So, Rihanna. She’s a slag, isn’t she? Such, at least, is the verdict of the tabloid press, who have once again queued up to pile opprobrium on the singer, following the example of one Alan Graham, a Northern Irish farmer who shot to fame after asking Rihanna to put her breasts away and leave his field, where she had been shooting the video for her new hit, We Found Love.
Writing for the Daily Mail, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — a columnist I normally admire — praises Farmer Graham for making “a brave stand against two of the worst excesses of modern life: the sexualisation of society and our celebrity culture.” She says that Graham is almost alone in taking this stand, and that she “hugely admire(s)” him.
I can’t agree. I could be wrong, but I’ll bet against the likelihood of this elderly fundamentalist Christian having feminist concerns at the forefront of his mind when he chose to reprimand a young woman for showing her naked body in his fields. Mistaking religious prudery for feminism gets you ten whole points in “liberals missing the issue” bingo, but there is something additionally abhorrent about the way in which this older man is being commended for stepping in, as if he were saving Rihanna from her wicked ways.
The debate about whether popular culture has become too “sexualised” is hardly restricted to Bangor, NI — it’s a debate that has run and run in nearly every major paper for over two years, partly because it’s simply gagging to be illustrated with full-colour examples of such “sexualisation” for readers to cut out and keep.
It is interesting that Rihanna — not only one of the most prominent women of colour working in pop, but a woman who is well-known for speaking up about her own experience of domestic violence — should have become the chief scapegoat in this new culture war.
Disapproving, lip twisting pseudo-feminist articles about whether or not music videos and trainer adverts are going to turn all girls under 12 into knicker-tossing teen harlots who can hardly turn on MTV without becoming pregnant or syphilitic are usually accompanied by pictures of Rihanna in her underwear.
Sometimes it’s Lady Gaga, but Gaga is weird and confusing and you never quite know when she’s going to turn up dressed as a man, a lobster or all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital at once, as opposed to the standard alien vinyl barbie look of which certain sections of the curtain-twitching middle classes love to disapprove.
No, for real, quality disapproval, it has to be Rihanna. We love to disapprove of her. We love to disapprove of her cute, pert bottom; we love to disapprove of her luscious breasts and smooth skin, barely covered by those disgustingly small leather thongs she likes to wear, the hussy. Look at her sexualising our children. Look at her, sexualising away in those horrifyingly sexualised sexy pants. We disapprove of those, too.
The hypocrisy is obvious, and it’s not just the Daily Mail, which rather topped the pile by linking, in the middle of their piece on the Farmer Graham story, to another article about how “Smoking Hot!” Rihanna looked in the exact same video shoot, which they illustrated with the exact same photos, this time naming her the “Queen of Seduction”.
This two-faced neo-puritanism makes mock concern for women’s dignity just another reason to print enormous close-ups of their soft bits in not too much. There are po-faced men in garages across middle England who will pay a lot for that sort of disapproval, disapproval that stops extremely short of actually asking for change, because change doesn’t sell papers.
I’m not saying that there are no problems at all with Rihanna’s brand of arse-out sexual commodification becoming a standard feature of female celebrity — although give the girl credit, at least she isn’t claiming, as others do, that it’s a non-stop shuttle to planet empowerment.
I’m not saying that there aren’t big, big problems with the kind of raunch culture that has made Rihanna rich. What I am saying is that perhaps, just perhaps, the best way to address those problems might not be to applaud a religious fundamentalist for telling a young woman to cover herself up in his presence.
Some people can’t seem to understand the difference between taking a stand against sexism and taking a stand against sex, but it’s a distinction that we must make if we want a women’s movement that’s smart and brave and useful.
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