"Blurred Lines, Indeed" Response
In this essay from her book Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay discusses the way that women are sexually objectified framed around Robin Thicke's 2013 smash hit "Blurred Lines" (which is basically a love letter to the idea that no means yes. In this essay, she talks about struggling to balance her enjoyment of this music and her desire to be light and fun and not some sort of feminist killjoy with her realistic concern that these kinds of pop-cultural things contribute to the rape culture that we live in.
The thing that stuck out to me the most was definitely exemplified by this quote. "It's hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you're not imagining things. It's hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you're going to float the fuck away...These are just songs. They are just jokes. It's just a hug. They're just breasts. Smile, you're beautiful" (Gay 189). I know that that is a really long quotation but I feel like it really captures the way that women are almost gaslit by culture to believe that the harassment and abuse that they experience, and crucially, the things that lead to and normalize that harassment and abuse, are not that big of a deal and they are being killjoys for complaining about it.
These ideas are not ones that are particularly unfamiliar to me, but I think the way that Gay approaches them actually is. She does not come down hard on the condemnation side, saying that you cannot enjoy pup cultural things that have these elements in them, but she also does not excuse the more toxic elements of these texts. She doesn't give us a simple answer, and I do not think that there is one, but the level of nuance that she gives to this issue is clear and refreshing and very much the point of the essay more so than any answer or guide to approaching problematic cultural exports.
This is really interesting to me. I really like that song because it's such a bop and as a ten year old when it came out I didn't understand what it meant . Now that I listen to it again as someone who understand these things, it can be really upsetting. This is textbook "no means yes," as you put it. I find this is also a really tough area for me. I think that it is very important to think about. It can be hard for me to ignore the sexism in media given that sexism is something that causes so many people pain, but at the same time, sexism is everywhere and it's hard to find media that doesn't contain it.
ReplyDeleteRowan, I also read and analyzed this reading, and I completely agree with your points. When pop culture and sexism are so closely intertwined, starting conversations without "ruining peoples' fun" is difficult. Like you mentioned, when women protest against misogynistic songs or share their experiences of harassment, society often downplays their stories by telling them to "lighten up." It's incredibly frustrating-- but I definitely think it's necessary for us to continue having conversations about the implications of sexism in media.
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