Teenage girls discuss what they think about explicit lyrics and videos
So we've all seen the Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball music video, which has been attacked for its sexually explicit imagery, and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, which has been condemned as misogynist for both its lyrics and its video. Both artists have defended themselves as misunderstood and described themselves as feminists. Everyone talks of the messages going out to teenagers like yourselves, so what did you make of those explicit videos, and the row over Lily Allen's controversial parody of what she says is a deeply sexist music industry in her new video and song, Hard Out Here?
*Faye McLean:* Lily Allen says she is trying to make a point, but she still uses girls in her video who are scantily dressed. So I'd say she isn't a hardcore radical feminist, but she doesn't have to be. She's taking the mickey out of men who make those types of videos. She is calling people bitches, but nobody makes a fuss when men talk about bitches.
*Bonnie Jones:* She could have just recorded the song with its strong lyrics, she didn't need to do the video with all those girls. It's just as bad as the singers she was trying to put down.
*Jordan Lane*: She's not the first person to talk about this, but she's famous and so people will listen. But it's important she is taking a situation and drawing attention to it, because a lot of the time people don't even listen to the lyrics.
*FM*: Yes, it's being going on for a while. I don't understand why it's suddenly blown up as an issue. Rap videos have been doing this kind of stuff for years — look at Biggie Smalls and Hypnotise [a 1997 rap track referenced by Allen in her video]. Robin Thicke isn't much worse than any of the others.
*BJ*: Nobody kicked up a fuss when Lady Gaga danced in a thong, but Miley Cyrus does it and there's a fuss because she's supposed to be the Disney princess. It's a competitive industry and her management know that.
*Genevieve Koutsoumanis*: What annoys me is that the ratios are so skewed, I've never seen a music video where a man undresses, it's just lots of females. The music industry is run by men, and you do wonder how much control any of the singers even have over their own videos.
*But if you have a singer like Adele – who outsells Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke put together – then doesn't that suggest it is possible to be successful in the music industry without making a sexually explicit video?*
*FM*: Adele doesn't care. You wouldn't catch her licking a hammer [as Cyrus does] and she has never lowered herself to taking her clothes off, but maybe the music of Miley Cyrus isn't strong enough, so she needs the attention of making a porn video. On the other hand, if Adele did decide to do a naked photoshoot, I'd be like "go girl!" if she was comfortable.
*JL*: Miley Cyrus's music hasn't changed from when she was the Disney girl, it's her image that's changed. Maybe it's her, or maybe it's her management. It's all about making money.
*Holly Kinsell*: I'm not sure anything is new here, the dominant ideology is still from the 1950s when the pressure was on housewives to look good for their men coming home. It was all diets and putting on your lipstick. In a way, Miley Cyrus is brave in Wrecking Ball, she's obviously comfortable with herself and her own naked body.
*FM*: I couldn't disagree more. If she was naked in an artistic way, maybe, but it's not a message of "I'm happy with my body", it's "Come and get me". There's no creativity.
*Emily Toft*: If you think about suffragettes, starving themselves and throwing themselves under horses, then Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke have let them down.
*GK*: She says it's empowering, that's the problem with feminism, everyone interprets it in their own way. But she didn't take her clothes off for herself, it's for money. I have stopped watching music videos, the sexism in all of them makes me angry.
*GT*: It's more like if you're a female singer you have to also be a porn star.
*HK*: I don't know if them being X-rated would make any difference, it's always been the same and children have got access to anything they want to see on the internet. I remember a video where the women were being X-rayed like they were baggage. I don't know why the outrage is happening now.
*Rachel Macpherson*: Miley says she a feminist but the song is all about how a man destroyed her, she is basically saying that if you haven't got a man you're somehow less of a woman. I don't think that's a very good message.
*So Miley Cyrus gets the thumbs down, but what about the nudity of Lady Gaga, or even Kate Moss doing a Playboy shoot? Are there double standards because you grew up with Cyrus in her previous incarnation as the Disney girl Hannah Montana?*
*FM*: Kate Moss is 40, looks phenomenal and good for her. Some things are OK if the woman is in control. Some people might say it objectifies women but Playboy is what it is, it's not pretending to be anything else.
*JL*: It's maybe about your respect for Kate Moss, she is the best model and she looks great and being a model is about looking great.
*RM*: But it opens a window for women to be criticised over their looks even when they are older. It's just making it harder for older women as well as younger women, as the expectation and pressure are on them too.
*ET*: The incentive is important. Kate Moss is a model and looks great and can maybe do things that would seem sleazy if Miley Cyrus did it. Miley Cyrus's career was fading before this blew up and I think fame must be addictive. But there's double standards in everything – around what boys can do and what girls can do. A boy still can be promiscuous without being judged or called a slut the way a girl is.
*FM*: Boys get a high-five and girls get a slap. It's fine when you hear a boy has slept with a girl, but if you're the girl you get called a slut. It goes round on social media and becomes a real embarrassment. And boys are affected by these kinds of sexualised videos. They look at these women and think they are amazing. They don't realise that they are probably Photoshopped. It becomes their normality and they expect all girls to look like that.
*HK*: A lot of the comments I've heard from boys about Miley Cyrus are that she hasn't got a bum, so why is she taking her clothes off? We need more artists like Lily Allen to push the message.
*JL*: There are plenty of groups who are a bit more girl power, like Little Mix.
*So who is under the most pressure from highly sexualised imagery? Boys or girls?*
*HK*: My brother is 14 and he has weights in his room and goes to the gym. Women want to see abs, so it's not just media images affecting girls, it's affecting boys.
*JL*: We'd all be lying if we said we didn't feel a pressure to have our bodies look a certain way. We all want to look good in a bikini and you feel very self-conscious if you know you don't.
*RM*: You can be a feminist and take off your clothes, you can be a slut and a feminist. While women are seen as lower than men, everyone should be a feminist. We are only going to be equal when men say they are feminists. I know boys who would stand up for women, but I don't know any who would say they were a feminist. They don't understand when you say you are.
*BJ*: And think you have hairy armpits!
*GK*: If you mention feminism to boys of our age they think you're a lesbian or about to blame them for centuries of oppression.
*RM*: The media can be so bad about famous people. They called Kim Kardashian a whale when she was pregnant. Famous women hide when they are pregnant because they can't bear not to have perfect bodies.
*GK*: But so are schools: at our school in Worthing we had a "rear of the year" prize at the end of school prom. I only heard the word feminist when I came to sixth-form college in Brighton and started to understand about it. There is this emphasis on not being racist or homophobic at school, but no one explains why you shouldn't be sexist. Schools wedge barriers between the genders, the teachers are always saying things like "Right, let's have girls versus boys doing this or that", and not allowing girls to play things like contact rugby. Why shouldn't they if they want to? It's really divisive.
*FM*: At our prom there was a prize for best-looking girl and best-looking boy.
*HK*: We do need a lot more women in positions of power. Even our MP, who is the Green MP Caroline Lucas, you see how she is treated by male politicians. They don't take her seriously. She wore a No More Page 3 campaign T-shirt and they were all shouting at her to put a jacket on, not listening to anything she had to say.
We study communications and culture, where you learn about things like feminism and ideas and about how the country is being run. The men who run the government would rather we were all studying straight traditional English and learning Shakespeare, so we cannot challenge what they've been doing and how they are running things.
*JL*: We need change to start at home. Parents need to stop buying girls pink stuff. My brother got a toy kitchen when he was seven and we were raised by my dad, so the rules are changing. You get your values from your parents, although it's still hard to stop the media messages and the YouTube videos reaching kids. My dad has refused to let my brother have a Playstation or XBox because he says the games condone violence, but he can't stop him accessing all this kind of stuff online.
*ET*: If your son wants to do ballet and your daughter do football, then let them do it. Children aren't born sexist.
*BJ*: Sport is the worst. The commentary on TV in general is so male and the coverage of women's sports is disgraceful, as if it's not very feminine to do sport. Even PE teachers who are women are assumed to be lesbian for no good reason other than that they like sport and like teaching it.
*HK*: This won't be the last time these things are talked about, it will be talked about for generations. Until there is equality. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
So we've all seen the Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball music video, which has been attacked for its sexually explicit imagery, and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, which has been condemned as misogynist for both its lyrics and its video. Both artists have defended themselves as misunderstood and described themselves as feminists. Everyone talks of the messages going out to teenagers like yourselves, so what did you make of those explicit videos, and the row over Lily Allen's controversial parody of what she says is a deeply sexist music industry in her new video and song, Hard Out Here?
*Faye McLean:* Lily Allen says she is trying to make a point, but she still uses girls in her video who are scantily dressed. So I'd say she isn't a hardcore radical feminist, but she doesn't have to be. She's taking the mickey out of men who make those types of videos. She is calling people bitches, but nobody makes a fuss when men talk about bitches.
*Bonnie Jones:* She could have just recorded the song with its strong lyrics, she didn't need to do the video with all those girls. It's just as bad as the singers she was trying to put down.
*Jordan Lane*: She's not the first person to talk about this, but she's famous and so people will listen. But it's important she is taking a situation and drawing attention to it, because a lot of the time people don't even listen to the lyrics.
*FM*: Yes, it's being going on for a while. I don't understand why it's suddenly blown up as an issue. Rap videos have been doing this kind of stuff for years — look at Biggie Smalls and Hypnotise [a 1997 rap track referenced by Allen in her video]. Robin Thicke isn't much worse than any of the others.
*BJ*: Nobody kicked up a fuss when Lady Gaga danced in a thong, but Miley Cyrus does it and there's a fuss because she's supposed to be the Disney princess. It's a competitive industry and her management know that.
*Genevieve Koutsoumanis*: What annoys me is that the ratios are so skewed, I've never seen a music video where a man undresses, it's just lots of females. The music industry is run by men, and you do wonder how much control any of the singers even have over their own videos.
*But if you have a singer like Adele – who outsells Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke put together – then doesn't that suggest it is possible to be successful in the music industry without making a sexually explicit video?*
*FM*: Adele doesn't care. You wouldn't catch her licking a hammer [as Cyrus does] and she has never lowered herself to taking her clothes off, but maybe the music of Miley Cyrus isn't strong enough, so she needs the attention of making a porn video. On the other hand, if Adele did decide to do a naked photoshoot, I'd be like "go girl!" if she was comfortable.
*JL*: Miley Cyrus's music hasn't changed from when she was the Disney girl, it's her image that's changed. Maybe it's her, or maybe it's her management. It's all about making money.
*Holly Kinsell*: I'm not sure anything is new here, the dominant ideology is still from the 1950s when the pressure was on housewives to look good for their men coming home. It was all diets and putting on your lipstick. In a way, Miley Cyrus is brave in Wrecking Ball, she's obviously comfortable with herself and her own naked body.
*FM*: I couldn't disagree more. If she was naked in an artistic way, maybe, but it's not a message of "I'm happy with my body", it's "Come and get me". There's no creativity.
*Emily Toft*: If you think about suffragettes, starving themselves and throwing themselves under horses, then Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke have let them down.
*GK*: She says it's empowering, that's the problem with feminism, everyone interprets it in their own way. But she didn't take her clothes off for herself, it's for money. I have stopped watching music videos, the sexism in all of them makes me angry.
*GT*: It's more like if you're a female singer you have to also be a porn star.
*HK*: I don't know if them being X-rated would make any difference, it's always been the same and children have got access to anything they want to see on the internet. I remember a video where the women were being X-rayed like they were baggage. I don't know why the outrage is happening now.
*Rachel Macpherson*: Miley says she a feminist but the song is all about how a man destroyed her, she is basically saying that if you haven't got a man you're somehow less of a woman. I don't think that's a very good message.
*So Miley Cyrus gets the thumbs down, but what about the nudity of Lady Gaga, or even Kate Moss doing a Playboy shoot? Are there double standards because you grew up with Cyrus in her previous incarnation as the Disney girl Hannah Montana?*
*FM*: Kate Moss is 40, looks phenomenal and good for her. Some things are OK if the woman is in control. Some people might say it objectifies women but Playboy is what it is, it's not pretending to be anything else.
*JL*: It's maybe about your respect for Kate Moss, she is the best model and she looks great and being a model is about looking great.
*RM*: But it opens a window for women to be criticised over their looks even when they are older. It's just making it harder for older women as well as younger women, as the expectation and pressure are on them too.
*ET*: The incentive is important. Kate Moss is a model and looks great and can maybe do things that would seem sleazy if Miley Cyrus did it. Miley Cyrus's career was fading before this blew up and I think fame must be addictive. But there's double standards in everything – around what boys can do and what girls can do. A boy still can be promiscuous without being judged or called a slut the way a girl is.
*FM*: Boys get a high-five and girls get a slap. It's fine when you hear a boy has slept with a girl, but if you're the girl you get called a slut. It goes round on social media and becomes a real embarrassment. And boys are affected by these kinds of sexualised videos. They look at these women and think they are amazing. They don't realise that they are probably Photoshopped. It becomes their normality and they expect all girls to look like that.
*HK*: A lot of the comments I've heard from boys about Miley Cyrus are that she hasn't got a bum, so why is she taking her clothes off? We need more artists like Lily Allen to push the message.
*JL*: There are plenty of groups who are a bit more girl power, like Little Mix.
*So who is under the most pressure from highly sexualised imagery? Boys or girls?*
*HK*: My brother is 14 and he has weights in his room and goes to the gym. Women want to see abs, so it's not just media images affecting girls, it's affecting boys.
*JL*: We'd all be lying if we said we didn't feel a pressure to have our bodies look a certain way. We all want to look good in a bikini and you feel very self-conscious if you know you don't.
*RM*: You can be a feminist and take off your clothes, you can be a slut and a feminist. While women are seen as lower than men, everyone should be a feminist. We are only going to be equal when men say they are feminists. I know boys who would stand up for women, but I don't know any who would say they were a feminist. They don't understand when you say you are.
*BJ*: And think you have hairy armpits!
*GK*: If you mention feminism to boys of our age they think you're a lesbian or about to blame them for centuries of oppression.
*RM*: The media can be so bad about famous people. They called Kim Kardashian a whale when she was pregnant. Famous women hide when they are pregnant because they can't bear not to have perfect bodies.
*GK*: But so are schools: at our school in Worthing we had a "rear of the year" prize at the end of school prom. I only heard the word feminist when I came to sixth-form college in Brighton and started to understand about it. There is this emphasis on not being racist or homophobic at school, but no one explains why you shouldn't be sexist. Schools wedge barriers between the genders, the teachers are always saying things like "Right, let's have girls versus boys doing this or that", and not allowing girls to play things like contact rugby. Why shouldn't they if they want to? It's really divisive.
*FM*: At our prom there was a prize for best-looking girl and best-looking boy.
*HK*: We do need a lot more women in positions of power. Even our MP, who is the Green MP Caroline Lucas, you see how she is treated by male politicians. They don't take her seriously. She wore a No More Page 3 campaign T-shirt and they were all shouting at her to put a jacket on, not listening to anything she had to say.
We study communications and culture, where you learn about things like feminism and ideas and about how the country is being run. The men who run the government would rather we were all studying straight traditional English and learning Shakespeare, so we cannot challenge what they've been doing and how they are running things.
*JL*: We need change to start at home. Parents need to stop buying girls pink stuff. My brother got a toy kitchen when he was seven and we were raised by my dad, so the rules are changing. You get your values from your parents, although it's still hard to stop the media messages and the YouTube videos reaching kids. My dad has refused to let my brother have a Playstation or XBox because he says the games condone violence, but he can't stop him accessing all this kind of stuff online.
*ET*: If your son wants to do ballet and your daughter do football, then let them do it. Children aren't born sexist.
*BJ*: Sport is the worst. The commentary on TV in general is so male and the coverage of women's sports is disgraceful, as if it's not very feminine to do sport. Even PE teachers who are women are assumed to be lesbian for no good reason other than that they like sport and like teaching it.
*HK*: This won't be the last time these things are talked about, it will be talked about for generations. Until there is equality. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.