Tag: internalized sexism

Follow Up. Fallout. Part Two.

Follow Up. Fallout. Part Two.

I don’t think she will ever read this.

And if she does, I hope that will be a good thing, that she will find some validity, some truth in what I am about to write and what I wrote in the first part of this double post: “Follow up. Fallout.” The reason these two posts are named thusly is because of the post previous: “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old, Same Old” where a young woman calls herself the “modern whore” and adds to the myth that women can be empowered sex objects, that everyone can be one of the privileged 1% in the sex industry who go unscathed making happy memories of naughty and, yes of course, money—money that is represented as virtually free or, like the prostitution “sex work as work like all others” progenitors of the 80s Annie Sprinkle and Scarlott the Harlot celebrated, getting paid for sexually servicing men was a fringe benefit rather than the point of an inevitably unbalanced monetary exchange (and, as such, ironically, it wasn’t even the regular work they were claiming it to be at all). As abolitionist and prostitution survivor Rachel Moran states: “The only thing prostitution ever liberated me from was homelessness.”[1]

In capitalism, where the one paying always has power over the one being paid, there is no such thing as ‘free money’ as much as there is no such thing as prostitution being work like all others or abuse being liberation. I don’t know about you, but I have never had to give a blow job or let my boss bang me before work; I think I can safely say that myself along with the majority of wage labourers have never not been very aware of the fact that we are working for money and, most often, wouldn’t have performed said services without a pay cheque in mind. And, unless I was truly desperate to feed and house my children or support a drug addiction,[2] I—and I think I can also safely say pretty much all women—would never voluntarily sign up for an occupation on par with active warfare where women are routinely beaten, raped, maimed and killed.[3] But then, the happy hookers named above are either in denial of this reality and/or of the upper echelons of the all-in-one-piece 1% who, because of the cloisters of political correctness and fear of being SWERFed,[4] are able to speak for all people trapped in the sex trade and spread the dogma of the empowerment and even the glamour to be gained when selling one’s body (or, most often for everyone else in the sex trade, having their bodies sold by a pimps or traffickers)[5]. In the end, the good fortune of the modern whore, self-proclaimed pro-sex feminists (implying the rest of us are anti-sex), and sex-work as work advocates[6] affects self-righteous hyper-sexualization of many young women and implemented a revised misogyny that has become embedded in Western culture five decades later.

The fallout I am referring to in these posts about a young woman/teenage girl I know has to do with just these tendencies: the cultural patterns that emerged in the third wave feminism of the 80s and 90s when, in a lot of ways, feminism stopped being feminism at all as a political movement to challenge and ultimately dismantle patriarchy as a hierarchy that has to oppress in order to exist, as a male supremacist hierarchy that began and is centered on the oppression and exploitation of women by men. In feminist activist and author Julie Bindel’s words: “the authentic meaning of feminism is the liberation of women from male supremacy.” In the 80s and 90s though, regardless of women using their sexual liberation as a one-track-mind form of feminism, what has really happened is sex positive feminists have maintained and even fed what they claim to be liberating us from.

In the 90s and early 2000s,

empowered lap dancers and retro Betty Page style burlesque performers took center stage of what it meant to be liberated and all liberation was reduced to sex. Now, in the 2020s, this prioritization of sex has resulted in the hyper-sexualization of young women— along with and as a result of—their unwitting internalized sexism. As sex trade industry advocate Gail Dines says about the contemporary state of young womanhood: “either you’re fuckable, or you’re invisible.” And the young woman I know certainly isn’t going to stand for that.

If you haven’t read Follow Up. Fallout. Part One yet, I recommend you do so as to get the beginning of the chronology of where we’re going to arrive. I started out with Billie Eilish’s mega-hit “Bad Guy” and now we are about to devolve into NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out.” When the young woman first emerged from my neglected TikTok account (it mysteriously pocket dials; I have maybe five followers; whenever it turns on with a blare, it’s her), I didn’t think, as a feminist and survivor, I could be more horrified. However, with the latest blast, I found out I could. There was her pouty, pretty, indifferent face again, recently developed cleavage, heavy black eyelashes that inevitabilize bedrooms or pending back allies, her nostrils flaring into a fraudulent I’m-so-tough sneer, fraudulent because, like the oxymoron of an empowered lap dancer, any liberation this teenage girl is performing is all about attracting the coveted male gaze in patriarchy. Again. However, I think she actually knows this; this is what she wants and lives for: male attention and trumping other young women as the most desired and, hence, fuckable. And yes, over one-hundred TikTok hearts maintains what I pray is not going to become a fatal fraud.

“Slut Me Out” by NLE Choppa

is two minutes of can’t-get mo’-bad-ass-than-this. If you are sixteen or so and want to impress everyone at high school that you are so cool you’re beyond caring about anything including yourself, this is the song for you. The song starts, (as she did):

“Rip off my shirt if you love me
Spit in my face when you fuck me
Play with my gooch while you suck me
Suck my dick like you was ugly
I’m mean … Hello.”

Let’s start with the last line which is, because of its enigmatic and provocative manner of utterance, the hook. Flat, unfeeling intonation: “I’m mean … Hello” is stated as a sinister ‘oops’ emoji: as in I didn’t mean to, I take no responsibility for my actions and gee whiz aren’t I always inculpably cute in my exquisitely honed, solipsistic indifference? In a culture that is breeding new heights of individualism and self-righteous I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-anyone-expect-myself, the song and video are the opposite of empathy; they are sensationalized desensitization, a glamourized meanness filigreed with a ‘Hello’ that conjures a malevolent lost puppy. He’s stylishly numb: timbre pouting indifference, voice flat—as was hers in her one verse TikTok lip synch.

Continuing our explication from the bottom up,

“Suck my dick like you was ugly” plays right into the misogynist trope where young women who don’t fit into the category of ‘pretty’ are not even on the periphery of the in-crowd and have to work harder to get the male approval necessary to even exist. It’s assumed that this debasement and hard work sucking his cock more avidly than others is both a privilege and an honour. In a culture that pits women against one another in the fight to be the most desired by men, the pretty girls get satisfaction out of knowing they rise above those who don’t make the misogynist grade with their pert noses and butts to match and the constant grooming prioritized surfaces entail. However, all is not triumph for the young and the pretty. Because they succeed in attracting more attention from young men as ‘hot’ and, if they hyper-sexualize themselves in order to make the most of this, they will be deemed sluts and, thereby, presumed to be asking for and deserving to be sexually assaulted—which of course they often are.[7]

As young women self-objectify, their use-value is reinforced in a male supremacist culture and young men see women as things to be used more than ever before. This is certainly not to excuse them. Young men need to be educated on sexual violence and all young people need to be taught empathy. However, it’s reality. It’s logic. As young women strut down high school corridors in high-cropped, low cut tops and sparkling pierced navels,[8] young men, with their teeming testosterone, will be aroused. (Jordan Peterson is definitely correct on this point, but certainly not when according to him the hormone besieged boys don’t have to take any responsibility for not being able to control themselves). The use of date rape drugs is escalating in high schools[9] and as the teenager girl I know performs enjoying, wanting and condoning abuse, male impunity in patriarchy will escalate to the point where, because young women are literally asking to be raped, it is, therefore, consensual and no longer a crime.

And what is a slut, exactly,

now when so many derogatory terms have been appropriated and empowered or de-derogatized? As another late 20th and 21st Century prioritization of sexuality as female liberation, slut walks of the so-called first world are manifestations of a woman’s autonomy over her body and sexuality. Fine. Of course, we want the right to our bodies and to be free to choose our sexual lifestyles. But is that all there is to a slut walk: sexual autonomy? On the surface, yes—which is significant in itself as sexual liberation is again the only point—but when we flesh it out, like all cultural phenomenon, there’s much more than is-that-all-there-is.

Julie Bindel points out “the astonishment of feminists in the Global South [that] we continue to have slut walks” when in a third world reality survival is central. Bindel tells us how the FTN (free the nipple) campaign[10] that, like so-called empowered lap dancers and voluntary prostitutes, once again serves the male gaze and his sexual pleasure they line the streets to watch the liberated nipples—read: still sexualized women’s breasts. From a global perspective, the slut walk is directly connected to the sex-work-as-work mantra that, significantly, is not espoused by the majority of prostituted people who live on the peripheries of privilege in literal third world countries like Cambodia and Nigeria and in the third worlds that exist in the first in such places as Vancouver’s BC, Canada’s, Downtown Eastside low track.[11]

And so, back to the question: what is a slut?

According to the always relevant dictionary definition in regards to the history and predominant cultural understanding of the word: “a person, especially a woman, who is sexually promiscuous” (italics mine).[12] Regardless of slut walks attempting to liberate the term from its degrading and specifically gendered female definition that originated in the 15th Century, when NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out” is lip-synched by a teenage girl on TikTok, the dictionary definition is the only definition. This is how she has been conditioned in this era of feminist backlash to define herself. And this is how she is defined: easy, fuckable, usable, and rape-able. And, as an added bonus for men, she has tacitly exclaimed: “Sign me up for all.”

Of course, there is also a psychologically abusive twist that maintains the physical as NLE Choppa asks the women to:

“Where your friend
Bring your buddy
I don’t think you enoughie”

Okay, even though I’m doing everything you want me to in order to not be ostracized in patriarchy as undesirable by men, thanks for the blow to my self-esteem to keep me in my abuse-compliant place. If that isn’t enough, I am framed as trying really hard to fulfill his fantasy of domination when apparently my “favourite thing to say is ‘Cuff Me,’” (italics mine, again). The women represented in “Slut Me Out” are voluntarily demeaned zombies where the center of their worth—their favourite desire ever—is to willingly submit to a man and, even then, not be enoughie.

However,

in a way, the song can be construed as not as offensive and harmful in the fight to end violence against women because it is sung by a man. When I first heard it coming out of the mouth of a teenage girl, though, I assumed it was sung by a woman and I was surprised—and a bit relieved in the moment—when I discovered otherwise. The lyric that made me hot with rage, horror and heartache when it was blasted at me from her TikTok is “spit in my face when you fuck me.” Yikes. Yuck. A man spat in my face once and I left him. How did this happen? How did what could be referred to as misogyny on crack get through all that feminists have fought for since the 70s? And yet, now that I know the ‘me’ is most likely ‘him,’ that’s a bit better, and there is a third person (or persons) who are definitely women that supports the possibility that this ‘me’ is a ‘he.’ And yet, once again, as with the attempted transformation of carved-in-cultural-consciousness definition of slut as a dirty and promiscuous female, when the lyric “spit in my face when you fuck me” is celebrated by a hyper-sexualized young woman on social media and rewarded with hundreds of likes, there is no possibly male ‘me’—it’s all ‘she.’

Of course, I have no problem when cocky men turn the misogyny that their gender is responsible for onto themselves. However, this possibility is short-lived as very soon—to his narcissistic glee—women are stereotypically climbing all over him as he leans back luxuriating on black satin pillows and are ever-so-faithfully, tirelessly, on top. Naturally, in patriarchy with the pre-requisite of bigger the better, he states (definitely no longer the target of his own misogyny):

“Big dick energy, I give it
Don’t believe me then come feel it
Gon’ put this here in your kidney.”

Okay, even better! Damage my organs with your huge dick! Please! And then, promoting the plague of male emotional unavailability: “Don’t text me.”

But wait, the horror!:

poor, massive-cocked, glorified mean-guy is trapped by a lascivious flight attendant in the closet, his now puppy-dog eyes begging duped girl-fans to come and save him. I can feel them yearning starry-eyed from the other side of the screen: I’ll save you so I cannot be ‘enoughie’! Even though she is far from ugly, we know the the flight attendant will have no choice but to suck his dick like she is; however, with her desperate and cougar-ish representation, she won’t have a problem with that.[13]

Ending where it starts, the first line that is written on the opening frame of the video: “Why you being weird to me” victimizes the victimizer. Does he, after all, have his tongue a bit in his cheek as the answer to being rejected and someone (or everyone) being weird to him makes him desperate enough that he asks to have his face spat on while being fucked? Does “Slut Me Out” have something in common with Eilish’s “Bad Guy” when she enigmatically claims her hit pokes fun at the way people present themselves meanwhile representing glorified nose-bleeds, Lolita-esque bruises on innocent knees, in order to, yes again attract the male attention? In both, “Slut Me Out” and “Bad Guy,” if there is any satire to be had, young girls grasping for popularity are never going to get it. And, unlike “Bad Guy” where ambivalence runs through the song to the point where the singer-songwriter’s intentions are inscrutable, for NLE Choppa, except for this one enigmatic sentence, any undermining is undermined by all that comes next.

As a cultural theorist, I am fascinated by this anthropological study of cultural de-evolution; as a human, feminist and victim/survivor, I am horrified by how young women are being expected to want to be degraded and abused in order to, in Dines’ words, not be invisible. It is my hope that for my young woman friend this is only going horrifying a phase (but, unfortunately, her actions are also damaging to those who view it and believe it). It is my hope that she will get through it as equally unscathed as the happy hookers with their “pro-sex” initiatives and empowerment through prostitution who (most likely unwittingly) brought us here. It is my hope that she’ll read this someday and recognize the self she grew out of.

Until then?

Where does this lead to? Well, being voluntarily/non-consensually choked, of course. (Looks like there will be a Follow Up. Fallout. Part 3 after all).

Yours always logically,
LF.

#Iloveendnotes

[1] Rachel Moran Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015: 152.

[2] Simon Häggström Shadow’s Law: The True Story of a Swedish Detective Inspector Fighting Prostitution. Selina Öberg, trans. Bullet Point Publishing, 2016: 72-73.

[3] Victor Malarek The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It. New York: Arcade Publishers, 2011: 228.

[4] When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour 2022 across the US and Canada for my book Victim, I visited many sexual violence non-profit centres. I asked them about their take on sex-work as really being work like all others and not inherently exploitative. Many of them agreed with me; however, when counselling often mentally ill, traumatized and drug addicted women in the sex trade, they are unable to offer any exiting strategies, other opportunities for prostituted people to support themselves in a way that would most likely be interested in. This is because of the politically correct prerequisite to not question the exploited person’s ‘free’ choice even through implication. Through her extensive research and travels investigating prostitution internationally, feminist psychologist Melissa Farley reports how: “In 9 countries on 5 continents, 89% of more than 850 women in prostitution told us that they wanted to get out.” Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. Prostitution Research & Education, 2007: 27. Prostitution survivor Rachel Moran comments in her memoir, Paid For, how when she was in the sex trade, she acted as though she had freely chosen to be there in order to psychologically protect herself and have some sort of empowerment. It is common when women get out, they realize that there was no free choice involved and that is was all circumstantial and coerced choice. When you think about it, this is logic. However, some sexual assault non-profits, so steeped in the dogma and delusion of ‘free’ will and the freedom to choose exploitation and to not offend by openly offering alternatives, SWERFed me (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. See this link for more details)

[5] As Detective Inspector Simon Häggström, the head of the Stockholm Police Prostitution Unit, says: “When it comes to people’s backgrounds it is clear that certain groups are more at risk of ending up in prostitution than others.” Simon Häggström: 72-73

[6] Sex-workers advocates are well-meaning. They want to protect people in the sex trade by destigmatizing it and making it regular work. This is never going to happen because the majority of men who buy sex from predominantly exploited women and girls, hate women and there will always be an unequal power relationship. When a man is paying a woman for her sexual services, he has control over what she has to do. And, if she doesn’t do it, the man feels entitled and it has often been stated by men that raping a prostitute is not rape. Prostituted women always have an escape plan set up before going with a john. And, there are emergency buttons in brothel rooms (that sometimes don’t work). Do any not-prostituted people need an emergency button or an exciting plan before starting their shift? I think it’s safe to say, No. Logic.

[7] One woman every 17 minutes is raped in Canada, one woman every 2 minutes in the US, and one woman every 18 seconds in Mexico. The most common age when a women is raped is 13-30.

[8] The teenage girl who is the subject of this essay proudly showed me what she was wearing to school the next day. I said that’s a belt; but, no, it was actually a ‘shirt.’ There needs to be dress codes at high schools and universities. However, there quite often isn’t because of the politically correct dogma of ‘freedom of choice.’ In the end, political correctness supports and maintains rape culture.

[9] In this article about a Vancouver area high school, young women are starting to fight back; however, when male teachers ‘flag’ teenage girls for wearing revealing clothes, the young women say it’s their choice to wear what they want. Yes, it is. But unfortunately self-objectification as a sex object and the inevitable male response to this does nothing to end or even abate rape culture. Sorry. More logic. https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/new-westminster-students-rally-against-high-school-rape-culture-5368130

[10] Julie Bindel Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation London: Constable, 2021: 14; 80.

[11] The low track is the prostitution ‘stroll’ where some of the most desperate women in Canada are prostituted to pay for drug addictions. According to Gabor Maté who worked as a psychiatrist in the DTES for many years, all of the mentally ill and drug-addicted women being prostituted on the streets were sexually abused as children and continue to be sexually assaulted virtually every day. This is the location where serial killer Robert Pickton found his victims over a ten year period. The disappearances of these women were ignored by the Vancouver Police for almost a decade. See See Gabor Maté In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and Lori Shehner That Lonely Section of Hell: the Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away.

[12] A substantial and historical definition of ‘slut.’ “The word’s origins are unknown, but the Oxford English Dictionary coined it as “a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman” in the 1400s. Until the 20th century, the term ‘slut’ referred to poor women with low standards of cleanliness. ‘Slut’ was not only gendered, but also classed. According to society, the poor women it referred to should be more productive in the labour market. It was not until 1966 that ‘slut’ became what we know it as today; a “woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive.” https://yeoja-mag.com/origin-word-slut/

[13] There is also the derogatory ‘cougar’ stereotype is at work in this scene as well. It is so annoying when the name of the big cat in BC, Canada forests is brought up and right away men go to the stereotype of a ravenous middle-aged woman preying on younger men. Of course, when an older man is with a young woman, if anything, he is called a sugar daddy. Women can be labeled sugar mamas, as well. However, giving someone sugar is a much more positive metaphor than a female/predatory and terrifying wild animal attacking innocent young men. This annoying topic came up once again last weekend at a dinner party (by a man of course). I explained the above and, alas, a woman said to me, “people can’t say anything these days. There is no sense of humour.” (Sigh). Derogatory stereotypes are never funny: be they racial, gender-based or class-based. In his video, NLE Choppa as a literal and ideological predator in a male supremacist system becomes the victim as he is pulled into a closet by a misogynist myth. From my experience as a middle-aged woman, they are the young men who (often to my surprise) hit on me. Hey, middle-aged women sisters: what’s your take on this myth? Tell me in the comments!

*All images of NLE Choppa and his video “Slut Me Out” are screenshots from the official video on YouTube.

About the Blogger:

I am an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. My work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. My art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and I have exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. I am the recipient of the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” 2022 for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist who abducted and brutalized me and countless other women. Since that time, as I write in my book, Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

“And, believe it or not, what I suffered and survived …. all of those years ago gave me a gift of knowing my strength and what I can survive. And now, resistance, fighting for justice for all, is what I live for. My life is far bigger than myself.”(186)

My personal experience of surviving and triumphing over sexual violence and trauma is the origin of Logical Feminism.

I live in Mexico City and British Columbia, Canada. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor is my debut book.

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Follow Up. Fallout. Part One.

Follow Up. Fallout. Part One.

A follow up to my previous post, “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.”

I doubt she’ll ever read this.

And if she does, I’d like to think that would be a good thing.

As not only a logical feminist, but also, through the wisdoms gleaned from logic, a fierce one, I discovered recently that a young woman, a teenager whom I am very close to, embodies my worst nightmare.

I am a survivor and, what I designate in my book Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, also a victim because: “the bodies of rape victims stand as accusations. Our scarred, vibrant beings as memorials.”[1] With a memorial, a never forgetting, comes memory; memory is knowledge and with knowledge comes knowing what is going on; by honoring our scars,[2] victim/survivors know not only in our minds, but deep within or bodies. The inevitable scars of surviving violence are legacies of trauma. And, paradoxically, never forgetting the sources of our trauma is a good thing because our awareness can help change the pathology of a culture built with exploitation that creates a generation of young women who could be described as voluntary victims.

How did I find out about this nightmare?

Well, I have a TikTok account as “The Logical Feminist.” I haven’t used it much. Only three or four posts. As you will know if you use social media to try and effectively share a message that extends beyond your personal life, it’s tough to keep up with all of the posting not to mention actually creating the projects that you will post about! That said, it’s on my extensive list to get on the TikTok and get Logical Feminism more extensively out into the world and help stop this nightmare backlash.

Every now and then when I am walking with my phone in my pocket, my TikTok turns on. I have only about five friends and every time the TikTok comes on and startles me out of some peaceful state, it’s her.

The first time it happened, I didn’t recognize her at first. She was lip-syncing to a song insulting other women, internalized sexism blasting from this insolent and, dare I say, lethally ignorant, young woman. Her eyelids heavy with hyper-feminine, excessive black lashes, push-up bra cleavage, her beautiful so-recently-still-a-girl face pouting “I’m more fuckable than she is.” My ire flared instantly and I was just about to comment “You’re an idiot,” when I saw her name and recognized her beneath all of the horror I was seconds away from lashing out at. I felt like I was going to puke; rage, panic and  heartbreak momentarily darkened all hope and, amidst the gains a lot of women have made at least in the so-called first world, I thought: how the hell did this happen? This toxic backlash has to stop.

She’s sixteen now. When she was twelve or so she told me all she wanted was to be ‘cool.’ I thought “Oh No … here it comes ….” But, even though I have been studying and writing about sexual violence, feminist backlash and internalized sexism for decades, I never imagined how bad it could get.

It all started with Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.

Yes, I know. It’s a great song; it can be seen as a farce, a critique of terrible, power abusive men—up to a point. However, in the numerous interviews when Eilish has been asked what her enigmatic lyrics mean, she doesn’t get close to any analysis of what actually constructs the “bad guy” (what to me as a feminist and one who deconstructs systems of exploitation is obvious); but then, not to excuse her lack of feminist awareness, good art often goes beyond the intentions of the artist. She replies that the song “pokes fun at the way people present themselves.” Okay, if Eilish is taking the piss, it certainly isn’t obvious.

Unfortunately for inevitably impressionable girls, the main thing about the song and the super-slick video is that it’s cool. As a clever, catchy pop-song riddled with artful rock & roll ambivalence, right off the bat the ‘character’ Eilish is playing is a seamless combination of predator and prey. And, as demonstrated by the out-take laughter between Eilish and most likely her brother before the video starts, the brutality that is about to come is funny. This is rock & roll frivolity at its finest, the little snippets between songs that give ravenous fans a taste of their idol’s private life. However, what is about to come is far from funny.

Low-fi super-cool catchy:

Eilish kicks out of mustard-yellow paper that is the same colour as her be-hoodied sweat suit both defiant and energy-sapped as she slouches sulky gangsta’ groove in the baggy suit; cut to “white shirt now red my bloody nose,” and, yes, her nose starts to bleed. I researched the nose-bleed trope and found out that it is supposed to signify sexual arousal. Tellingly, in terms of what is being communicated as young women’s sexuality in this 2019 hit, if she is sexually aroused, she looks pretty numb (and/or indifferent) to the whole thing or like she’s coming back from being raped on a date-rape drug. However, if one doesn’t know about this connection between sexuality and nose bleeds, the young woman is just plain bleeding. And what is blood typically connected to? Well, logically: violence.

Cut from the nose-bleed:

dressed in pressed, white Bermuda shorts are little girl legs with “bruises on both my knees for you”; the bruises are red, raw, and suggest pre-bruise, recently-peeled scabs matching the fact that these bruises are ‘for you,’ as the young woman, simultaneously martyred and tough, is offering her wounds as a macabre valentine to the multiplicity of men who trail behind her on tricycles. Of course, these men are all really hot, those whom she is both victimized by and dominates while she is riding and rocking out on a bright red kiddie-car doing her soon to be very trendy manic-slouch dance as she states in super cool[3] unfeeling zombie-voice I’m the “might seduce your dad type.” (As in my last post, here comes the sensationalized Lolita trope again).

Eilish (or the non-self-character that is impossible to pull off as a rockstar in their music video because fans will always see them as the rockstar) is the epitome of the delusional empowerment so many young women think they achieve through their external and internalized hyper-sexualization[4]. Confiding: her chin is raised in male defensive/offensive defiance and/or having just received an upper-cut as eyes roll insolent and exhausted with “just can’t get enough guy.” However, despite—or perhaps because of—abuse, she states simultaneously gloating and indifferent: “I’m the bad type, make your girlfriend mad type.” Ambivalence reigns as the tough-girl/victim smears the blood from her nose-bleed all over her face.

The final shot is in a dimly lit, luxurious apartment. It isn’t hers. Not that it isn’t possible for an eighteen-year-old rockstar to own such an apartment, I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the man who is at least ten years her senior whom she is apparently dominating or is a five star hotel room paid for by him. This is another layer to the regurgitated mythology that luxury can be gained by young women using their sexuality to manipulate men. And where is Eilish (oops, I mean the character that we aren’t aware she’s playing)? Well, she’s oh-so-scandalously sitting cross-legged and cheeky as a little girl who wants to be more than spanked on of the man’s back as he does push ups (this requires her of course to be the idealized slender female of patriarchy that so many young women ferociously fight against their bodies to achieve).

Simultaneously smug and innocent,

she states, looking as though she is about to pass out (again date rape drug comes to mind): “I like when you get mad. I guess I’m pretty glad” and then asks, “you say she’s scared of me?” (referring again to the jilted girlfriend and the all-powerful “she” existing in her sexuality as the triumphant source of the jilt). Here (another segment, yawn amidst the apparent edgy innovation, of again and again) is the message of women having so much power over men that they betray their girlfriends for us because we are such hot bad bitches; however, by aspiring towards this representation of an indifferent, emotionally shut down person, we simultaneously betray our sisters and, at the same time, this triumph is based on the fact that the men want us because we are self-victimizing and we like, even ask for, abuse. Does anyone really want to be abused even when they have been conditioned to ask for it?

I know, this is gender-politics-twisted-madness and the artful ambivalence of the song and its video swirls round and round. As an art critic, I must admit this is a riot to write about, but there is no way a pre-pubescent girl who wants to be cool will get anything out of the video except the desire—or need—to be like that. She’ll gobble up this dangerous candy; embody what will piss off her parents; be what will put her in the danger that she either doesn’t know about or doesn’t acknowledge or it’s cooler to feign indifference to or, worse yet, it doesn’t matter because putting herself in danger is the whole point: asking to be abused. This is what she’s been trained to do. In the end, this representation of a hot, insolent young woman (who is being played by a teen idol whose concerts sell out in minutes) turns young women who want to be mainstream-cool against themselves.

The only ‘empowered’ lyric exists in the midst of its undoing:

“I like it when you take control even if you know that you don’t own me, I’ll let you play the role. I’ll be your animal.” (Italics mine). Okay: in terms of gender politics, I get it: things are a mess in so called post-feminist so-called first world young womanhood. But, at the same time, what does this mean exactly? What does this mean in terms of young women thinking it’s cool to imitate this contradiction laden way of being a woman? Let’s unpack it, or try to:

  1. She says she likes being dominated and maintaining the male role of domination and the female submission. Men will continue to see themselves as dominant and women as mere things to be dominated and vessels for the enactment of their power. They will continue to dominate and often brutalize women because they are not valued fully as human. And, better yet, the women ask for it now. They have consented to being an object. She is objectifying herself.
  2. This he who is the paradoxically submissive ‘bad guy’ might know he doesn’t own her. Might being a key word. The consent of this role-play has not been consented to and acknowledged as play (read: not entirely real because even play contains reality). How does this play out in what it maintains beyond this apparently benign sex game? Especially when she’ll be ‘his’ animal? Isn’t the animal that she is playing that is ‘his’ but then, at the same time, not owned by him of the same body? He doesn’t own her and yet she is his. It’s titillating. Great rock & roll angst. And edgy rebellion for teenage girls to get their trying-to-figure-out-who-they-are-peer-pressured-to-be-cool-and-part-of-the-in-crowd teeth into.

By the end of the song, Eilish—or the bad-guy-girl she is attempting to be acting—is the bad guy. As her male victims’ decapitated heads hang around her in bags, any sort of empowerment in the song has simply flipped the hierarchy of power abuse: the woman is now as violent as the most violent of men to the point of achieving the indifference of a sociopath serial killer as she playfully pokes a hole in one of her victim’s head-bags. There is no empowerment here as my teenage girl friend has chastised me. This is but a sensationalized reperpetuation of that which exploits and now she, as the exploited, is the exploiter—or, in a still male supremacist culture, so she thinks.

However, in yet another interview where yet another music critic is trying to unravel her enigmatic lyrics, Eilish tries again to explain: “The initial idea for the song is like people that have to tell everybody that they are a certain way all the time? They’re not that certain way. […] In general, I feel like you will never catch a bad bitch telling everyone she’s a bad bitch. It’s on—it’s you.”[5] Okay, I don’t know about you but I only sort of understand this, and I only sort of understand this in the context of an interview and as a convoluted comment on pretension and narcissism. But as an intention readily accessible in the work of art as the ‘bad bitch’ is more glamourized than critiqued? Not so much. Or even at all.

Even though we love it,

even though it is one hell of an ear-worm, I don’t think anyone got what the artist insists she was trying to do in Bad Guy—and this is most likely why so many music critics have had to keep asking her. I know the young woman I am close to didn’t. I think it’s safe to say that all of the other young women and pre-pubescent girls who strive to be cool didn’t. However, there is one almost useful revelation: beneath the unfeeling bravado performed by a bad bitch who, in the end, is the mirror image of the bad guy; through the internalized sexism that has simmered to the point of self-brutalization that pathologically produces a twenty-first century “liberated” young woman, Eilish is crouching on the sidewalk, despondently feeding pigeons (an urban pass-time that is often equated with loneliness and mental illness). Yay! I love it! An acknowledgement of vulnerability! There is a trajectory of logic here as a young woman trying to be a bad guy does quite often fail as she is abused in order to be accepted in the boys club of inherently power abusive men. And yet, again, this inevitability is washed away as the despondency becomes a decadent, stylized, first world depression, yet another act of coolness as the insolent, young woman performs being unaffected by trauma and teenage girl “Duhs” punctuate the groove.

Don’t get me wrong,

Billie Eilish is a brilliant artist and singer-songwriter. The song and its video are a pop masterpiece. However, because all artists find their inspiration in the fodder of the everyday, what does it say about our culture that this song exists in the first place? And what happens when girls imitate the very thing Eilish claims to be critiquing?

My young friend took all of Eilish’s stylized sulky, saucy slouching as real, as what she is supposed to be in order to embody coolness. And, yes, she is ‘cool.’ Hundreds of hearts on TikTok whenever she performs and posts acts of toxic, internalized sexism, but at what cost both to her personally and to reinforcing misogyny and either maintaining or increasing violence against women? Huge.

And after this early adulthood education what has she graduated to? Well, this: stay tuned for NLE Choppa “Slut Me Out.”

Yours,

LF

#iloveendnotes

[1] Karen Moe Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Vigilance Press: Mexico City/Lantzville, BC: 2022: 39.

[2] Ibid: 144.

[3] I can’t help but repeat this term ‘super cool’ as it’s the main theme despite being otherwise expressed by Eilish.

[4] Read Natasha Walter Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism for numerous examples where T-shirts that say “So Many Boys, Not Enough Time,” are marketed to the parents of toddlers. 3-year-old girl maturity through young woman (even girl) sexuality

[5] https://www.nme.com/news/music/billie-eilish-breaks-down-bad-guy-lyrics-2543500

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Note on images: all images of Billy Eilish are wallpaper free downloads except for the first and last which are screen shots from a live concert posted on YouTube.

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