After a four-year-long hiatus, during which she got married and had two daughters, British pop singer Lily Allen is back with her first original song since her 2009 album The Fear. The video for her new single, “Hard Out Here,” was released on Nov. 12, and immediately stirred up a maelstrom of internet controversy.
The lyrics of the song would be enough cause for strife, with verses peppered with statements like “If I told you ‘bout my sex life, you’d call me a slut / When boys be talking about their bitches, no one’s making a fuss” and a chorus that includes references to multiple body parts before sounding off with the repeated assertion that “it’s hard out here for a bitch.” However, despite the provocative lyrics, the salacious imagery of the music video proved to be far more controversial.
Ostensibly designed as a response to over-sexualized videos like Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Lily Allen’s video features a backup dance crew of mostly black women, dancing seductively to the electronic beat. These dancers are scantily clad, while Allen is wearing less revealing clothing and performing more subdued dance moves. While Allen herself has maintained that the video was meant solely to serve as a satire of the latest popular videos, many critics have commented that by not explicitly condemning the overt sexism of Thicke and Cyrus but instead imitating it in an absurd way, she is presenting it as a viable and innocuous form of expression.
The added racial factor of Allen, as a white woman, surrounded by and seemingly exploiting the bodies of women of color, plays a large part in many viewers’ objections as well. On her Twitter, Allen wrote a response to this criticism and said that “…[t]he video is meant to be a lighthearted satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture[…] It has nothing to do with race, at all” as well as saying that the dancers in the video were chosen solely on the basis of talent, not race, and if Allen was “a little braver, [she] would have been wearing a bikini too.” Though that may be the case, it’s not immediately obvious to the average viewer, who will come away from the video with the impression that Allen, like Cyrus and Thicke, endorses the sexual objectification of women of color.
The lyrics of the song are largely in step with feminist ideals, dismissing the double standards of slut-shaming and mocking those who think that women have complete equality– and it’s too catchy to boot, produced by hitmaker Greg Kurstin. But the video goes in a completely contrary direction. Allen has protested against the disparaging opinions she’s received, saying that the video was meant to be an empowering stand against misogyny, just like the song. But a single viewing is enough to see that despite her intentions, by participating in the video for “Hard Out Here,” Allen is complicit in sending the message that the objectification of women (and women of color in particular) is acceptable for mainstream music artists.
