Opinion: Country Music has a Misogyny Problem
Country music is a long-beloved genre all across North America that has featured some of music’s best talents including Charlie Pride, Dolly Parton, and Chet Atkins. It was a starting place of many feminist anthems by strong women such as Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Jeannie C. Riley. Furthermore, in just 2005 we had songs such as George Strait’s “Let Herself Go” that talked about how good it was for a woman to leave her terrible marriage.
So, how can I sit here and say such a bold claim that “country music has a misogyny problem.” The simple answer is that in country music today, women are used as an object or plot device in songs instead of being what they are, people.
Most of the time in modern country, they are described as sexual objects. A good example of a song that demonstrates a problematic representation of women is Luke Bryan’s “Country Girl (Shake it for Me).”
The song starts out with the call, “Hey girl, go on now! You know you’ve got everybody looking.” Right off the bat, the song establishes that this woman is being coaxed to dance for everybody that is looking at her. The song, a few lines, later continues as:
“Gonna watch you make me fall in love
Get up on the hood of my daddy’s tractor
Up on the tool box, it don’t matter
Down on the tailgate
Girl I can’t wait
To watch you do your thing”
These lines continue to force the idea that a woman needs to look good for the enjoyment of the men around her.
Someone might argue, “What is wrong with a woman looking good?” And, that answer is nothing. Nothing is wrong with a woman dressing up and embodying her style of beauty when she does if for her own reasons. However, when a man is telling her that she has to perform for his arousal and entertainment, it is wrong.
“ Shake it for the young bucks sittin’ in the honky-tonks
For the rednecks rockin’ ’til the break of dawn
The DJ spinnin’ that country song
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon
Shake it for the birds, shake it for the bees
Shake it for the catfish swimmin’ down deep in the creek
For the crickets and the critters and the squirrels
Shake it to the moon, shake it for me girl”
Nowhere in this build-up to the chorus do we hear that the woman should dance and feel good for herself, but instead she should dance to please everyone else around. In this song, she is an object to be enjoyed. This is later reinforced by the hook:
“ Aw, country girl, shake it for me
Girl, shake it for me
Girl, shake it for me”
Now, if this song was sung from the perspective of the woman and she was saying “I am going to go out there and dance because I feel sexy and I am going to show it off,” then the song takes a whole new meaning. It no longer takes the humanity away from the woman because it is now about a woman enjoying herself and her own sexuality. Instead, currently, the Luke Bryan song is about him telling a woman to dance for his enjoyment.
“Country Girl (Shake it or Me)” is an extreme example of misogynistic views about women’s bodies, but it is not alone. Mississippi State University sociologist Braden Leap published a study that analyzed over 800 country songs that topped Billboard’s country music charts and he found that there is a shift in how masculinity is being represented.
A story on the website Pacific Standard is a good summary of the study that is easy to consume.
Leap, in his study, states, “But the ideal rural man is now depicted as a particular type of heterosexual provider, while white women have increasingly been represented as the ideal sexual objects to complement this masculinity.”
This “ heterosexual provider” is no longer seen as the classic, but equally misogynistic, breadwinner of the family either. Instead, the study has found that songs pay an increased focus on providing women alcohol, transportation, and sex.
The focus has been given to songs that praise heteronormative and misogynistic ideals of white beauty and that women’s purpose is to be enjoyed by men.
The image that is used for this story is from a song that shows the insulting content that is found in many of country music’s top hits. Maddie and Tae’s “Girl in a Country Song” is a funny look at the culture that has been made from these songs.
“ I hear you over there on your tailgate whistlin’ in
Sayin’ “Hey girl, “ but you know I ain’t listenin’
Cause I got a name and to you it ain’t
Pretty little thing, honey or baby
It’s drivin’ me red red red red red red redneck crazy”
They make fun of common phrases that are used to refer to women while also using small snippets of popular country songs.
“ Bein’ the girl in a country song
How in the world did it go so wrong?
Like all we’re good for is lookin’ good for
You and your friends on the weekend, nothin’ more
We used to get a little respect
Now we’re lucky if we even get
To climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut and ride along
And be the girl in a country song”
Maddie and Tae, as well as many other women, took a look at country music and saw a bad trend. The men that are writing these songs are using women to be sexual objects.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Maddie and Tae state, “We were going into a songwriting session one day, and we had just been in the car listening to country radio like we do every single day, because we love these songs and we love these guys. We were laughing, because all these lyrics were very similar, and there were a lot of clichés in them. So what we did was we made this checklist, and on the checklist it had bare feet, cutoffs, tanlines, tan legs, but the most important one is the girl.
“And this smoking-hot girl is typically in cutoff jeans with long tan legs dancing on a tailgate shaking her money-maker. Tae and I were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t think we can live up to those expectations.’ We thought it would be kind of fun to give this girl in these songs a voice.”
Obviously, there are artists that do not fall into this trend but sadly country music has a misogyny problem. Maddie and Tae’s song foils what Luke Bryan was singing about. Many of the top country songs today still treat women like objects for male enjoyment. The days of great country music writing seems to be over and was replaced with a genre that treats women in a way that is degrading and humiliating.
