Andy Hutchins: isabelthespy: jonathanbogart: IMPORTANT...

Sep 29, 2012
23 notes

jonathanbogart:

IMPORTANT MISANDRY TEXT

can i just say that like five or six people have posted or reblogged this onto my dash and AT LEAST four of them have been like MISANDRY PARTY WOO

i think this means my dash is great

also this video is great, because it is a misandry party but even better, it’s a misandry glitter party, and her hair is all like pink and purple, i am jealous of her ability to rock every single outfit she has on, and i actually like the song too??? it’s a bright day in xtina land i guess is what i’m saying. probably because all the dudes are dead.

I love the image of glitter as blood, because really.

One thing that bugs me about this video is that, early on, it deliberately avoids shots of Christina’s body (which, frankly, is central to Christina now because she ~~says~~ doesn’t actually say it is, and in this song because it’s called “Your Body” and is about bodies) (also, Billboard has one of the quotes of the year from Christina in a cover story on her but because that cover story does not ~~appear to be online~~ exist, it’s only available in republished fake form on Tumblr and message boards, which both makes people less likely to think it’s real and means less traffic, so great job, Billboard!) in a way that is a) distracting and b) almost seems to be bowing to male gaze by hiding the parts of Christina’s body that are not “perfect”; contorting one’s body on a bed is not particularly comfortable, at least in my experience, and Christina doing that here seems like an excuse to shoot her in a way that shows as little of her curves as possible.

Melina Matsoukas is behind the camera here, and she’s done lots and lots of videos for women, but almost exclusively women, in her great career. (Notably, she’s done more than a few videos for Ne-Yo, maybe ‘cause Ne-Yo is great.) The last three minutes of the video, when Christina goes from killing time to killing fools, is a much better video, maybe because it dispenses with most of the close-up shots of Christina posing against a mobile home and gets with giving her agency.

Part of the giving her agency, it seems to me, is showing her in full: the swaggering walk in the convenience store, the look over her shoulder on the way into the motel, the tease into the swing in the motel. She becomes less object and more actor as the video progresses. (The greatest misandry would probably have been not giving dudes thickness to leer at, but I think that would have denied Christina agency in owning/using her body.)

I might be (probably am) wrong about this, and I’m happy to hear where I am.