Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's song, WAP, was released last week to predictable furore. The song, a loopy paean to female sexual arousal, divided listeners into the usual factions of the religious right outraged at the song's explicit lyrics and trashy aesthetic, and the left celebrating the song's sexuality as 'empowering' while being outraged at the outrage from the right. In short, another Groundhog Day of self-fulfilling internet shouting.
For all the fuss, 'WAP' doesn't offer much lyrically or aesthetically distinct from the long history of songs overtly about female sexuality. Christina Aguilera's 'Dirrty' released eighteen years ago and was more explicit and less comedic as a song and video. 'WAP' is firmly within the Nicki Minaj wheelhouse of playing its sexuality with pantomime humour. For my money, Minaj's 'Anaconda' is funnier and lyrically sharper: 'He toss my salad like his name Romaine' is a flat-out masterpiece of a line. For all the performed outrage on the left and right, 'WAP' is distinctly Widow Twankey in tone. That anyone could take such a deliberately silly song seriously enough to either get annoyed or celebrate its 'message' says more about the emptiness of the commenter's supposed values than the song itself.
It barely needs to be said that the only people benefiting from the mud-slinging over these songs' depiction of female sexuality is the record label and its marketing departments. If there is any morsel of substance to be taken from these spats, it is how marketing has successfully observed, manipulated and exploited the meaninglessness of factional political argument to sell the same product in the same way over years of supposedly shifting public values.
When Aguilera released 'Dirrty' in 2002, its emphasis on overt female sexuality was attuned to the grimy, Terry Richardson-esque pornified aesthetic popular at the time. Although this was vaunted as women taking control of their sexuality, an evolution from and reaction to the Spice Girls' bubblegum 'girl power' schtick of the mid-to-late 90s, there was little pretence that the aim was anything greater than to make oneself sexually attractive and available to the hypersexual, borderline-alcoholic man being marketed to on the flipside of the girl power coin, what was referred to in the UK as 'lad culture'.
As the impact of both 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis took a toll on people's ability and willingness to buy into the self-destructive nihilism of lad culture, marketing departments faced a crisis: when your product's image has been constructed around a credit-fuelled, sexualised lifestyle, how do you continue to sell that product once your consumer base has sobered up and realised their wallet is empty? The answer came in the form of two implausible saviours: Pornhub and fourth-wave feminists.
Having previously embraced the girl power messaging marketed to them as liberation, disparate feminist groups began to united under the realisation that far from freeing young women to express their sexuality, the new culture was simply locking young women into a different form of coercive control where their bodies and youth were currency for the pleasure of sex-hungry young men.
At the same time, the hardcore pornography industry suffered an almost overnight collapse with the launch of Pornhub, which allowed access to a vast library of free, often pirated pornography which users would previously have had to pay for.
Feminists protesting the last vestiges of lad culture were met with accusations from the right-wing press of being prudish and joyless. This was both a familiar affront and one which played to a partially accurate perception of the movement as being anti-sex: feminist movements of the past had often found themselves on the same side of the argument as religious conservatives when it came to pornography, albeit for very different reasons. This contradiction was potently encapsulated in Margaret Attwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, where the mother of protagonist Offred is a radical feminist whose controlling nature and hatred of pornography accidentally aligns her with certain values of the misogynistic dystopia of Gilead.
In trying to avoid being stuck with the label of prudishness, fourth-wave feminists argued that the everyday softcore pornography of The Sun's Page 3 girls or the Victoria Secret Fashion Show was the real subject of their ire for its accessibility and perceived friendliness, naturalising objectification for girls in everyday life where the more hardcore nature of pornography made it something separate. With Pornhub exploding in popularity, it was left almost completely alone.
With feminists wiping softcore pornography off the cultural map, young men and women were left with nothing but the hardcore material proliferating on Pornhub to guide their sexual development. Where softcore pornography of the likes of Page 3 had presented women's sexuality for the benefit of men, but with a saucy postcard wink, the hardcore videos on Pornhub stripped away all humour and humanity, bastardising female sexuality into an often degrading performance of loud moans, infantilisation and uncomfortable, sometimes harmful, acts at the behest of one or more men.
This is not to cast judgment on the women (and men) who participate in pornography, who enjoy sex in its more extreme forms, or to suggest that consent cannot exist in such forms. It is simply to observe that through Pornhub, and without the intermediate barrier of softcore material, what was once extreme became increasingly mainstream, redefining perceptions of female sexuality into a more aggressive caricature along the way.
For record label marketing departments, this allowed them to carry on selling their sexualised singers with only a slight change in language. Where the likes of Aguilera's 'Dirrty' was previously marketed to adolescent boys (and those who men had never grown out of that stage of life) for the thrill of its sexual content and secondarily to girls under the guise of showing a sexually active woman who could perform in the way boys (supposedly) liked, the messaging has now shifted to primarily selling to girls the idea that embracing a pornified form of their sexuality is liberating and empowering to them on their own terms, even though, by sheer coincidence, it happens to be exactly the same stuff sold for boys' benefit little over a decade ago.
The likes of 'WAP' or 'Anaconda' are clearly not detrimental to young women in any serious way. Children may be more easily influenced by popular culture than (most) adults, but the songs in question are so knowingly silly that most girls and boys will likely be laughing along with the innuendoes just as enthusiastically as any mentally-fit adult. If there is any risk, it is not from the song or the video, but how they are sold and championed as more meaningful and important than the joyously silly ditties they are. Feminists who once criticised softcore pornography for being too friendly to young women must now find themselves in the worst of all worlds: pop culture embracing the softcore sense of humour as gloss over a more hardcore-influenced vision of female sexuality.
That's fine on its own: the entire product is one of obvious exaggeration. It is only when that depiction of pornified female sexuality is lauded as authentic and empowering that it risks becoming something to aspire to, rather than enjoy through the buffer of comedy. That marketing departments have embraced such language as tools to sell the same sexualised material in the seemingly ideologically opposed eras of lad culture and modern hypersensitivity demonstrates the extent to which such jargon is nothing more than hollow manipulation. 'WAP' is a funny song with a visually striking video. Let's just enjoy it as that.
