Katy Perry And The Vacuous "Fauxminism" of the 2020's
Last week, Katy Perry released “Woman’s World,” a truly bizarre music video about… how women are… great? I guess? After a deluge of negative reviews that I’ll speak more about in a moment, Katy Perry took to instagram to defend herself and elaborate on her artistic intent. The post is captioned: “YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! EVEN SATIRE!”
“With this set, it’s like, ‘We’re not about the male gaze but we really are about the male gaze,’ and we’re really overplaying it and on the nose because I’m about to get smashed, which is like a reset for me, and a reset for my idea of feminine divine.”
…K.
So she’s satirizing…. pandering to the male gaze? …..by pandering to the male gaze? I think Katy needs a lesson in how to use the phrase “on the nose” because it seems like she thinks it somehow allows her to call what she’s doing satire when all she’s doing is the thing she’s claiming to criticize. That’s like a super wealthy person buying a yacht and then calling it satire because it’s really “on the nose” for a wealthy person to buy a yacht. Usually “on the nose” is a phrase used to describe when the point that’s being made is a little heavy-handed (like if the music video were an AI generated woman’s body sucking a dildo that had the word “feminism” written on it. Now THAT would be “on the nose.”) But in this case, you can’t call the joke “on the nose” because no point is actually being made. Katy Perry is just walking around looking hot dancing with objects and eye fucking the camera.
I’m not saying you can’t be raunchy or slutty and be feminist at the same time. And I’m not saying that satire can’t involve a little bit of pandering to the power you’re trying to upend, but satire does more than merely demonstrate the phenomenon you’re trying to criticize. Satire is a mechanism for undermining, recontextualizing, or clarifying the thing that’s being satirized. Often it has the form of feeding the audience the thing they thought they wanted and making them question their desires in the process. So, the problem here isn’t Perry’s objectified body (some feminists might say there is no way to take a picture of the female form in our current society without pandering to the male gaze in some way.) What’s missing in Perry’s video is any commentary whatsoever.
Here is a great example of an artist that is successfully satirizing the male gaze while simultaneously pandering to it.
Why is this satire? The legendary Peaches is doing two things with this photo shoot. The location and the impracticality of the outfit conform to some desires of the male gaze; namely that the female-bodied subject be uncomfortable, decorated, and sexualized. They’re giving the viewer the thing the male gaze purports to want, which is access to their body and the promise of sex.
But at the same time, they’re breaking with other male gaze conventions. They’ve neglected to remove all their “imperfections;” note the odd placement of the ill-fitting leotard, the hair sneaking out of the armpit, the unsupported, bra-less natural breasts, the absence of aesthetic attention to their groin. And their upper body is in a posture of comfort, confidence, and maybe even a challenge. Their back isn’t arched performatively. They’re not a damsel, caught unawares. They’re actually down to fuck and they’re quite comfortable with that fact. The fact that this picture does not fit into the conventional image of “sexy” proves that the thing that men think they desire (a woman who is ready to fuck them) is not, in fact, the fantasy at the core of the male gaze. This picture proves (and forces the male viewer to confront) that the male gaze wants not only to fuck the female form, but to have the impossible combination of a female form who has meticulously festooned her body for his pleasure and enjoyment and simultaneously does not, in fact, want to be fucked, at least not easily. A girlish or frightened or fake female form would be far more appealing to the conventional eye.
Peaches is an artist who sexualizes themselves in a very confronting and purposeful and non-commercial way. They have pushed culture with their work. They’ve stretched long-held concepts of what “sexy” means, what “sex” even is, and proven how radical it can be to simply appear as a female-bodied person who isn’t trying to convince the world they’re fuckable. A plus. Great feminist art that’s also raunchy. Whooooo!
(Another great example of satire that is way less male gaze-y is their second album title and cover: Fatherfucker, pictured below.)
Now let’s take a look at some frames from Katy Perry’s video.
On the nose, indeed.
As I alluded to above, I’m not the first person to criticize this music video. Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Cut and others all tore it to pieces calling it “abysmal”, “regressive warmed-over hell”, and “so forgettable, so cringe, that it overshadows the blatant hypocrisy of having an alleged predator produce it” respectively. (Oh yeah, a producer who was accused of sexual assault by Kesha produced it.)
Cool. I’m glad that videos like this aren’t being embraced by the mainstream media as feminist anthems. That’s… progress. But what’s really striking to me is all of these reviewers’ inability to actually put their fingers on what is so horrifically bad about the video. The reason they can’t do it is that feminism is, in fact, my friends, kind of complicated! And not everyone has been swimming in the discourse in a real way, regardless of their familiarity with the terms that the discourse has birthed, such as “male gaze” “patriarchy” and “divine feminine” or as Perry (and no one else) called it, “feminine divine.”
Pitchfork diagnosed the problem as Perry’s apparent insincerity and lack of interest in feminism, but then neglected to share any actual feminist critique of the video itself. The Guardian focused on the video feeling dated, and disparaged Perry for failing to understand that pop looks more like Chappell Roan now, hellloooooo? Get with the times, Katy!! (as if accusing a 39 year old woman of not being as hip as women in their twenties is truly astute social commentary.) The Cut, cruelly, derided Perry for her “desperation”, calling her a “2010s relic, a faded pop star frantically attempting to clamber back to relevance” (as if every artist on the planet isn’t frantically attempting to become, or remain, relevant.)
I cringed almost as much reading these reviews as I did watching the music video. The palpable delight that these writers took in tearing apart this faux feminist fumble reeked not just of vacuous political analysis but also unexamined misogyny. Katie Perry definitely failed at making the feminist anthem she hoped she was making, but not because she’s a desperate, washed up, out-of-touch hag. Quite the opposite. I think Perry simply made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud.
Instead of experiencing this video as out of date, I perceived it as the ✨perfect✨ time capsule of what the mainstream currently vomits up and offers unapologetically as feminism in 2024 which is, basically:
There is no clear feminist analysis here! Just a bunch of terms, phrases, hashtags, nods, aesthetics and winks that we hope you’ll buy as feminism so you can feel good about spending money in the ways we’re asking you to!
This is also the gist of the message of the movie “Barbie.” Though Barbie might be worse, because it also includes a problematic suggestion that when women don’t take care of men’s emotions, patriarchy happens. But that’s a whole essay unto itself. If I’m being extremely generous, I’d say the other message embedded in both Katy Perry’s video and the Barbie movie is that women face a lot of contradictory pressures. We need to be hot but nurturing, successful but complacent, etc… and that’s, like, so hard, you know? 😔
It’s a true sentiment, but it’s not particularly insightful or deep or political. Feminists have been writing about and naming the double bind issue since the beginning. This is a really superficial analysis of what women and AFAB folks are experiencing in the world today.
I think what this video shines a painfully bright light on is the reality that it’s not enough to simply state the main tenet of feminism (that all genders should be equal) and get a feminism prize. In my mind, what makes something a piece of feminist art in 2024 is the presence of a deeper take, and one that actually challenges something about the oppressive structures we’re dealing with. The diagnoses for why we haven’t achieved gender equality and the prescriptions for how we solve this are where the really juicy stuff lies, and where the deep and well-informed thinking is required, both of artists and their reviewers.
Without a discernible thesis, art that brings up gender and then says nothing about is just co-opted, pandering garbage; “fauxminism” if you will. And that’s true no matter how many times you use the word “patriarchy.”
In debaucherous camaraderie,
🪶Rachel Lark
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