With Kim Kardashian’s recent front page butt-spread on Paper Magazine and Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video fuelling more “How to twerk” YouTube videos than ever before, it seems that we have finally reached an era of women in control of the mainstream media.
Yet despite the increased coverage of women in the music industry, there has been a proportional increase in the sexualization of female artists, and a growing dichotomy between the treatment of white artists and artists of colour. Statistics show that from 1997 to 2007, female artists produced 41.4 per cent of chart-topping hits, compared to 54.1 per cent from male artists. However, only 34.3 per cent of radio airplay was dedicated to female artists. Considering that sales rankings for female artists are just barely below their male counterparts, it begs the question as to why male artists are receiving double the radio airplay. Furthermore, not only are these trends present within mainstream media, but they are also prevalent in the local Montreal music scene as well.
According to Marc LaFrance, assistant professor of sociology at Concordia University, women are expected to display forms of femininity as they relate to beauty and attitude.
“The differences between representations of women and men in the media mirror broader differences in terms of the gender stereotypes [that] we attribute to either gender,” LaFrance said.
In fact, there is the assumption that what happens to women in the music industry is just a microcosmic display of what happens in society as a whole. The mainstreaming of pornography has undoubtedly changed what it means to be conventionally sexy, and for many, there is an expectation that those in positions of fame should act as representatives to the nth degree of these arbitrary societal expectations of beauty.
Alanis Morissette wrote a piece for Fashion Spot in early December 2013 claiming that since the end of the 20th century, sex has become a tool for women to embody power and manipulate men.
“There’s this erroneous message that women’s power lies singularly in our sexuality,” Morissette wrote. “It would be easy then to think, falsely, that the main aspect of our power is our sexuality and the ornamental aspect of our physicality [… but] it’s a sad state of affairs when we rely solely on this one-dimensionalized aspect of ourselves. And it feels extreme. And it feels incomplete, and it’s unfortunate that this is what we rely on—our aesthetic.”
According to LaFrance, it is undeniable that the music industry has fallen into an overly sexualized aesthetic.
“Social scientists from across the disciplines have shown very clearly that one’s viability as a female pop star now is much more tied to a performance and [its] sexiness than ever before,” LaFrance said.
Much controversy has risen over what is and is not acceptable behaviour for female artists while on stage. Miley Cyrus is the easiest target for this discussion; her 2013 VMA performance with Robin Thicke inspired a media frenzy and an open letter from Sinead O’Connor, in which the Irish singer-songwriter scolded Cyrus.
“Nothing but harm will come in the long run from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely not in any way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent,” O’Connor wrote.
O’Connor, who claimed she was speaking from a place of motherly love with her letter, stands in the camp of those who believe that outlandish sexiness is inherently demeaning. LaFrance elaborated that women are pressured to incorporate sex into their music and performances.
“Many [female] artists […] have gone on record saying you can’t really make it now without doing the hyper-sexy thing,” she said. “It’s a new form of regulation of the female body.”
Indeed, the female aesthetic remains a crucial factor in determining viability. As former McGill student and present pop sensation Grimes said in a recent Tumblr post, “I don’t want to be infantilized because I refuse to be sexualized [….] I’m tired of being referred to as ‘cute,’ as a ‘waif’ […] even when the author, fan, friend, family member […] is being positive.”
Similarly, in an interview with The Guardian, Adele called out the double standards of the music industry when it came to the female body.
“You’re either too fat or too skinny; even if you’re a perfectly healthy size ,they still find something to [complain] about,” she said.
Yet the notion that over-sexualization is an avoidable presence in music culture is wholly untrue. Many famous stars have broken through ‘the barrier of sexiness’—the three most famous being Lorde, Adele, and Taylor Swift. Swift’s newest album 1989 is the only album to go platinum in 2014 and has avoided the pornographic sexiness common to her pop genre.
Interesting to note, however, is the way the dialogue about women and the way they are represented has changed across musical genres. As LaFrance explained, a large part of the rhetoric of sex appeal is mainly applied to women who have or are looking to achieve a particular level of commercial success in mainstream music, something often represented by billboard rankings and net worth.
Mary Fahl, a folk singer and McGill alumnus, echoed this perspective, but added that there are those who choose to separate themselves from this approach.
“Sex sells […] right?” she said. “I think there are women in this industry who choose to buy into being sexual objects, and those people are pretty easy to spot. But there are just as many who don’t.”
While Fahl stated that she did experience gender bias in the sense that her male counterparts tended to be taken more seriously, she claimed that in her career—as a part of the band October Project—the biggest obstacle was her own insecurities.
“You’d have thought that I didn’t have a chance of getting a deal as a woman over 40—my own manager at the time warned me about that,” Fahl said. “But after October Project broke up, I got not one, but two deals with highly respected labels, and I was well into my 40s when that happened. I just decided that I wasn’t going to let gender or age restrict my dreams.”
However, for singers in the pop and hip hop world, age and appearance have proven to make or break careers, and consumers are only supporting the perpetuation of the female hyper sexualized aesthetic. Iggy Azalea commented in an interview with Hot 97 FM that she was no longer willing to crowd surf at her shows because fans consistently sexually assaulted her when she did.
“They think I’m real slutty, like ‘Oh, she got a song called ‘Pussy,’ I know what she wants,” Azalea said. “‘She wants these two fingers.’ Why would I want a stranger to ever finger me? Buying my album for $12 doesn’t mean you get to finger me when I come to your city.”
The abuse and misrepresentation is intensified for artists of colour. LaFrance described black artists as being “ghettoized” into the genres of hip hop and R&B. With the recent corporatization of hip hop, the genre lost its image of being a source for social commentary and became a genre for club beats and the ‘rich hood’ lifestyle. Lily Allen and Miley Cyrus have both come under fire for using black women as “props” in music videos.
Nicki Minaj, who is strongly associated with this genre of music, has constantly been forced to address rumours of sexual encounters with other rappers, and has been widely fetishized for possessing the “ideal black figure” across social media. According to LaFrance, black women are far more heavily sexualized than their white counterparts, in addition to having to emphasize their visual aesthetics over talent far more than their black male counterparts. Power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z is a clear example of this, as Beyoncé, despite being marketed as the embodiment of a strong female archetype, is constantly being analyzed for her appearance and stage presence, whereas her husband Jay-Z has gained recognition for his talent as a rapper, irrespective of his overall appearance.
Is there a problem with the way the music industry treats women?
“There’s not a problem with sex, per se,” LaFrace said. “The problem is when those forms or performance become the only avenue […] when being really sexy becomes a necessity.”
LaFrance notes, however, that the treatment of women by the music industry is part of a larger cultural phenomenon of diminishing the value of a woman by inherently linking her viability to her physical appearance. Though men do face issues of aesthetic prejudice relating to their weight or fashion choices—particularly in Montreal, which has long been noted for its fashion scene—it is misguided to claim that the challenges faced by men in this aspect are perfectly equivalent to those faced by women. The music industry’s insistence on natural aesthetic perfection and childish independence among mainstream artists forces them to walk an impossible tightrope towards fame. And because the perception of women in the celebrity sphere is nothing more than a magnified perception of everyday women, consumers should be encouraged to support different kinds of cultural production in a broader attempt towards social equality that allows sex and sexualization to be an option—not the only choice.