Hmm yes, one of those posts.
I guess I'm just intrigued by the seemingly popular (and even, dare I say, desirable) proposition of being a bad bitch, a girl boss, a boss bitch or any of those variations. It seems quite prevalent in our modern entertainment. I hear it a lot in popular pop and hip-hop (not my cup of tea generally, but great to dance to). Also, I just finished watching Issa Rae's dramedy series Insecure and it gave me the same vibe I got from the songs.
So. If I'm reading this right, as a young woman today, my aspiration should be to be a boss of some kind. Whose or of what is less specified, but it does seem to involve a lot of cruelty towards males. Also, a lot of oral sex. It seems a recurring (almost disturbingly so) topic in both music and television. Apparently, that's what has come of the great suffragette fight of the previous century. Getting head.
That and having no feelings towards men. And getting loads of money. And fucking multiple dudes. Essentially, it seems young women are aspiring to be the female equivalent of the archetypal cad. The playboy. The rascal.
The fuckboy, as our increasingly dumber culture has termed him, though I can't say they're wrong there.
It strikes me, as a sporadic consumer of this type of entertainment, that the message is horribly selfish and seems deeply unsatisfying. For instance, Insecure (which ran for 5 seasons, and has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so apparently quite popular) focuses much of its attention on the (female) leads acting like hoes (their words, not mine), behaving poorly towards men, "getting dick" and still somehow coming out the righteous, entitled victim every single time.
While the show is a fairly entertaining light watch, it was disappointing to me that at no point were the characters called out for their bad behavior. There's no sobering realization that maybe acting like that isn't the epitome of female empowerment, as modern society would have you believe.
Because why would they say that? After all, Issa and her friends are just being "bosses". They're out there "slaying". They're empowered women.
In the immortal words of George Carlin,
Imitating the worst behaviors of men - is that the noblest thing that women can think of? [..] Isn't there something noble they could do to be helping this planet heal?
And bad men, at that.
It's very bizarre to me that as much as we run our mouths about women enjoying sex just as much as men, us women have failed in restructuring what sexual enjoyment looks like in popular media. Time and again, in our culture, the depiction of sexual gratification comes in male terms. If creators want to show a sexually empowered lady, she's basically acting like a dude. She's cold, ruthless, with a high sexual appetite, but little interest in creating a deeper connection or even satisfying her sexual partner.
Whereas it's not obvious to me at all that casual sex is enjoyable or empowering in the slightest. I don't think it is for men, either, but much less so for women who tend to attach more rapidly. For whom orgasm with infrequent, casual partners is rare (as studies show).
It's also not clear to me that in order for me to feel "empowered" I should be treating men like shit. Quite the contrary. I believe you become stronger and happier, that you grow by treating others with kindness and empathy. Compassion.
Though we pretend to be all liberated and equal, we still talk the talk in the patois of men. I don't understand why so many of these female creators are insisting on acting like guys. I'm sure most real, non-brainwashed women will agree that sexual enjoyment does not look like that at all. It wasn't true back in the "Sex and the City" era, and it's not true now. And while I do think there are some women who do not attach easily, who do genuinely prefer that lifestyle without being brainwashed by the media, I think they're fairly few. And we're doing our sex a disservice by pretending that liberated, sexually fulfilled women behave just like shitty men.
We've taken our sexual satisfaction and done a poor, stilted translation that we think men will understand. It's as if we're still secretly worried that we'd be misunderstood and ostracized were we to speak the real thing out loud.
