By Tandy Versyp
Instead of doing homework, I sat analyzing the new Britney Spears video – filled with a watered-down third-wave Feminist message.
It’s for her new single “Womanizer,” a ridiculously catchy tune, if only because the chorus is: “Womanizer. Woman. Womanizer. You’re a womanizer. Oh, womanizer. Oh, you’re a womanizer, baby. You. You. You. Ah, You. You. You. Ah. Womanizer. Womanizer. Womanizer.” I think there was a contest amongst her songwriters to see who could write a song in 10 minutes. Or she wrote it herself.
The video – which brings Britney back to her obtrusively sexy “Toxic” standards – opens with Britney as a sexy housewife serving her husband, in his underwear, an egg. Then we follow the husband as he encounters Britney as a sexy office lady, a sexy waiter and a sexy chauffer. The ending shows us that all of the sexy personas were really the housewife the entire time, and now she beats the hell out of him and makes him disappear with the rearrangement of a sleek, satin bedspread. (That part was scary – Britney gets this weird look in her eye like she’s about to eat a hotdog and a small child simultaneously.)
This is a woman who is nothing but an image, a – yes I’m going to use this adjective again – sexy image. She can’t sing. Her voice is synthesized, equalized, whatever-ized to make her sound like she has a voice. She’s crazy – because she’s from Louisiana. (Sorry Cajuns. But y’all know y’all’s crazy.) All she has going for her is sex. Pure sex. No talent. But as I watched her new video, I felt this wave of go-on-do-yo-thing-gurl!
Each whorish persona was blatantly throwing sex in the husbands face, but daring him to make a move and even rejecting him when he did. The husband even gets objectified in a not-so-tasteful shower scene. Could this be the way Feminism in the media is moving? Women not scared to flaunt what they’ve got, and flaunting it for their own egos? Men do it all the time. Get two bros together in the locker room and endowment talk begins – even in mixed company. We’ve seen women do this before in the media with the “Sex and the City” girls. They had substance, albeit bland punned-up substance.
And that’s when I saw the last frame of the video. Britney smiles at us like a child who just got a Laffy Taffy wrapper joke. She has no idea what just happened. She isn’t in control.
I came to a realization I’d had in the late ‘90s: Britney Spears has no substance. She’s just like all the teenage girls you see at the mall, chewing their gum, texting on their Blackberries and twirling their hair vapidly. The media coverage of her life made me sympathetic, hoping for something great to come from her. And once again, I was duped into believing. It was like Santa died, because I couldn’t even enjoy her ironically anymore.
So I finally started doing my homework. And crying for women everywhere.
