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BY SOFIA SAIYED

In print | Published November 5, 2009

This past Saturday, I gave myself a semi-deserved break in a weeklong streak of frantic thesis-writing and braved swine flu at the Halloween Party. Desperately in need of an intellectual break, I was grateful for the trashy pop songs blasting from the speakers and the license to dress silly and pose vainly for photo shoots.

Try as I might to turn the noggin off, some of the songs blasting through Upper Tarble triggered a nagging in the back of my head as I was trying to carelessly dance the night away: “PROBLEMATIC!”, it nagged.

I know that the outcries against misogynistic mainstream hip-hop and pop songs are kind of old news. Just as I personally have gone through phases of rejection and disgust to carefree acceptance, because “whatever, they’re just songs,” outrage at song lyrics and videos is no longer as trendy as it once was. “Liberated women” used to be the ones who raised their voices in opposition to the “objectification” of women; now, “liberated women” are the ones who assert their sexuality and are “objectified” on their own terms. See the overwhelming positive reception of such songs among female audiences and the deluge of videos and songs prominently featuring well-respected female artists in overtly sexualized roles.

Two songs I heard at the Halloween party are a case in point. First is the song “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx: with a well-known chorus line “Blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol,” Foxx essentially claims that “no means yes” for the woman he is pursuing in the song. “She said, she usually don’t/But I know that she front/’Cause shawty know what she want/But she don’t wanna seem like she easy….Just one more round/If you’re down, I’m for it/Fill another cup up/Feeling on your butt-what?/You don’t even care now/I was unaware/How fine you was before my buzz set in.” The song is an anthem of the drunken hook-up culture (no stranger to the Swarthmore campus). While I have no objections to the decisions people make regarding their sexual lives, I do have a problem with a song that celebrates morally dubious behavior, such as ignoring a woman’s objections and using alcohol to make her more likely to allow you to “feel on her butt-what.”

When I first heard this song, I was horrified by its implications, but a Google search for other women’s reactions revealed an overwhelmingly positive response.

Women praised the song for, they claimed, bringing a hidden truth to light: women want to be “sexually liberated” and sleep with multiple partners, but are held back by deeply internalized, antiquated social norms such as the stigma attached to being “easy” or a “slut,” and thus the only avenue open to women is to drink, have sex, and then be able to “blame it on the alcohol” after the fact.

If you can blame it on the alcohol, it means it wasn’t really YOU who was easy; you emerge guiltless from the whole situation.

My response: if you’re really sexually liberated, then don’t feel guilty about it! Your guilty conscience just means that those women who really aren’t interested have to deal with men who think no means yes because she just “don’t wanna seem like she easy.” We’re living in the year 2009; there are no more rules dictating the number of sexual partners you can have before you’re doomed to slut-dom.

The second song was “Good Girls Go Bad” by Cobra Starship; it is essentially the story of a “bad boy” who seduces a “good girl.” The male singer starts with “I know your type/You’re daddy’s little girl/Just take a bite/Let me shake up your world/Cause just one night couldn’t be so wrong/I’m gonna make you lose control,” and the female singer responds with “I know your type/Boy, you’re dangerous/Yeah, you’re that guy/I’d be stupid to trust/But just one night couldn’t be so wrong/You make me wanna lose control.”

Where do I start? First, when is it ever a good idea to leave with an untrustworthy person? What does trust even mean in this context?

Second, the implication of the title and the oft-repeated chorus, “I make them good girls go bad,” is that there is such a thing as the “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy. Good girls don’t sleep around; they’re shy and innocent; they don’t know how to go “wild.” Bad girls, on the other hand, are hypersexual, easy girls, whom men are licensed to talk about in terms they wouldn’t use in front of women. Good girls are the type you introduce to your parents; bad girls are the type you just sleep with. “Goodness” and “badness” are attributed as permanent characteristics: good girls will always be good and bad girls will always be bad. Even if the singer gets the “good girl” to “go bad” for “just one night,” her “badness” is transient. This song celebrates the notion of the ultimate “conquest” for the “bad boy” to get the “good girl” to unleash the “bad” inside. Why is the badness of “good girls” more compelling than the badness of “bad girls”? It also perpetuates cultural stigma attached to female sexuality. Even while encouraging “good girls” to “go bad,” the necessary implication is that sex is inherently bad (for women) and “good” is a child-like, innocent sweetness.

The fact that the song features a co-ed group of vocalists and includes the voice of the “good girl” asserting her sexuality could be interpreted as empowering. If it didn’t occur within a framework that emboldens the good-girl/bad-girl dichotomy, I might have found the song less problematic.

This topic begs discussion of hyper-sexualized videos like those produced by Beyonce and Shakira. I have to admit, I was a huge fan of the “She Wolf” video because I felt that it was empowering and allowed an oft-sexualized female artist to gain control over her own sexuality by virtue of the fact that the only male in the video starred as a faceless lump lying in the bed that Shakira sneaks out of to explore her “wild side” in a fantasy-land of which he was not a part. However, watching straight men watch music videos with similar sexual themes reminds me that not everyone interprets videos this way.

“Empowerment” can easily become pure sexual objectification. So is it okay for progressive, liberated women to like these videos? How are we to respond?

Ultimately, I think the problem lies in the fact that female sexual empowerment still occurs within the dominant (read: male) paradigm that determines definitions of sexuality. Reclamations of sexuality, often even mainstream nods at queerness, occur in such a way as to still appeal to male fans. Is empowerment on someone else’s terms really empowerment?

At Swarthmore, a lot of people like talking about not being sexist and not being heteronormative, but our social lives still revolve around dancing to songs that reek of these progressive sins.

Sofia is a senior. You can contact her at ssaiyed1@swarthmore.edu.

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