed by watching males involves the camera panning the willing
and exposed bodies of these women. The camera roams over it, scanning up
and down at will, exploring it in detail. The assumption behind this way of looking
at someone is that it is perfectly legitimate to watch in this fashion. Women’s
bodies are surveyed, looked at, analyzed in the same way that one might
examine a landscape or an object. Their function in the video is to be examined,
gazed at, and desired by men. The camera angles that are used to shoot women
reinforces this view. For example, the shot from above looks down into a female
cleavage cannot help but emphasize one part of a woman’s body as being
central to her identity. A variation of this has women bending over in front of the
camera. Similarly, when the camera looks from below as in the manner of looking
up a dress it is reminiscent of a forbidden and taboo kind of watching, standard
fair in a certain kind of male, adolescent fantasy.

Another conventional technique that illustrates this is the shot between the legs
of a woman, her legs framing the action on the other side. These ways of visually
representing femininity seem to lead almost naturally to focus the gaze on only
one part of women’s bodies. The women of the dream world are fragmented and
presented as a number of simple and disconnected body parts. This is a
common filming technique. It is a way to present women as an object of fair gaze.
Just as from the viewpoint of content, we can say that is reflects the pornographic

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imagination, the filming techniques that accompany it are a reflection of what we

call the pornographic gaze. The point here is that the way in which women are
filmed, not simply what they are doing or wearing, communicates messages and
ideas about them. Specifically, focusing on only one aspect of people, women in
this case, detracts about thinking about them as real people with feelings,
emotions, thoughts, intellect, their own dreams and desires. Instead, they are just
legs in high heels. When you think or someone only as a body part you deny
them subjectivity and what makes them unique individuals. In this case, these
ways of filming reduce women to one part of their bodies and only to the sexual
part of their multifaceted characters. There is nothing inherently wrong with any
of these techniques in and of themselves it is not that it is always negative as
always ready to be watched and wanting to be watched. We all, men and
women, present ourselves to be watched and gazed at. We all, men and women,
watch attractive strangers with sexual desire. To treat another as an object of our
desires is part of what it means to be human. The problem in music video and the
culture in general is that women are presented as nothing else. If the story told
about femininity could be widened beyond sexual objectification to include many
other qualities of individuals: intellectual, emotional, spiritual and religious;
creative, athletic, familial, political, occupational, the desire for autonomy and
independence, for pleasure and deeper meaning then there would be no problem
with a little bit of objectification as a sexual aspect of femininity would be
balanced out and integrated with many other human qualities. The problem is
that in our contemporary culture this complexity gets crowded out by a one
dimensional definition of femininity based on a single story of the body of
objectification of a passive sexuality whose only goal is to please men being told
over and over again so it becomes the only way in which femininity is thought of.
In that way, a lot of objectification is extremely damaging as it narrows how we
think of femininity emptying out all of the complexity of human existence. Women
become nothing but shadows or silhouettes, merely outlines; just empty shapes
that men can fill with their own desires. There is nothing important and unique
inside, nothing that makes them human. They are merely shadows of real
people.

What, then, does it mean to grow up in a world where stories of femininity are
defined and told in such narrow ways. For girls and women, this way of
understand themselves and their bodies traps them inside a sexual imaginary,
not of their own making where they are positioned only as sexual beings whose
main function is to be pleasing to men. The video series Girls Gone Wild is one
indication of the internalization of the story. Young women, with very little
persuasion willingly reveal themselves to males and the camera. This is a full
embrace of identity with a fantasy figure that prowls the pornographic
imagination. The hyper-sexualized woman whose body is there to satisfy men’s
desires.

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[VIDEO CLIP Girls Gone Wild] Reporter: Okay we need 5 seconds. Ready. 1,
2, …(girls showing their breasts and screaming)

SUT JHALLY: In this way, these images and stories have worked their way into
the inner identities of young women who view their own sexuality through the
eyes of the male authors of that culture.

FEMALE ARTISTS: TRAPPED IN THE PORNOGRAPHIC GAZE

SUT JHALLY: To gain entrance into this world, female artists have to fit into the
existing set of stories and use the visual language that has already been
established as the norm. Musical ability is only one of the talents that is needed
to establish a presence in the dream world and it is clear that many female artists
thoroughly understand the requirements of the pornographic imagination. To
navigate the barriers that this way of looking at the world erects, female artists
are compelled to use the only visual language the culture allows, the central
aspect of which is that women have to present themselves as primarily sexual
beings. So predominant has this image of the female artist become this it is
difficult to even imagine what an alternative might look like. The challenge of
female artists is to try and stay true to their own vision of themselves but the
pressures to conform are relentless and the conventional techniques that are
adopted are easy to identify no matter the genre. Female performers must take
on the fantasy roles that the pornographic imagination dictates. They perform for
the camera and the male gaze, presenting themselves invitingly. They touch
themselves suggestively, undress for the watching audience, allowing the
camera to pan up and down their bodies, looking at them from above as well as
from below. Like all women in the dream world their bodies are fragmented and
they become defined through their various body parts. Even artists such as
Madonna, who want to present themselves as assertive, independent and
powerful have do it from within the conventions of the dream world when it comes
to highlighting their sexuality and as the codes of female sexuality define it as
passive and submissive, they find themselves in a strange paradox.

In more recent years Gwen Stefani reveals the same contradiction. On the one
hand independent, energetic, in control, but always at the same time soft and
safe within the conventions of the pornographic imagination. These pressures to
conform can also be seen if we look as the representation of some artists over
time. For example, the singer/song writer Jewel had for many years carved out
an image of herself as a serious and authentic artist who made headlines with
her video Intuition where she very knowingly and skillfully, perhaps “tongue in
cheek” recreated many of the conventions of the dream world knowing what is
necessary for survival.

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[VOICEOVER] Jewel: This video is really over the top. I’m doing things in this
video I never thought I’d do like, you know, I’m dancing, sprayed down with fire
hoses (laughing) It’s silly, you know, it’s silly and completely over the top and
something you would absolutely see in a music video, you know, (laughing) it’s
just an insane thing.

SUT JHALLY: And once you’ve entered this world it is difficult to change
direction. Jewel’s subsequent video was based on a song dealing with serious
social issues including poverty and violence…

[VIDEO CLIP] Jewels Stand video.

SUT JHALLY: But, halfway through the video the pornographic imagination kicks
in and Jewel is shown writhing on a bed in a variety of suggestive poses, getting
undressed with the camera utilizing one of the usual conventions, and, of course,
taking a shower. There seems to be no escape from male music video directors
wedded to the pornographic imagination. But the pattern can be detected in the
career of many female stars. It is instructive to remember that Mariah Carey’s
original image was much more innocent before it seems she threw herself whole
heartedly into the stories that the culture seems to demand from female artists to
ensure success. Early in her career Christina Aguilera, too, was marketed in a
gentile manner to young girls. That changed dramatically with the video that
marked her full-scale immersion into the adult dream world of music video.
Similarly, Jessica Simpson went from tamed pop star to mega publicity and
heavy rotation with a video that presented her in quite explicit sexual terms. All
these cases make clear that the price of female entry into what is considered the
mainstream of the culture is to accept the vision of the pornographic imagination;
that the only things of value about women are their bodies and their sexuality and
their willingness and desire to act out male fantasies.

MASCULINITY AND CONTROL

SUT JHALLY: Another female artist who reflects this sexual imperative is Janet
Jackson who in the 1990s went from relative obscurity to superstardom when she
abandoned her somewhat tame image for a hyper sexualized one that met the
requirements of the pornographic imagination more fully. This journey to
objectification was completed in the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show where she
literally became defined to the world by one part of her body. However, Janet
Jackson was just half the story of that event and almost no mention was made of
the moments leading up to it where she plays the role of a tease and Justin
Timberlake plays the role of a man who wants to control her and her body…

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[VIDEO CLIP] Justin Timberlake (singing): See I’ve been watching you, and I
like the way you move, so go ‘head, girl, just do it, that ass-shaking thing you
do… No disrespect, I don’t mean no harm, I can’t wait to have you in my arms,
hurry up ‘cause you’re takin’ too long, bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this
song.

SUT JHALLY: The dramatic conclusion of the incident is in a microcosm the

essence of the dream world played out in front of the whole world. She (Janet
Jackson) has become nothing more than a body part and he has demonstrated
his sexual control over her. In fact, Justin Timberlake had already explored this
theme in a previous video based on the end of his real life relationship with
Brittney Spears, which shows him breaking into her house and surreptitiously
watching as she undresses and takes a shower. This behavior of glamorizing this
instance mimics precisely the structures of real life stalking and domestic abuse
where a man who cannot accept a woman’s rejection of him and attempts to
assert control over her life.

In fact, just as music video tells us a story of female passivity, it tells an equally
powerful story of masculinity being tied to power, intimidation and force. And in
this story of powerful and out of control masculinity women play a key role. They
are shown repeatedly in cages, exhibiting themselves for watching males. They
are shown tied up and writhing seductively on beds waiting for a man’s attention.
Chased and pursued by men, they are carried away and handled like children,
their bodies explored and used as men please. This sense of male entitlement
has an unmistakable aggressive edge. Women are pushed aside, slammed
against walls, and held on the floor, spanked and slapped, water and alcohol
poured over them and on them and finally, spread out on a pool table. In the
pornographic imagination even a woman’s apparent refusal to make ill advances
ends in their acquiescence to his desire. Even when men unexpectedly attack
them, women’s arousal wins out over fear. In the dream world women never say
no and passionately welcome masculine aggression. They even enjoy being
forcefully kidnapped in a dark garage, blindfolded and made to perform for their
attacker. In these ways, men’s violence again women takes on an erotic quality.
Perhaps the clearest and more aggressive articulation of this sense of male
control of female bodies is reflected in this video with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit
kidnaps a woman he’s obsessed with and forces her to watch as be both
expresses his anger to her for rejecting his advances and demonstrates his
ability to control her in line with his desires.

[VIDEO CLIP] Fred Durst (singing): Hey you, Mrs. Too-good-to-look-my-way

and that’s cool you want nothing at all to do with me but I want you and ain’t
nothing wrong with wanting you ‘cause I’m a man and I can think what the hell I
want, you got that straight?

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 13

No doubt I’d love to sniff on them panties now…I’d eat you alive! I’d eat you alive.

SUT JHALLY: As these ideas of male entitlement and power have become
glamorized and normalized in the culture, we have to ask, what affect do they
have on real life behavior of men and women?

[VIDEO CLIP] From the documentary War Zone

Man: (makes a kissing noise as she walks by)

Maggie Hadleigh-West: Who did that?
Man: What? (makes the noise again)
Maggie Hadleigh-West: Did you do that? Do you always do that?
Man: Oh I do it all the time; I do it to all the pretty girls on the street

SUT JHALLY: The documentary film War Zone is a real life demonstration of this
sense of male entitlement and shows the harassment and verbal abuse that
many women experience simply walking around their communities.

[VIDEO CLIP] War Zone

Man: I said good morning, baby, I like your style.

Man: I said have a nice day, you’re very attractive
Man: Do you mind if I walk with you?
Man: Say, yo, baby.
Man: Happy mothers day, happy mothers day, happy mothers day, happy
mothers day
Man: I said you’re good, that’s all.
Man: You’re looking old
Man: She got big legs
Man: She needs to get laid
Man: You ain’t got it like that
Man: Ah, forget it, forget it.

SUT JHALLY: And sometimes, this verbal abuse very quickly transforms into
physical abuse. [Video from Central Park, NYC June 11, 2000] During the 2000
Puerto Rican day pride parade in New York City, the public space of central park
turned into a literal war zone for scores of women who were doused, sexually
assaulted, and stripped of their clothes by groups of men who felt they had an
entitlement to act their desires on any female body. This footage, used by the
police to identify and prosecute the assailants shocked and outraged the country
when it was broadcast. When virtually identical images have been played out
over and over again on our television screens with virtually no comment, why
should we be shocked? In fact, what was most striking about these images was
how familiar they were.

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 14

[VIDEO CLIP] Montage of women in music videos and police video being
sprayed with water.

SUT JHALLY: While there are chilling similarities between the popular culture
image and the real life attacks in Central Park, there is a major difference. The
women in the real world were not enjoying it. They weren’t smiling. This wasn’t
their dream world. It was someone else’s, which had turned into their nightmare.
A similar sexual assault took place during the 2001 Mardi Gras festival in Seattle
captured in this award-winning photograph where a mob of men violently stripped
and indecently assaulted a woman in full public view. One of the interesting
questions to ask is what is going on in the minds of these normal looking men
that they think that they have an entitlement to in act their desires on any female
body that happens to be around even when it is clearly against their will. What
stories from the culture are they drawing upon to legitimate their assault…

[VIDEO CLIP] Rapper (singing): Gimme that pussy, girl gimme that, girl gimme
that, girl gimme that pussy, girl gimme that, girl gimme that.

SUT JHALLY: There are always two sides to the sexual objectification of the
female body. On one hand admiration and desire , on the loathing and contempt,
which is reflected in the language that some men use to describe women and
sexuality.

[VIDEO CLIP] From the documentary Keeping Score

Man: If you see a woman or you know a woman, a bunch of guys know a female
who they perceive to be what you’d call a bitch. What they’d say is that she
needs a good fuck to put her in line, like fuck her, straighten her out, it’ll be
punishment for her or tame her like some type of wild horse or something, like a
good fuck would just tame her.

Man: You’ll see a group of guys in bars and a real pretty little girl who has her
nose in the air a little bit and she’ll trot by and someone will say ‘man, she needs
a dick in the ass’ or ‘someone should fuck her and leave her’ or something like
that. ‘She really needs to be left in the cold.’

Man: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of “hate-fucking” but you’re out and a girl
will walk in with this big attitude and you’re like ‘I’d just like to fuck the hell out of
her, I’d pound her, I’d nail her to the wall’ or something like that. Or like on
campus there might be a girl that you know in a class or something like that and
she just gets the reputation of being what you’d consider a bitch or something like
that and you’re just like ‘Man, I’d just like to fuck her.’

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 15

Man: This one guy we used to know, we used to call him HTB; it stood for “Hurt
the Bitch” cause every time he got one he’d say he hurt the bitch so we called
him HTB; you know just thrashing a woman, doing her ‘til she’s sore, that’s
something that’s bragged about all the time. The day after a guy goes to bed with
a woman he’ll come back and say ‘Man, I thrashed her, man, I did it ‘til she was
crying.’

SUT JHALLY: What these attitudes reveal is that the danger and violence is
inside our relationships and not outside and that when you objectify women and
use them for props of male power and prestige then violent language and
violence itself will not be far behind. While this embodied and fragmented images
of women cannot directly cause sexual and violent assault they do rob women of
their humanity and create an environment where a tax against them is not treated
seriously. They cultivate attitudes and values that legitimate and justify the
assaults as self deserving and provoked by the victims. If your understanding of
female sexuality is mediated by the stories of music video then these are
precisely the types of attitudes that one would expect that dream world to
cultivate in it’s male watchers. Further, all behavior is based upon certain
assumptions, attitudes and values. These stories of the pornographic
imagination, then, do not directly cause sexual assault but they create
understandings in a cultural environment that might encourage certain violent
behaviors, influenced by many other things, of course, by some men towards
women. Fantasies are fun but sometimes the line between fantasy and reality is
blurred and the images of the dream world in that respect are not innocent, they
are not just images. The stories they tell are firmly implicated in the gender and
power relations in our society.

[END]

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© 2007