The faux feminist credentials of self-love pop songs
Female pop stars are having a masturbatory moment. From Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Party for One’ and Hailee Steinfeld’s ‘Love Myself’ to Niki Minaj’s ‘Feeling Myself’, these women are shaking off the stigma and embracing pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Or so they would have us believe.
Journalists are eager to applaud buy into the narratives of these tracks as body-positive feminism entering the popular public domain. These pop stars are strong, independent women providing role models for young women, they say. Magazines like Pitchfork claim the trend ‘illustrate[s] the many ways self-sex can enhance women’s lives’. But is this trend really as celebratory and sex-positive as it at first seems?
Euphemisms only, please
While it might be the current ‘in thing’ for pop stars to sing about, masturbation has been present in popular music for decades. Why then, when this trend is so popular, do we still insist on being so coy about it? Lyricists use metaphors and oblique references rather than addressing the issue head-on. If anything, today’s incarnations are more intent on beating around the bush (pun intended) than their predecessors.
Female masturbation in pop songs took off in the 1980s, with trailblazer Cyndi Lauper’s ‘She Bop’ being one of the first mainstream tracks to…
