On Sunday November 24th, millions of people tuned in to the American Music Awards to watch one of the biggest nights in the music industry. Katy Perry opened the show with a geisha themed performance, which immediately received criticism from the Japanese community calling her racist. Her performance consisted of paper fans, japanese cherry blossoms, Japanese garden sets, and Perry and her backup dancers dressed as traditional Geishas. According to Psychology Today's Ravi Chandra, many Asian Americans were offended by the performance because they've "watched [their] cultures misappropriated and commodified time after time. Frankly, many of [them] feel used as props to glorify White artists.” The artist was also accused being a racist because she was essentially sexualizing the Japanese female figure. Although Perry's intentions were harmless, many people called her ignorant and offensive. Her performance was also compared to Selena Gomez's which was recently criticized for being offensive to the Indian culture and sexualized the traditional Indian female figure. Maybe this should serve as a warning to other musical artist that it is important to be careful when stepping into the territory of recreating other cultures because there is a thin line between appreciating the culture and being racist.
Last week, Lily Allen released her most recent single Hard Out Here, which is a criticism on the music industry and the rampant sexism we have been seeing recently. Allen voices her issues with the industry and its double standard of men and women when it comes to beauty and sexuality. A woman is constantly scrutinized by the public on her weight and what she looks like while men are left alone and are rarely bothered for their looks. She also points out the slut shaming that goes on for women as well as their objectification in music videos. She creatively puts together a music video that parodies Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines video, Miley Cyrus' VMA performance, twerking, and also most hip hop videos in general. She showed how just how ridiculous these videos actually are when you realize how they are putting women down and degrading them. Another thing she points out in her video is the fact that advertisers play a large role in the sexism because they use these pop stars and music videos as plugs to sell their latest items, meanwhile using women as objects to promote their products. I believe that Lily Allen does a great job at satirizing the music industry by using humor and exaggeration to get across a powerful message: the music uses sexism and objectification of women for the sole purpose of making a profit.
Day by day, large, for-profit corporations constantly bombard women with ads that are trying to sell them something to make them thinner, younger, prettier, taller, more sexy, and every other improvement under the sun. These ads are sexist, ageist, and classist. They promote one type of woman, one who is white, thin, young, and has an unachievable body type. We see hundreds of ads everyday but rarely see anything going against this norm. Advertisements in our modern world lack diversity which is a huge problem, seeing as the most recent census reveals that there is a growing importance of minority consumers. Minorities make up a large sum of consumers but are rarely represented in the advertisements of the products they are purchasing. In order to fix this issue, the Advertising Agency of New York is supporting an initiative called "I'mpart," which strives to promote, attract, retain and train diverse candidates in advertising. The advertising club is investing $700,000 to help their goal of creating more diversity in the advertising world in order to equally represent all the minorities who are consumers of these products. It is time to have ALL types of women in advertisements rather than continue to uphold this Eurocentric and unrealistic image that is constantly being put out by advertising companies.
