Wow….this clip almost made me cry. That is so disturbing. I think the point about men’s sense entitlement is important and needs to be made again and again. We live in a world where many men still seem to believe that they are entitled to women’s bodies. Women are understood as being men’s sexual playthings. Music videos encourage this sense of entitlement.

Sure, most men know the difference between reality and the ‘fantasy’ (whose fantasy?) depicted in music videos. But the fact that around the world, in so-called gender-equal societies, such as Australia and the US, men continue to sexually assault women demonstrates that some men still believe it’s ok to (ab)use women for their own sexual gratification.

The sexualisation of women in music clips is so normalised that I wonder if people even notice it anymore. It certainly doesn’t titilate me or represent anything ‘edgy’. It demonstrates a lack of creativity and imagination.

Erwin,

Speaking form the perspective of a teenager who has grown up with imagery far more main stream and confronting than what you are talking about, I have not always been okay. It has affected me and I know it has affected my friends and they did not all turn out “okay”

I do not think you can speak from a position of understanding teenagers these days. So yeah, I am concerned about even the younger kids than me! For sure.

Thanks CS

I wrote a lengthy answer and then my computer decided to kick my behind.

Let me just take out one part that was the only fun part to write for me because the rest of the gish gallop and wrong assumptions probably caused the answer that broke my internet.

Let me take you to a young lad in his early teens (yes, me, some 30 years ago). It is the early 80s. To get lyrics, you had to listen to songs focusedly, try to figure it out and write it down. If a friend had actually bought an album and it had a lyrics sheet, your work was done for you, except that you had to copy the music to tape and copy the lyrics with pen and paper. Sometimes, you and a friend got together and listened to songs, argueing what the lyrics were, if they were not clearly pronounced. Believe me, being busy with a songs like that for anything between 10 minutes up to an hour, it is much more in your face than the audio-visual overload of modern TV.

Let’s add an more twist to it and think about what you would do if you saw your kid writing down the lyrics from which I will quote and what it might do to the psychological development. I’ll spill the beans: nothing. None of us became sado-masochists, gay (well, I’m bisexual), religious, violent, drugabusers, incestuous or suicidal. Most of us (like me) have kids, some of us (like me) got married and a few (like me) were divorced by there ex-bff’s. You know, normal life.

And oh, the lyrics. The song’s you target are so forgettable by comparison. Actually, kids forget them, if they remember them at all. Otherwise I can’t figure out why all the kids in my neighborhood are normal and healthy despite the exposure to all the ‘evil’. There are about 40 that I know enough about, 2 of them are mine – which is why I keep a fatherly eye out on what goes on out there, especially because my son is an autist, can’t be too careful.

As promised, a sample of the lyrics I figured out or copied by hand as a wee young lad:
“You treat me like a dog – Get me down on my knees” (Master and Servant)
“With you on top and me underneath – Forget all about equality” (Master and Servant)
“Vicar in a tutu, he’s not strange” (Vicar in a tutu) (not very explicit, but I love the song)
“Burn down the disco, hang the blessed DJ” (Panic)
“The boys in the backroom loving it up, shooting of energy” (Menergy)

From one song (Sister)
“I was only 16 but I guess that’s no excuse
My sister was 32, lovely, and loose
[..]
My sister never made love to anyone else but me
She’s the reason for my, uh, sexuality
She showed me where it’s supposed to go
[..]
Incest is everything it’s said to be
[..]
She [took a whip to] me until I shout”

You get the idea.

“and the adults and lives of families today are in great shape compared to our parents era”

For some reason I talked with more than my share of people of our parents era and this is my general conclusion:
In that time of strong families with the father as the undisputed head of the family, so much was swept under the rug to maintain that image of the crispy clean family. Not the only but a to me painful victim was my father who never could deal with the injustice of his youth and drank himself to death at the ripe old age of 43. He wasn’t the only one but the one close to me. So DON’T come to me with your pathetic uninformed stories about how things are worse these days and especially don’t tell me that we need traditional families to save our world and that you fight your pathetic uninformed wrongly targeted badly founded battle for this.

Just don’t.

I’m known as a walk-over but some things can trigger this boy named Sue (Nice cultural reference, not? I know a lot more about music and its cultural history than most people). In our parents’ days, children had no recourse because that almighty father was always right and his wife would always nod in agreement. Even if my dad wasn’t a victim and me trying to keep him from his demise didn’t scar me, I heard too much for comfort from others of his generation. I sometimes wish people didn’t confide in me so much.

But let’s get to a lighter topic lest I explode in a ball of rage.

Question: would you let your kids watch this innocent piece of popular 80s pop? Would you call your station not to put in on on Saturday morning TV?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDRnSXOgMuI&feature=av2n

It is Master And Servant by Depeche Mode. It is very subtle, don’t you think? I seriously want to know.
Recently on twitter I quoted the ‘you treat me like a dog’ line on Twitter with ‘name that tune’ after it. Almost everyone of my generation knows that song, I was overloaded with reply and people telling me how awesome the song is.

I have always been sensitive to degredation of women, or anyone, and even songs that vaguely put women in stereo-typical roles. In that respect ‘I should be so lucky’ by Kylie Minogue is a song that always burned my toast because, like most Stock, Aitken and Waterman songs (from Mike Stock, the hypocrit that article starts out with) it always portrays women as, having to look good and non-dominating roles. In response to a lyircs of a song by The Smiths (’cause the music they [DJs] constantly play tells my nothing to me about my life”) they said said:
“We are writing for girls who go out and hope for a guy to buy them a drink”
They also brought out the single “No deeper meaning” to say that teens aren’t interested in songs with a message and they just want to dance.
The blog posting started out with qouting the wrong guy and to add insult to injury added a link to the UK Daily Mail. If you rail against music that uses shock effect to sell, linking to a newspaper that doesn’t give a rat’s arse about what they write as long as it sells seems a tad contradictionary.
Initially I was irritated by Prince’s “I could never take the place of your man” because, until I figured out the lyrics it seems to say “Never mind what a lying cheat your husband is, as a woman you stay with him, whatever happens”.

Now, back to those videos. I think nothing good of them. They lack substance. The way that women in them seem to be in constant awe of the men ticks me off as much as those stereotypical good-clean love songs were the women are in dire need of a man to give their live any meaning. I should be so lucky….. right.
If you’re going to fight this battle, Dreamworlds is the worst kind of you want to make any headway. Two things look alike, so one thing casues the other and it happens all the time? Because, while people forget the few statistics, the impression it leaves, an impression it intently sets out to make, is that it is the very rule, that it happens all day every day. While this sensationalism gets attention, like the videos it tries to condemnm, it does not help to reach the goal.
Are these videos the cause, or the effect of something else that causes both the videos and the attitude towards women. How often does it happen, to what level? I could go on. When it happens to you, it all doesn’t matter. To prevent it, it is of prime importance.
The quote from the research you give basically says “It is true”. That is not enough. The approach of this research is clarified in “Research into the often sexual and violent content of music lyrics is comparatively thin on the ground”. Let me get scientific on this. You might find that nonsense but the report, or at least from what I read in the quote, pretends to be scientific. By using ‘often’ is quantifies and makes an absolute statement and follows to say there is little research. You can’t say it happens often if it has never been reseached. This is something a tabloid would do in a headline.

The degradation of woman might have a more ancient cause. One of my grandmothers changed from the protestant to the catholic faith because her religion told her the wife has to follow the husband. Another grandmother, not mine, suffered the abuses of her man because, well, women follow their men and especially in those days, if you were left by your man, you simply had no income. I have a hard time imagining a few millenia of such behavior was magically erased in the 60s and 70s like it was never there, only to be reborn in now by videos. There should be research into what causes these videos because otherwise even if you wipe it from the planet. My hopythesis: if we get to a generally better attitude towards woman (and other groups we like to spit on – but let’s not go there), the videos will go away.

Commercial videos latch on existing attitudes because it sells. If the attitude isn’t already there, the videos wouldn’t sell. While being a big hit, Smalltown Boy by the Bronski Beat never was as big as mainstream hits portraying existing attitudes. In case you don’t know the song, it describes in a non-explicit way how a young boy has to flee his hometown after being beaten because he is gay. As the message, ‘accept gays’, is not a pre-existing attitude, the song didn’t sell like a Stock, Aitken and Waterman song. Because the song is an example of great songwriting, it still became a hit and a classic.

I wouldn’t mind the videos you protest to go away but not for the reasons you give: they are silly in how they in an exaggerated way display the pre-existing attitude towards women. Yet, I don’t plan to protest to anything I don’t want to see just to shape the world in my image.

And I’m still interested in opinions on the video I linked to. I did shape my views on SM when I was 15 (and that of most people my age that I know) and while I don’t care to be a practitioner, I gradually went from ‘ewwww’ to understanding why people do it and respect them for it. But, as it is not completely on topic, I can understand as pass on that one.