Ruth Houghton and Ben Warwick are Graduate Teaching Assistants and PhD candidates at Durham Law School. This post coincides with the Rewind/Reframe campaign launched today by EVAW, Imkaan, and Object to challenge the racist and sexist content and impact of music videos.
With songs like ‘Blurred Lines’, ‘sexualisation’ is not the problem. Despite long running and vocal campaigns on behalf of children and young adults who are said to be ‘sexualised’ by popular music, the issue of misogyny in the music industry carries on. By looking through the ‘sexualisation lens’, the picture has been blurred and the misogyny question has been left unasked and unanswered. Given the failure of sexualisation languages to adequately identify and deal with misogyny in music, it is necessary to change the lens through which we see popular music, its problems, and the solutions.
The current, and in our view, failing approach to explicit songs and music videos has been to recognise the potential damage of music videos to children and young adults through ‘sexualisation’. The response which arises from this approach is manifested in age restrictions on videos and albums, radio edits, and ‘explicit’ labels. These kinds of measures were endorsed by the recent Bailey Review, which looked at the pressures experienced by young people to ‘grow up too quickly’.
Inherently Human 