FEATURE:
She is Heaven-Sent
IN THIS PHOTO: Katy Perry/PHOTO CREDIT; Jack Bridgland
How a Hollow and Problematic Feminist Mainstream Track Causes More Issues Than It Solves
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WE are living at a time…
when women’s rights and safety seem as exposed and threatened as at any other time. Their physical safety and lives endangered. Violence and misogyny is rising. Whether online or outside, how safe is it being a woman?! It is horrifying that we are seeing such male violence and abuse. On the other side of things, we should be celebrating the brilliance of women. Not only how we should be making them feel safe and protected in a violent world. Their rights, value and importance needs to come roaring through. How the modern world would be better if more women were in charge. A move from the patriarchy and the toxic evil of male violence and misogyny and a move to a matriarchy and a far safer world for women. I hate the world we live in. I fear for women. They are amazing people and yet, when you think about all the worst crimes, violence, offence and bad things in the world, the vast majority is perpetrated by men. The strength and humanity of women. Their humility, intelligence and beauty. We need to fight for equality through the world. There are artists, most of them women, writing incredible feminist anthems. Whether it is artists promulgating the power of women and their merits or others showing their defiance and anger against male violence, misogyny and sexualisation, we need more songs like this. We need more male artists actually putting women at the front. Writing their own feminist anthems. There is a wave of great sex-positive songs from women. Others that are about sisterhood, togetherness and recognition. In 2024, I feel women are as attacked, endangered and exposed as ever. So much violence and misogyny directed at them. The huge rise in male violence and Stone Age views. Feminist tracks not only that strike against the way women are treated, marginalised and abused. There are feminist tracks all about the way women are striking out and leading. The moral and intellectual leaders. Videos that are inventive, eye-catching and moving. If a video is quite sexual, it is through their control and gaze. Not a male lens that distorts their messages or distils and dilutes their meaning.
PHOTO CREDIT: Cynthia Parkhurst
Not that it is the only example, though it is a current one that muddies the water. WOMAN’S WORLD is not a Katy Perry ‘comeback’ single. She did not get lost in the wilderness: she started a family and took time off. It is her first single for a long time. Because of that, there are a lot more eyes and spotlight on the song than there would normally be. She has come back on the scene with a track that has created criticism. Vulture and Pitchfork have shared their views. I am going to come to a review of The Guardian. It is not so much about the quality of the singing or music. If this was a normal Pop song about love or anything else then there would not be such vituperative and negative reaction. What Perry has released is a so-called feminist anthem. I feel her intention was to celebrate women and say how the world is dominated and run by women. Admirable in spirit and theory, though the whole package is problematic and troubling. Not only is the song produced by Dr Luke – who has been accused of assault, coercive behaviour and sexual abuse -, its video puts me in mind of the horrendous visual for Eric Prydz’s Call on Me from 2004. At that time, there were a lot of sexualised versions of women. Videos where their bodies were used to sell singles. There was a difference between male artists using it to appeal to base instincts. Female artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera showing body and sex-positivity. Liberating and confident videos that, today, may seem like exploitation and the demands of record labels. Using sex to sell. WOMAN’S WORLD has that rather uneasy and queasy essence of the early-2000s. For a song about sex or freedom, there would not be such a problem with Katy Perry putting out a video that takes us back twenty years. There are a lot of issues regarding Perry’s new song.
On a feminist song, one of the worst things is pairing it with a video that sends out the wrong message. It is almost like A.I. or men pitched the video. A song about how great it is being a woman and how they are in charge. Women acting like men and letting it hang loose. Showing curves. The video does, despite its better intentions, have this male gaze. It is what we would imagine if we wanted to highlight the worst traits of music videos from the 2000s. I am going to move on in a minute. However, I should get to some observations Laura Snapes made for The Guardian in her one-star review for WOMAN’S WORLD:
“Perry’s clubby missile of a new single, Woman’s World, had affirmed to me that yes, it is a woman’s world – and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it. In her woman’s world, women are nuanced, winners, smart, soft, pretty, prickly, fiery and shiny. As the video demonstrated, you could be a Rosie the Riveter type (but, like, hot) or a businesswoman or a big sexy bionic horse. Women can have it all! Thank god someone finally said it.
There was another strange sensation. That of being dragged back in time, possibly in some kind of cosmic wagon pulled by the scary bionic horse woman. Back to almost exactly a decade ago, to August 2014, when Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music awards in front of the word FEMINIST, emblazoned in big baby pink letters, and the whole world had to be passed its collective smelling salts at the pop-cultural notion that girls just wanted to have fundamental rights. Maybe a few years further back, even, to when the brash electro-pop of Lady Gaga stressed the importance of being exactly who you were. (Incidentally, Gaga’s biggest hit of 2014 was Do What U Want, with R Kelly, another winding reminder that we were ever so young.)
Woman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years: “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine,” the 39-year-old pop star said in a statement. Her last album, 2020’s Smile, was her first since her 2010 superstar breakout Teenage Dream not to hit No 1 in the UK or the US. She has made subsequent stints in Vegas. The sense, going into her seventh album era, is of a 2010s pop star now very much on the back foot – one compounded by pre-release visuals that seemed nakedly inspired by the warped futurism of next-gen stars Arca and Charli xcx. At least the imagery suggested some kind of attempt to embrace pop’s present; then the credits for her new album 143 were revealed, heavily featuring Perry’s old collaborator Dr Luke.
In 2014, Kesha sued Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) for sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence and emotional abuse. Luke denied the claims and countersued for defamation, alleging that Kesha, her mother and management had fabricated the claims to escape the record contract she had signed with him. In 2016, a judge dismissed Kesha’s claims. Kesha had also accused Luke of raping Perry, which Perry and Luke denied, and in 2020 a judge ruled that those comments were defamatory. In 2023, Luke and Kesha settled his defamation claim.
No conviction has ever been brought against Luke, although he is perceived by many as a pariah within pop music, and any artist – such as Kim Petras – who works with him becomes subject to disparaging online commentary from pop fans and will be called upon to defend the choice. When the collaborators for 143 were announced, Kesha simply tweeted “lol” – widely assumed to be a reference to Luke’s involvement – and was later photographed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the same word. The actor Abigail Breslin also called out the news, and later said she received death threats for doing so. Much of the online commentary around Woman’s World underlines the disconnect between working with a producer who comes with such baggage to make a song about the strength of women.
The video for Woman’s World suffers from a much more benign case of mixed messaging. It starts out as some sort of attempt at satire, with Perry dressed as Rosie the Riveter and gals in work gear recreating the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photo. They pretend to flamboyantly wee in urinals, which are quickly swept away (with far less glamour than in George Michael’s canonical Outside video) to reveal the stripped-down gang chucking away wellness paraphernalia – including Perry winking as she hurls a can of her own seltzer brand – to dance in a circle waving sex toys at each other. Boobs are oiled and bedazzled in stars-and-stripes bikinis. Perry wields a bedazzled screwdriver. It is perhaps less the trenchant comment on how women are sold the tools of their own disempowerment that Perry presumably intended than a preview of the Makita power tools calendar 2025.
Muddled in with all this turbo cheesecakery are blatant grasps for gay standom. “She’s a sister and a mother,” Perry sings, winking at drag culture so hard you suspect she’d pop a hernia if her abs weren’t hard as armour. Later in the video, as bionic horse Katy strides through some sort of apocalyptic scene – having rebooted as a sexy equine cyborg after being crushed by an anvil – two men kiss in the windy maelstrom. This clumsy expansiveness stumbles in a later bit when Perry rides in a monster truck with a sparkly uterus hung from it, an inadvertently apt symbol of all the essentialist, pandering nonsense going on here.
Not to sound like one of those men (actually I’ll take Perry’s insistence that it’s my goddess-given right as a woman to be essentialist, OK!) but: this garbage has six writers. Granted, it is infernally catchy, but it is the Bic for Her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (get your lips around this!), a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”.
I am going to come to another review before rounding up. There are so many reasons why there needs to be an augmentation of any feminist song coming out that sends good messages and hits the mark. More activation from artists who should put women’s rights at the forefront. Whether highlighting male violence and how we need to fight against it and protect women, or songs that focus on the strength of women and how they are slaying, this is what mainstream artists should be doing. Putting videos out that match the lyrics. Rather than Katy Perry getting the tone right and creating a modern-day feminist anthem produced by a woman with a video that is as captivating and visually arresting as anything Beyoncé or Taylor Swift could put out, there is so much wrong with WOMAN’S WORLD. Consequence shared their opinions about perhaps the most divisive song of 2024:
“What’s so head-scratching about this set of visuals, which Perry never fully commits to as satire, is that this is not how feminism should ever feel. Perry told Apple Music2 that her decision to focus on this theme was because “this is the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine.” Connecting with the feminine divine doesn’t mean co-opting traditionally masculine spaces; ideally, it means celebrating the unique joys of womanhood. Feminism isn’t about proving we can do everything men can do — these days, the road to empowering women shouldn’t be centering men at all. Plenty of women drink whiskey and know how to operate power tools, but that’s not even the core of the issue here. It’s that this is the most baseline, tip of the iceberg, generic attempt at feminism, and the result is Perry never actually saying anything of substance.
Everything about the focus of the track feels 15 years too late to be interesting, and the music video doesn’t help. There’s obviously something to be said for escapist pop or harkening back to the sounds that dominated charts through the early 2000s, but “Woman’s World” is a nothing burger served on a chrome plate. Take out any of the fun arena energy of “Roar” and you’ve got this chorus: “Celebrate! ‘Cause, baby, we ain’t goin’ away/ It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it.” Doesn’t the visual of jade rollers on Perry’s face make you feel lucky to be alive? This isn’t camp; this is boring.
In a world where very few structural or institutional systems make us feel like we’re strutting sexily through a “Woman’s World,” no part of me wants to turn up the volume on this one. The timing is bad, and so is the song. This reality might be something Perry tries to touch on in the muddled second half of the video, when an anvil crushes her and turns her into a reanimated, inflated version of herself that wields the gender symbol for woman in the form of an influencer’s ring light — and, bafflingly, linking up with YouTuber Trisha Paytas”.
It is a shame that male artists are not writing about women. Putting their merits and safety at the front of their tracks. It is such a harrowing and horrible time where we need to support women and ensure that male violence is ended. Also, there has never been a better time to say outright how this world could charge very much for the better with women on top. How women should be celebrated and given greater rights and equality. Some mainstream artists are writing important and brilliant feminist tracks. It is a shame that there are those like WOMAN’S WORLD that are sort of undermining them. Getting the wrong sort of attention. I do hope that something good might be able to come from the backlash against WOMAN’S WORLD. Throughout the years, there have been examples of songs that discuss a woman’s world. The realities of being a woman. These are the type of songs that we need to hear…
IN the modern age.