Objectifying the Squeezebox

JLo & Iggy play "bum Tetris"

Yesterday something cracked me up. The historian Amanda Vickery tweeted an article on Stylist magazine about celebrity bottoms and how they wished the women in pop would pop their bottoms away, especially people such as Jennifer Lopez who recently released a song about the female bottom with Iggy Azalea: "Now, we're not saying that every pop song should tackle the gender pay gap... but you would be forgiven for thinking that in 2014 our leading female pop stars might have associated themselves with a creative enterprise that's a little more, well... worthy of them." It's a funny article, but it struck me that it is not the nudity female pop singers increasingly seem to feel is required that is the problem. It is the fact that female pop singers and/or their lyric writers don't know how to sing about sex from any other perspective than a heterosexual cis man. 

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Try as I might I am struggling to recall many songs in which a woman sings about her enjoyment of sex without somehow relating it to pleasing a man or titillating the men listening to the song. There's Khia's My Neck, My Back, I recall Lisa Left Eye Lopes alluding to cunnilingus (when she wasn't rapping about safe sex) on a TLC track. Missy Elliott gave instructions on the single Work it. Alison Goldfrapp was equally demanding on Twist. And of course pretty much every song Peaches has ever released. 

That's not many compared to the plethora of songs that are about how the female form is pleasing to the eye. Women and men have sung about curves and women acquiescing for years. The focus on the behind is interesting though because it's the first time women have joined in on the odes to a certain female body part. 

As the Stylist article points out over time many parts of women (when oh when will we just like all of a woman?) have enjoyed more attention than others. "While it's highly plausible we'll look back on this time in contemporary culture as The Era When Everyone Got Their Bum Out (A Lot), the fetishising of a body part is nothing new."

I lived through the nineties, before JLo invented the female bottom in the film Anaconda, in which we couldn't decide between waifishness and massive tits. But while boobs have a back catalogue of songs about them by men, The Who, Iggy and the Stooges, Frank Zappa, AC/DC women never really sang about breasts.

if you are a woman and you want to sing about sex the real mystery is not so much that you sing about it only in the context of objectification but that you never sing about your vulva

Even when Pamela Anderson was really flying the flag for them. There is no invitation to squeeze, or admire a jiggle or note the size of the singer's bosom in any female lyrics (that I or Google know of). 

But really if you are a woman and you want to sing about sex the real mystery is not so much that you sing about it only in the context of objectification but that you never sing about your vulva (singing about the act of cunnilingus is not the same). Oh I know the odd act has indulged in a crotch grab but that could just be a sneaky choreographed scratch - don't tell me we haven't all succumbed to a yeast infection. 

Perhaps ultimately we are fetishising the sight of a woman leaving. I just hope the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out. 

Squeamish Kate