Recently proclaimed feminist anthem “Hard Out Here,” U.K. pop star Lily Allen’s first single since dipping out of the music scene in 2009, debuted online along with its video last week. Wild enthusiasm waned within hours of its release, as points of contention rose up and overtook it.
The problem did not lie in the lyrics or the video alone. Together, they make something I would not call a feminist anthem — even though I was sold on the song at first.
Allen came back to pop without (gasp!) losing the weight from her two pregnancies during her time away. The “Hard Out Here” video comments on this by opening up on Allen on the operating table, a scalpel taken to her body beneath a sheet, while her faux-manager and surgeons criticize her for letting her appearance get so out of control.
“Um, I had two babies,” she answers to an accusation of a loss of self-control. Brilliant. I swell with outrage larger than her lingering baby bump. Who says pregnancies, potatoes and pop music can’t coexist?
Then the song starts, and all that groundwork is thrown in the garbage.
After refusing to abandon the studio for the kitchen or brag about her chains, something I didn’t realize Allen collected in the first place, she unleashes this gem: “Don’t need to shake my ass for you, ‘cause I’ve got a brain.”
She then gets a point for mentioning the glass ceiling, but I’m distracted a few moments later by the chorus, which consists of several reiterations of “it’s hard out here for a b****.”
Two black dancers then flank Allen as close-up shots show the dancers’ hands grabbing their crotches and their butts shaking in slow motion. Dancers of other races are there, but in the back, and we see Allen attempting without success to twerk along with the girls up front while her manager eggs her on.
What a struggle the young, white pop star goes through, being forced to stoop to the level of the dancing black woman.
Then Allen veers into a stanza on the superficial constraints on women while washing a rim in a kitchen stocked with only champagne bottles. Is she supposed to be criticizing the music industry or black people and their awful habits of owning their bodies and gold jewelry, of daring to gain affluence through the avenue Allen herself employs and of drinking champagne to celebrate that success?
Another dancing scene, now in front of a shiny luxury car, black buttcheeks shaking and even being smacked by Allen, a la Miley, ends my suspicions for good.
Even ripping into Robin Thicke’s rape anthem “Blurred Lines” in both her lyrics and a recreation of Thicke’s braggart message written out in silver balloons can’t save her. Allen is not truly feminist.
Black women aren’t dummies to throw under the bus for the misogyny in our society. White women aren’t the only ones being treated like prize cows tied out for inspection; black bodies are exploited, over-sexualized and dehumanized without hope of an end.
The issue is a complex misogynistic system, affecting all microcosms — like music, rap or pop, and business — within it. True feminism recognizes that and includes all races, all sexualities, all subsets of women in this discussion, regardless of whether they choose to shake their asses or possess brains. Only through solidarity can we change the unfair treatment of women.
I’m interested in the advancement of women, not the advancement of the white woman’s ego. From white woman to white woman: sexism and racism go hand-in-hand, Lily.
Samantha Bares is a 20-year-old English junior from Erath, La.