By now many of you have heard/seen Beyonce's new song "Run the World (Girls). And for those of you who know me, y'all know how much I LOVE Beyonce....but this song....not so much! I had a problem with it when I first heard it, and now, I just had to come out of hiding to share a WONDERFUL response to it. The video is by youtuber: NineteenPercent. The video is below the transcript!
Enjoy!
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Enjoy!
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"Hey, Beyonce! Guess what? You’re a liar, and I’m calling you out!
Beyonce is selling you a bill of goods, and I’m here to tell you not to buy it. Her new song is called “Girls Who Run the World”. I don’t think it’s right that she’s out there promulgating historical inaccuracies to impressionable young women, imparting the false belief that they “run the world”, thereby lulling them into a false sense of achievement and distracting them from doing the work it takes to actually run the world. Which, by the way, I don’t think female domination is actually the goal. I think the endgame should be a socially egalitarian society.
[Do] Girls really run the world? First of all, women are universally dominated. There is not a society known where women, as a group, have decision-making power over men as a group. “Who’ll run the world? Girls!” A better question would be, “Name the only American minority group that actually constitutes a majority of the population. Girls!” 50.7 percent of the US population is female, but sociologists consider women a minority group because of their position relative to men, the dominant group.
There are things called “women’s issues” which, apparently, are a “special interest”. A problem that affects half the population of your country is not a “special interest”, okay? It’s a big interest; it’s a regular interest.
So, Beyonce, you really want to try to convince me that girls run the world? Is that why 90 percent of rape victims are female? And, similarly, 95 percent of domestic abuse victims are female. According to that statistic, we’re not even running our domiciles, let alone the globe. You’d agree that something should be done about that, right? So let me tell you: In South Carolina, in 2005, cock-fighting became a felony. That same year, there was a bill to make domestic violence a felony; it didn’t pass. So, apparently, if you let two chickens peck at each other for your entertainment, you’re a felon. But if you punch your wife in the teeth, not so much.
If women have such power and influence, then why are female fetuses in China and India selectively aborted? And before ultrasound was widely available for sex detection, you just had to have the baby, and then if it was a girl, you’d just kill it. So… girl power! I wish I were making this up.
Let’s examine some of the lyrics.
“Make your check, come at they neck.”
Indeed. Go to work, and make your check, but be aware that your check is going to be significantly smaller than your male counterparts’, because at all ages, at all education levels, American women are paid only 78 percent of what a man is paid for doing the same work. And that is a huge improvement from 1980 when it was only 60 percent.
“Some of them men think they freak this like we do, but no they don’t.”
I actually agree with you there, Beyonce. Men certainly do not “freak this” the way our culture demands that women do. Men aren’t objectified the same way or to the same magnitude that women are, if at all. Female sexuality is for sale; it’s profitable. And another thing, anecdotally, every issue of Cosmopolitan magazine is about “freakin’ it”. Women are sent messages like, “First take off his pants”, but don’t sleep with him ’cause if you do, then you’re skanky. What am I to do? The message that the media sends women is like, “Be really really sexy, but not too sexy!” It’s a phenomenon known as the Virgin-Whore Dichotomy; go briefly read about it if you want to. Link in my pants.
So, indeed, Beyonce, women have a very unique and contradictory course to navigate when it comes to “freaking it” in this country.
“Disrespect us? No, they won’t!”
Yes, they will, and they do, often.
I’d like to defer to a very famous doctor on this subject — Dr. Dre. He says, and I quote, “Bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks.” There you have it. Listen, Mrs. Carter, you should know this firsthand: When your husband isn’t busy with his money, cash, or ho(s), you’ve still got 99 problems, and a bitch ain’t one. Of the most popular rap songs in recent memory, I am hard-pressed to think of one that doesn’t have any reference to women as some derogatory name. Not to mention, like, workplace sexual harassment or cat-calling, and all other manner of disrespectful things.
“I think I need a barber. None of these [censored]* can fade me.”
Don’t call me a bitch; it doesn’t make me feel empowered.
We have this thing in our society whereby it’s somehow okay to do and say sexist things because, somehow, they’re not sexist anymore since women have so much power, and I think the media is partially to blame for this.
Yes, it’s nice to see female doctors and lawyers on TV, and Geena Davis even played a female president in that one show that got cancelled. And yes, lady humans can vote and work outside the home, and all sorts of other things that weren’t part of the status quo in past eras. But a simple survey of reality will reveal that we don’t run anything, and pretending we do will get us nowhere. I think, not only is it not helpful; it’s actually harmful. Like, these messages of “girl power” in art and music, in movies and all other sorts of media are useless unless there’s actual work being done behind them. A shift in values, policy changes, and changes in perception; there just needs to be a huge shift, and that’s gonna take some time. These sporadic campaigns of “girl power” aren’t really gettin’ the job done. Remember the late ’90s era of “girl power” circa Spice Girls? A group of ladies who told us we could be sporty, or we could be scary. We could be posh, or we could dye our hair red like Ginger. Or, we could be babies. Awesome, ’cause that’s just what women need more of: infantilization.
Women have made great strides towards equality, but we’re not there yet, so it’s a little premature to be making victory anthems.
If you’re at all interested by anything I said in this video, or realize that some of the stuff that I talked about isn’t really fair, then you should look into it for yourself, and if you want to do it the old-fashioned way, I highly recommend this book. It’s called ‘Full Frontal Feminism’ by Jessica Valenti — an excellent, excellent book. Or you could just go to her website, which is called feministing.com, which is dangerously close to the word “fisting” which makes me feel, frankly, uncomfortable to say it.
And that concludes this video. Bye, everyone."
