Topic: Ranting
That post I mentioned I'd been wanting to write about Pink's new music video? Soft Graffiti got there first, and has done a really good job identifying both the positive and the negative aspects of the messages in the video.
Unfortunately, I can't find a live link to the video. Plasticbag.org pointed me to it a few weeks ago, but that link is no longer working. You can read the lyrics here, if you're interested. Or you might try YouTube for the video - I can't at the moment because the site is not available.
The song is a rant about 'stupid' girls: materialistic, body and image obsessed women. The video fairly pointedly sends up Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson, in particular. On the one hand, it's entertaining to see vapid, shallow, obnoxious behavior mocked. And I'm always happy to see a critique of image obsession in popular media, where it's possible it might reach a large enough audience to do some sort of good.
The video isn't any sort of radical critique, though - the alternative to being a 'stupid' girl that the video presents is to play football with the boys. The message seems to be that either you can play with the boys, or be played by them - male approval figures highly in what's valued about women either way, and there isn't a strong message that women are capable of being supportive of each other. That, to my mind, is a major omission.
It's something of a missed opportunity, as well. The media is able to play this as a catfight between Pink and the 'stupid girls', going straight for the salacious angle and ignoring the commentary on the scarcity (in the mainstream) of alternative models of femininity for girls and young women. I think it would have been better (although for Pink, as a participant in and product of the mainstream media, maybe not possible) to have attacked the media for pushing thinness, consumerism, and a pre-packaged blatant 'sexiness' as feminine ideals, rather than focusing on the 'girls' in question.
(Via the 9th Carnival of Feminists at Mind the Gap!)