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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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Can someone help me understand how these lyrics are being seen as female empowerment?

197 replies

QuentinQuarantino · 15/08/2020 22:22

WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.

Lyrics.

The video, predictably, is surgically enhanced T&A with celebrity cameos providing additional surgically enhanced T&A.

It's being lauded as celebratory of female sexuality and empowerment by lib fems such as Lena Dunham.

I am only(?) 40 and don't consider myself an old fart by any means but I just can't accept that this song (lyrics and video) is anything other than women perpetuating a toxic male view of women as nothing more than receptacles for their dicks.

Hypersexualised, pornified, emphasis on attaining material goods based on how well you perform sex acts.

I know, I know I can just ignore and not be affected but I've always been a huge fan of pop music and seeing this shit so mainstream is just depressing. And as a mother of a daughter it makes me feel queasy.

OP posts:
BowtieBling · 18/08/2020 03:41

Jesus wept.
That's awful in a million different ways.
From what I know about Cardi B I'm not surprised that she's part of this awful track. Her entire career has been this way. I do believe she was an 'exotic dancer' in a strip club prior to making it.

I'm now off to watch a real inspirational woman's music video a dozen times to replace that bloody awful track with some catchy, brilliant, singalong lyrics.
Link if you want a song from a real female empowerment track currently available in the music industry

HarryHarry1 · 18/08/2020 03:50

Are there any American feminists here who can share their thoughts on the song and the video? All my American friends are libfem, sex-positive, pro-sex worker types who praise stuff like this as empowering, much to my bewilderment. I just find it all a bit ugly to be honest. They both look cheap and nasty and vulgar and fake (as well as really unsexy). I don’t know if that is the point or not. Some of the video is a bit tongue in cheek.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 19/08/2020 00:25

Anyway. Did anyone else think when they saw the title of this song in the endless media articles about it that it was a bit weird to be singing about Wireless Access Protocol-enabled phones in this day and age? Just me?

Not just you! Grin I can't break the association now with Y2K "smart" phones

nepeta · 19/08/2020 01:15

The reference to money changing hands is pretty interesting. I personally think that we are going through an era of very bad opinions about women's sexuality. I don't think women and girls are even allowed any time to think about their own sexualities before porn teaches them how it is supposed to be.

Take the choking craze. When I first read about that, many years ago, the people who had died of it were all men. Doing self-strangulation to enhance orgasms.

Suddenly, in a few years, it is supposed to be what large numbers of women want to have done to them. A niche form of sex has been mainstreamed AND assigned to a different sex as well. And young women, not having a historical context (why does that always seem to happen), assume that choking is what they are supposed to enjoy whether they do or not.

That so much of the new sexuality for women seems to be about degrading stuff and about subjugation and about spanking and choking and so on, is something I am not in a place to analyse. But its roots worry me a lot, as does the fact that it is interpreted as empowerment, somehow arrived at in isolation from porn.

Annasgirl · 19/08/2020 10:45

@noblegiraffe

Feminism is now doing exactly what men want you to do but pretending it’s your choice.
This x 1000
ArabellaScott · 19/08/2020 10:47

@DidoLamenting

I wanna gag, I wanna choke, I want you to touch that lil' dangly thing that swing in the back of my throat

Setting everything else aside that is a truly awful piece of writing.

Could she not find a rhyme for 'epiglottis'?

I can think of about five.

Goosefoot · 19/08/2020 23:42

@SeriouslyRetro

I think it needs to be framed within the culture it comes from. Much like an all female punk band from the 70s shouldn’t be held to a higher moral standard than the sex pistols.

No one expected their parents to enjoy any punk, they thought it was all terrible. But would you feel it was a bit rich if young men with green Mohawks disparaged ‘the female sex pistols’ for being disgusting?

This is kind of my thinking.

But what could be interesting is if we saw, through the songs of the female SP type band, that what they were talking about was actually pretty bad for women. Because it would reveal that what we were accepting from the male SP was in itself a problem but we just didn't recognise it.

sawdustformypony · 20/08/2020 07:11

I think it’s called a uvula

The80sweregreat · 20/08/2020 13:50

Awful lyrics ( not heard the actual 'song' ) and Wap phones were around in the late 90s so I thought it was about that too.
I said to ds2 ' to think that Relax was banned on the radio back in the day ' ..
She is known as ' cardigan ' in my house from now on too she is about as interesting as my old blue one out of m and s.

It won't get any air play with those lyrics either but I guess it'll just be online etc. the bucket and mop reference made me laugh though! Buckets are not 'sexy 'at all.
Putting feminism back a few decades too.

FlamingoAndJohn · 20/08/2020 13:56

@noblegiraffe

Feminism is now doing exactly what men want you to do but pretending it’s your choice.
This. This is exactly what is happening.

No I want to shave off my pubes and get bigger tits. It’s my choice to do what men want.

Ffs.

ZolaGrey · 20/08/2020 14:06

@SeriouslyRetro

I think the support is coming from the place of ‘he can (and has for the past 30 years) so can she’

Is it tasteful? Probably not. But I think it’s about ‘equality’ in representing their version of their sexuality, when their male counterparts have been comfortable to do it for a long time.

It’s about the ‘as the mother of a daughter...’ message. Do you feel queasy for your son? For the fact that hip hop, rap and pop music has been sexual since the rock and roll revolution?
Why is Cardi B more responsible for being a role model to your daughter than Lil Wayne is to our sons?

This exactly.
ZolaGrey · 20/08/2020 14:07

@noblegiraffe

Feminism is now doing exactly what men want you to do but pretending it’s your choice.
Er..no, no it's not.
FlamingoAndJohn · 20/08/2020 14:15

So if all these women love being choked and it’s entirely their choice and nothing to do with porn entering the main stream at all then why weren’t we all doing it years ago?

FlamingoAndJohn · 20/08/2020 14:17

But this is what’s happening though Zola.
Women are doing exactly the things that men want them to do, like dressing certain ways, removing all body hair, acting in a certain way, being sex workers but women are being told that to chose to do this is empowering and feminist. The end result is still the same for the men.

TunaWhite · 21/08/2020 17:01

No I want to shave off my pubes

It looks messy with pubes. Pretty without. Even men with pubes are a turn off. Back hair, thick arm hair, loads of chest hair, beards... All vile

TunaWhite · 21/08/2020 17:03

Buckets are not 'sexy 'at all.

The lyrics were "get a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy" as in its leaking all over the floor and you need to go and mop the mess up... Its not talking about vaginas being buckets.

ButterflyC · 21/08/2020 17:05

That Taylor Swift song posted is shit. Nauseating sickly sweet type pop music. Never liked TS.

BillywilliamV · 21/08/2020 17:11

Sometimes it almost seems a pity that Covid is unlikely to wipe out the human race.. !

Mumoftwo1994 · 21/08/2020 17:20

@QuentinQuarantino

WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.

Lyrics.

The video, predictably, is surgically enhanced T&A with celebrity cameos providing additional surgically enhanced T&A.

It's being lauded as celebratory of female sexuality and empowerment by lib fems such as Lena Dunham.

I am only(?) 40 and don't consider myself an old fart by any means but I just can't accept that this song (lyrics and video) is anything other than women perpetuating a toxic male view of women as nothing more than receptacles for their dicks.

Hypersexualised, pornified, emphasis on attaining material goods based on how well you perform sex acts.

I know, I know I can just ignore and not be affected but I've always been a huge fan of pop music and seeing this shit so mainstream is just depressing. And as a mother of a daughter it makes me feel queasy.

I honestly quite like it. I don't find it empowering necessarily but I wouldn't begrudge someone if they felt like it did.
youkiddingme · 21/08/2020 17:20

I don't think it would be unreasonable to see the bucket and mop as a metaphor tunawhite in the context of the rest of the lyrics

irishfeminist · 21/08/2020 18:50

It's ugly and crass and materialistic and depressing, I don't get any sense of joy from it at all. Women have been singing songs like Grace Jones' Pull up to the Bumper or Salt n Pepa's "Push it" or a hundred more besides, with wit and flair and style. This is just bleak.

FlamingoAndJohn · 21/08/2020 19:50

@TunaWhite

No I want to shave off my pubes

It looks messy with pubes. Pretty without. Even men with pubes are a turn off. Back hair, thick arm hair, loads of chest hair, beards... All vile

Sorry but I don’t care if my vagina is ‘pretty’. It’s not there to be ‘pretty’.
TunaWhite · 21/08/2020 19:58

it’s not there to be ‘pretty’.

I take it you think it's wrong for women to get genital piercings too then? Seen as it's for aesthetic (or in some cases pleasure), such as Christina piercings?

I wouldn't kiss a man with a big beard, why would I want to be with a man who has hairy genitals?

FlamingoAndJohn · 21/08/2020 20:07

My husband has a big beard and hair everywhere else thanks.

Are genital piercing there for the look of it?

Tell you what, I’ll keep my hair and you take yours off. Just don’t dare tell me or anyone else that if matters if a vagina is pretty or not.

Deliriumoftheendless · 21/08/2020 20:11

@youkiddingme

I don't think it would be unreasonable to see the bucket and mop as a metaphor tunawhite in the context of the rest of the lyrics
Maybe she just has a weak pelvic floor and had a big sneeze.

Genital piercings are for the feels and somewhere to hang your keys when you have no pockets.

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