Researching the music industry's relationship with feminism
The representation of women within the music industry can be exploitative, degrading and even threatening; evidenced by the condoning of rape culture by current artist, Robin Thicke.
I have decided to focus my research on modern media so that what I am presenting has more relevance to my audience. This could allow my documentary to create a greater impact as my audience may reevaluate the media which they are consuming. My target audience will also be familiar with current media due to their predominant media consumption habits as a young, digitally literate demographic.
Deconstruction of
Timber by Pitbull ft. Ke$ha
Deconstruction of lyrics:
"I'll have them like Miley Cyrus clothes off twerking in their bras and thongs. Face down booty up, that's the way we like to what."
From these lyrics the males are degrading women by describing them as sexual objects. 'Dig-gidy dogs' metaphorically describing the males is degrading to men as it suggests they are driven by animalistic, hedonistic behaviour such as sex rather than complex human behaviour. The artist Miley Cyrus is also slut shamed for her 'twerking' and outfit choices.
"She says she won't but I bet she will."
The scenario being presented here is that the woman has rejected Pitbull's advances, but he is certain that he will be able to convince her otherwise - suggesting harassment by Pitbull. This demonstrates the damaging feminist social theory that 'no' means 'yes' and a man can change a woman's mind by harassing her despite her showing that she isn't interested - giving the man patriarchal control over the woman's choices.
"Timber"
The song title itself which is repeated throughout the song is a metaphorical male sexual innuendo - creating male dominance.
Deconstruction of the video:
This wide shot still from the music video demonstrates the male gaze in third person, as the audience can see that women are objects for the males' viewing pleasure.
The male gaze is also presented by the producers use of close-ups and tracking shots with the focal points being the curves, bottoms and boobs of the women in the music video.
Tracking and lingering over the women's curves presents them as an erotic object for the men in the video as well as the audience - which passively gives them the role of the oppressive male gaze. As the women are the only gender to be objectified in this way, a patriarchal role is assumed in the video, as the male perspective is the dominant one whilst the females are submissive to his gaze. Second wave feminist Laura Mulvey who created the concept of the male gaze in her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', 1975, stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera, and Hollywood films played to the models of voyeurism (sexual interest in spying on people engaged in intimate behaviours) and scopophilia (sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects). It may be useful to research further into the statistics and ratios between male and female main production roles within the mainstream media and whether this is changing, in a separate post.
When an audience views women in the media with an objectifying male gaze, this can transfer into how they view women in reality - leading to more female objectification, evident by everyday sexism such as cat calling, staring and groping/other forms of sexual assualt.
Looking at the mise en scene costume within the video, the women are wearing significantly less than the fully covered men. The women's costumes are sexualised due to their revealing design which often resembles lingerie, presenting them fundamentally as 'eyecandy' for the males in the video and the audience, however the suited, shirted and trousered men are not objectified in this way due to their styling.
The differences between the male costume and female sexualisation can be seen clearly by these two similar wide shots above and below.
Male costume: hats, long sleeved shirts, jeans, boots. Female costume: hat, cropped vest, unbuttoned knicker shorts, visible thong, heels.
Mid shot of fully suited male costume at the beach.
Wide shot in right third of fully clothed male costume with a long sleeved shirt and trousers apart from shoes.
Wide tracking shot of full clothed male costume with a long sleeved shirt and trousers whist diving.
Mid shot of lingerie style costume with cut outs on the pants and translucent lace draped at the back.
Finally, the shots of the women dancing on the tables for the male crowd's entertainment suggest arguably degrading stripping/table dancing imagery, met by a man grabbing one of the women without her permission, which further degrades the women in the video and demonstrates a male dominance.
