How Women Are Objectified In Music Videos

The new video clip of our favorite singer is released.

we give to play and, to the tune of the upcoming summer hit, we can watch as a woman who is internationally famous for her work crawls across the floor between the legs of several men, moves in sexually explicit ways, and does it all wearing less clothes than those who wear her. surround. Few people care.

What does this mean?

What is sexual objectification?

Sexual objectification occurs when one person, usually a man, sees another, a woman, not as a human being but as a thing. The recipient cannot run away from this gaze since she is omnipresent.

Martha C. Nussbaum explored the concept of reification and its definition is a reference in gender studies. According to Nussbaum, a person is reified when they are treated as property or an interchangeable tool or as someone who is violated and insignificant, among other things.

Most forms of sexual objectification make the objects of such objectification feel treated only as a body, valued for use by others while denying their independence and equality.

One of the sources of this power disparity stems from pornography. It is an audiovisual product that silences women in a way that confers authority on men. Thus, if they learn to interact with them through porn, they also learn to treat them as objects.

And sometimes, women objectify themselves. Intense social pressure to observe “appearance standards” forces them to meet standards of thinness, youth, and beauty, as seen in some music videos that are produced by women.

A show of feminist force can disguise a reification. One example is Beyoncé’s performance in 2016, in which she appeared in a skimpy outfit in front of a screen that read “FEMINIST” in giant letters. But when female artists become sexualized, “they have more autonomy over their role as ‘observed’ or ‘observers.'”

Objectification can occur without sexualization. For example, some ads use women’s bodies as canvases on which to display brands, logos, and messages.

In short, sexual objectification –in a very simple way– is a process by which a sentient being is reduced to a thing or an insignificant being without social status, which can be exchanged, possessed, exhibited, used and abused for sexual purposes. Women gradually accept it through rites that transform it into possession.

Why investigate sexualization?

There are two main reasons. The first is that sexualizing images normalize female objectification in a way that goes unnoticed. That masculine gaze is so integrated into our social practices that we barely notice it. Said masculine domination has a symbolic violence, imperceptible and omnipresent through daily practices.

The second is that the normalization of sexualization generates individual and social damage. In women, this is associated with depression, obsessive body control, symptoms of anorexia and bulimia, social physical anxiety, shame about bodily functions, inhibited cognitive functioning, decreased motor skills and sexual pleasure, and low self-esteem.

Music videos have powerful effects. They have become audiovisual creations with a cinematographic vocation that function as “witnesses to the expectations and concerns of urban subcultures and tribes.” As such, they can be vehicles for ‘ways of living, behaving and thinking’. The consumption of music videos through platforms is massive among young people. Through them, boys and girls adopt stereotyped visions and normalize attitudes.

Cara Wallis has researched the nonverbal manifestations associated with subservience, dominance, sexuality, and aggression in music videos. In her studies, she concludes that stereotyped notions of women as sexual objects and subordinates, and of men as aggressive, predominate.

Observing with desire does not have to be harmful. The problem begins when that gaze is inevitable, ubiquitous, unwanted, and systematically focused on women. It is necessary to investigate this objectifying and sexualizing gaze in order to understand the messages that reach us through popular culture about gender roles and the value of women.

We analyze some of the most viewed videos on YouTube

As an example of this, we wanted to analyze five international music videos in the top 10 most viewed on YouTube in 2019, when the study began. All of them continue to add visits to this day.

We brought together a committee of experts, made up of Raquel Jiménez Manzano (member of the Women’s Institute), María Martín Barranco (advisor on equality) and Nuria Coronado Sopeña (journalist specializing in feminist studies) and we used some of the theoretical sources already mentioned here in terms of objectification and sexualization.

In addition, we also had Caroline Heldman’s seven-question test as a reference to examine visual sexualization and the criteria established by the Spanish Observatory of the Image of Women to determine if there is sexism in audiovisual content.

The videos chosen were:

• Danny Ocean, Swing
• Aitana, Lola Indigo, I stay
• Katy Perry, Never Really Over
• TINI, Lalo Ebratt, Strawberry
• Rich Music, Sech, Dalex ft. Justin Quiles, Wisin, Zion, Lenny Tavarez, Feid, Maybe

What do the videos tell us?

The five videos use the women’s bodies as decoration, in passive or inert attitudes, or show them as something replaceable.

For example, in some of the scenes in StrawberryAlthough she sings, Martina Stoessel (Tini) is a painting in the back of a room. In Swinga woman dressed in a suggestive dress with transparencies swims aimlessly around the singer.

Also, nudity is something they all have in common. While the artist of Strawberry she is shown in all the scenes almost naked, Lalo Ebratt, her partner in this duet, is fully clothed.

In Maybethe seven singers –far from any normative beauty canon– appear dressed, while the women who decorate this video, all young, slim and beautiful, do not.

Furthermore, in I’m staying, Strawberry y Maybe, the dancers seem to simulate intercourse, at times, to the delight of their partners. The letters that accompany these images could not be more explicit.

Specially in Strawberry and in Maybe, the camera focuses several times on specific parts of the female body instead of showing the person in full length. The local processing of a body – as opposed to global processing – that occurs more frequently in female bodies than in male ones, in reality and in images, is a characteristic of reification.

The decorations are also suggestive. For example in Strawberry, the protagonist sings “I have a rocket in my pants” sitting on a bed. In Maybe, several women appear in various states of undress, some inert, in a luxury car. They don’t sing.

That is, the music videos analyzed have a high degree of sexualization of women. But not all types of reification have the same frequency. The decorative use of women’s bodies, nudity, passivity and the denial of their autonomy and individuality predominate.

In addition, there could even be a higher level of sexualization of women in music videos than in advertisements, since the former cross more borders as they are not regulated.

This article has been co-written by Cristina Ubani, member of the ARES research team (University of Deusto) and expert consultant on gender.

Miren Gutiérrez, Researcher, data activism, University of Deusto

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.