Greetings all,
A few weeks ago a friend in real life who is a friend on Facebook seemed to be really upset about facebook and people commenting on stuff. One thing this person was upset about was people reacting to the song Blurred Lines. He declared his love of the song and then posted the video. I tend to be opinionated on things and politely articulated that this video was sexist. While the lyrics are not about rape as many women seem to think it is about, the uncensored video involves the women being fully naked while the men are dressed in suits.
I've been a bit more interested in female issues over the year and am calling myself more a feminist. To be exact I call myself a Cock-loving feminist because people seem to think feminists hate men, which is certainly not true for me and most other feminists as I joined last year a Meetup group for feminists and we usually are talking about issues, not man bashing which is utterly unproductive.
So back to this video. It is a very sexist video because the women are naked and the men are not. I mean, clearly it's about the man being dominant. If everyone was naked, then it would not be sexist but it's sexist because the women are prancing around naked. My friend is one of those people where on facebook everybody praises him constantly and I think for him, hearing the truth was not something he wanted.
He reacted rather dramatically about it and for me, I am not one to be rude about expressing my opinions. I do try to be diplomatic. I did feel that if you don't want people to comment on what you post, then don't share things on facebook. To me facebook is about sharing stuff and part of sharing stuff means hearing opinions of people that you may not agree with.
For example, I posted how I thought it was gross that Patrick Stewart is engaged to a woman half his age. I think she is probably using him on some level because most 35 year old women (like me) would never want to marry a 70 year old man unless we had intentions of getting his money. Seriously no normal woman would date a man that old and I could care less if he was Patrick Stewart. Women like that are gold diggers. Many people disagreed with me but I didn't throw a hissy fit over it. I accept that people have different opinions. I have only removed one friend because his differing opinions was rude and disrespectful towards me (I removed him about a few years ago well before this recent Patrick Steward comment. This was a regular pattern of his and I had enough. Had he been more polite, I would have not removed him. He was just too antagonizing towards me and has anger issues). I certainly do not want to upset my friends and that is usually why I try to be diplomatic on my opinions.
This stuff all happened when the Music awards came out. People can get so reactive to things. I really don't understand why women think that song was about rape. I read the lyrics and the only explicit line was about "tearing your ass in two". Overall I felt this song was about a really horny guy and that quote was really him expressing his interest in anal sex. It had nothing to do with rape. Unless he sang "I'm going to fuck you against your will and fuck you even though you are fighting back and shouting no", then yes I would say he's singing about rape.
Sometimes I can't believe how reactive people are. I guess people are projecting their own sexual issues onto this song which is the perfect scapegoat.
I really wish my friend would have acknowledged that yes the video is sexist. You can still enjoy the song but to not acknowledge that the video is degrading to women and is sexist is disrespectful. This person is a minority as he is gay and so if the situation were reversed, i.e. a bubbly song that had a hateful message to gay people, I think many people would not support the song.
This basically goes back to something I have read about namely how Feminism is not a respected movement in comparison to liberating other minorities like gays, racial issues, etc. It's not okay to support things that put women down and basically show them as sex objects. I think most of all that was sad was that someone who belonged to a marginalized group was partaking in this marginalization of women. If your part of a sub culture that was abused and invalidated, it's not right to promote the abuse and invalidation of other equally marginalized groups like Women.
