Objectified Women In Music Videos

Objectification, the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object, or in my words, treating someone like a toy or an object. Music, is supposed to entertain the audience, and videos are meant for people to watch. Music videos are recorded performances of a song, than lead with some sort of visual. Social media has been portraying this idea of turning women into so called accuracies to attract the audience, and teens, I’m pointing at you, because you probably know what I’m talking about.

Now let’s take the music video Hotline Bling by Drake and Swalla by Jason Derulo. Women in these videos had one role, which was to be pretty, and pretend to be shiny accessories in the background. Doing what? Take a guess, yeah, you're right, being all sexual and objectified by men, and in this case, it's the artist. Around the 1:50 mark of Hotline Bling, Drake and random women started to just dance a little bit, I really don't want to get into the details but I hope you know what I mean. Let’s just say that these women are being used as objects. And don't even get me started in Swalla, that video, was just really wrong in every way. Literally the lyrics are just about girls, more girls, and sex. Honestly, there couldn't be anything better to talk about Jason?

Women in music videos or social media in general are expected to have flawless skin, perfect jawlines, long legs, and fully shaped curves. Men on the other hand, are supposed to be rich, handsome, and masculine to have any woman they’d like. Anyways, I do want to mention a very fancy technique called Bending. It is an advertising technique used to describe a person’s pose, a very. . . unusual pose that attracts the audience. Well this technique is used in all sorts of things, from print ads, to advertisements, to music videos. Not surprisingly, music videos get millions of views because of these women. This affects teens, teen males, adults, basically everyone, even children. Why you may ask? Children has become more of a target audience in social media, in ads, video games, TV, music videos etc. Although social media can teach many educational things, well, they can also educate children a lot about the objectification, the use of inappropriate language and darker things. This impact can cause children to think that objectification is normal, ordinary and typical for for everyone. Adults should be aware of this because they can also be trapped in this same mindset. You see, the music videos that is seen and played by teens today are shown with a few specific things in order to grab teen’s attention. One, a woman’s breasts or cleavage, two, a woman’s bare legs, or a woman’s buttocks. These clips of the music videos would be emphasized more than their actual face, or their whole body itself. Examples like Nicki Minaj’s song Barbie Dreams, Fefe, Freaky Friday are all focused on women and their body parts. This brings me to another advertisement technique used and it is called separation. Separation is displaying any part of the body usually focused without a face, so that could be legs, chest, arms, and stomach.

Lyrics are also a huge part of the objectification in music videos. Some lines in the song could straight up talk about women. The song Blurred lines by Robin Thicke for example, has this line “but you're an animal, baby, it's in your nature. ” The musician is clearly saying this towards women, how women are supposed to be treated like an object, an animal. Why you may ask? Well there are alot of clues why he is pointing this towards women. One, he is fully clothed surrounding by women that aren't wearing as much as him. Two, he looks very seductive towards the women. Another example would be the song Anaconda by Nicki Minaj. The lyrics in verse two were just overwhelmingly sexual.

The use of inappropriate language used for replacing and the lines about men causes to have high expectations herself, resulting of self-objectification. Self-objectification is when someone treats themselves as objects, and not as a real human, and this goes mainly towards women. Yet in Anaconda, Nicki Minaj can also mean that she is too perfect that a man could hardly get her. Verse one and verse two talks about two different men trying to get her through many trials that are sexual. She potentially is creating a message that being objectified or treating herself as an accessory is right.