Monday 29 December 2014

Rihanna twerks and all black women are 'whores'. Miley does it and it's just her who's judged

As campaigners call for age ratings on 'sexist and racist' music videos, comedian Ava Vidal explains the nasty effect music videos can have on young people's impressions of black women.

Why are people more outraged about Miley Cyrus ‘twerking’ when they don’t blink twice when Rihanna does it?
Why are people more outraged about Miley Cyrus ‘twerking’ when they don’t blink twice when Rihanna does it? Photo: AP

“All black women are whores aren’t they Dad?” Rocco, a character in The Slap (the hugely successful 2008 book that was turned into an Australian television series) remarked to his father as he looked up from the hip-hop video he was watching.

I remember reading that and feeling pretty shocked. Even though the sentiment had come from a fictional character, it got me wondering just how many people might actually watch these videos and infer the same thing about black women. I am well aware of the stereotype about black men that is reinforced by these types of videos. However, and feel free to think of me as naive, it had never occurred to me that people may also judge black women that appear in them negatively.

A group of young women have now had enough and have launched a campaign calling on government and the music industry to address it. I remember when music television first became popular (yes I’m that old) and you would see rock artists spraying scantily clad blonde women in hot pants and T-shirts with water. I remember Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’ video and the outrage that it caused upon its release. It was considered so risqué that there were two versions of it, one for daytime and an uncensored ‘night version.’ I remember my friends and I giggling over Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love’ video, which I had sneakily recorded late one night during the holidays whilst my parents were sleeping.

The Girls on Film video, released by Duran Duran in 1981, is tame by today's standards (YouTube)

These days those promos wouldn’t even cause a raised eyebrow. Over the years the videos have got more and more outrageous. Artists have needed to push the envelope more and more to cause a stir. Nowadays it’s very common to put on music television in the middle of the day and see scantily clad women with their legs akimbo, or draped across a shirtless young man making erotic gestures. You go into shops, bars and restaurants and they are played on constant rotation. It’s the sheer volume of it that I find shocking.

What is it like to grow up with those images being constantly projected you? I have a 14 year-old son and he is not allowed to watch these types of videos. But as every parent knows, try as you might, they will always find a way. I think that the main effect that this has had on young people today is the way that they view their bodies. I have looked through my son’s social media accounts and was shocked to see so many of them discussing the gym and how to get their bodies ‘ready for the summer.’ What?!

I didn’t care about that when I was 14 and if I am honest I don’t really care about it now. He is also very into sports and if I try to get out of cooking and offer him a takeaway two days in a row he accuses me of trying ‘to ruin his beautiful body.’ Does it affect the way that he sees women? Not really. Not yet anyway. He is just like any other 14 year-old, he talks a good game but he is really scared to death of real live girls.

I wondered if young women his age felt the same way and so I spoke to my friend’s 13 year-old daughter. She said that she definitely feels the pressure. Not only are these images constantly projected at them, they also have Facebook and Instagram where people are constantly posting pictures of themselves. There are cameras on phones, laptops and iPads and they feel the need to look good all of the time. Some girls believe that the young women are the standard of beauty that they must measure themselves against.

BBC Three aired a documentary, Music, Money and Hip Hop Honeys, where young women were queuing up to be featured in these videos. Often accepting to do it for free and also receiving very poor treatment from the artists and directors. Some young women were even willing to undergo plastic surgery, breast augmentation and ‘butt implants’ often risking their health and even lives.

A shot of Robin Thicke in the controversial video for Blurred Lines

I totally understand the furore surrounding the lyrics and accompanying video for Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and welcome the move by many universities across the UK to ban it from being played in their student bars. I was in a restaurant once when the offending video was projected on a big screen whilst I was eating. I asked the proprietor to turn it off immediately or I would be leaving without paying for my meal. They switched it off straight away and I sadly paid my bill.

But what about the issue of race? Intelligent and conscious rapper Akala crossed swords with popular mainstream rapper Professor Green for his quite frankly disgusting video for ‘Jungle’ that portrayed young black men as ‘hungry apes’. Green responded by accusing Akala of ‘looking for racism’ and ‘having a chip on his shoulder’. I don’t think that he could fit anymore stock responses into his 140 word character limit.

He didn’t tweet a list of all of his black friends but he did mention that he grew up on a council estate in Hackney where ‘he didn’t grow up any different to anyone else.’ I believe that Professor Green has been intellectually dishonest. He did not grow up the same way that the young black people on his estate did because he is not black. The way that young black people are viewed in this society is different from that of their white counterparts. One only has to look at the disparity for stop and search figured between young white people and young black people for instance.

Race matters. Why for example were people more outraged about Miley Cyrus ‘twerking’ when they don’t blink twice when Rihanna does it? I named this blog as a tongue in cheek reference to the phenomenon. Is it something that is expected of black women because of the way that we are portrayed? This is a question that has been asked by one of the young ladies involved on the campaign, Ikmara larasi from black feminist organisation Imkaan.

Miley Cyrus twerking at the MTV awards

I recently appeared on Dotun Adebayo’s radio show with Ikmara and she was discussing this subject. She pointed out that when a scantily clad white woman appears in a music video then people will judge her as an individual. When a black woman does it, then all black women are judged by that standard. So in other words, music videos are like everything else in the world.

Repetition deepens impression. If you are not exposed to many young black people and all you see is this image of them over and over again, it leads to stereotyping and labelling. It makes their lives harder and creates more hurdles for them to have to get over.

I am interested to see how this campaign will take shape. I welcome this new generation of butt kicking feminists. These young women would take off their bras because they wanted to set fire to them, rather than because they want to appear in a music video or on the cover of a magazine. I hope that they are successful in getting either the music industry to have to take some responsibility for the content that they are putting out, or the government forcing them to do so in a more responsible way.

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