Ah . . . no. That would require the monumental and mentally taxing task of actually thinking before spewing, something humans frequently seem incapable of doing.
Take, for instance, Guardian writer Dom Lawson, who chose to assume that a music video featuring female dancers twerking must be sexist by default. Silly me—I thought the black-and-white knee-jerk thinking of the lazy-thinking political-correctness crowd had died out in the 1990s. While simultaneously praising Mastodon for being an "ostensibly bright bunch and very much not from the heavy metal old school" and damning them for ostensibly "lampooning the silly black women," he fails to see the irony of his own statements while trying, and failing, to connect the dots.
What irony? Let's start with the fact that the dancers in the video are a mix of several races—hmmm. Is calling them "silly black women" a way of playing the race card, or do you think only black women are silly? Just askin'. More? Okay—the reference to "a tune the size of Cthulhu's balls" and the "lampooning" quote above taken in its entirety are further examples. What, those examples don't count and I'm taking them out of context? Exactly. Now we may get somewhere. Also, didn't Metallica use that whole Lovecraft and Cthulhu thing like 30 years ago? Might want to update your reference material to something more original.
But most damning is this profound observation, dripping with the syrupy ironic goo that bubbles in the bloodstreams of select male archetypes: "Neither is this video excused from being tarred with the sexist brush because a proportion of women immersed in alternative culture have decided that it’s OK." Wow, dude. I guess women really are dumb, especially dancers in the alternative culture. Who cares what women have to say, especially those fringy ones in the "alternative" culture, whatever the hell that is. I'll make sure that I advance women's and human rights by ignoring or discounting anything such women have to say. I'll also ignore what actual dancers in the video had to say about it. I shudder just contemplating what I would do if you weren't here to tell me what to think, and to define sexism for the rest of us.
As for connecting the dots, the article gives hip-hop artists a pass by noting that the really smart ones don't have videos portraying women as sex objects. Uh, okay—let me know when you've watched your first hip-hop video. Second, it entirely ignores the other important and historically much more sexist element of hip-hop music: lyrics. Not that I expected much from a writer whose entire musical range seems to span from Led Zeppelin to My Morning Jacket. It's just that a music writer typically doesn't embark on flights of rhetorical fancy when not knowing jack about the genre used as the reference point. More to the point, the video itself is pretty consistent with the assertions and quotes in this rebuttal article posted on Loudwire.
Similarly, one would be hard-pressed to formulate a cogent argument that the dancing cheerleaders in Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video represent some sort of sexist motif. Yet it's not a stretch to see analogous characteristics of the women in these two videos, once one moves beyond a fixation on ass and starts using the ol' noggin. Perhaps the Guardian is still living in the past, like The Crusades past, where men popped every time they saw a flash of female skin.
Or maybe they just missed the subtle symbolism at the start of the video, where a metaphorical Adam picks the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Funny, I always thought Eve was the one who picked the apple. Oh, you missed that? Oops.
Almost forgot the money shot (really, you expected more from me with the low-lying fruit of the title "Motherload" just begging for a pun?):
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