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Beyonce – raising a generation of young feminists?

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Meg Kissack
WVoN co-editor

Whether you like her music or not, Beyonce Knowles is a massively successful female music artist.

Since she started out in the pop-group Destiny’s Child  – one of the best selling girl groups of all time – she has gone on to have an extensive music career as a solo artist.

She has won awards such as  favourite female artist for soul/R&B, a BRIT award for the best international female solo artist and is the  most nominated female artist of all time in Grammy history.

Whether Beyonce is or isn’t a feminist icon is down to personal opinion, and that’s not what I want to discuss here.

Instead, I want to discuss the way in which her song ‘Run the World (Girls)’ promotes an imaginary ideal of girl power, which isn’t linked to girl power or to feminism, but to naive booty shaking and silly lyrics that misinform the younger generation that we have achieved equality.

Beyonce has inspired women around the world with song titles such as ”If I Were a Boy’ and ‘Single Ladies’, but out of all the singles she has released, it is her latest that I have the biggest problem with.

If you haven’t heard it, the lyrics go like this:

Who run the world? Girls (girls) x 38  with additional expletives.

So what does everyone who listens to the song learn? That women run the world.

Trouble is – they quite clearly don’t.

They are not paid as much as men, they are killed and mutilated for being women, they do not have fair access to education, they barely feature in many governments – I could go on. The list is truly endless and I  imagine you get the point by now.

If young women take Beyonce’s each and every word to heart, we will  end up with a generation of misinformed young women who think that girls do run the world and that they are not just equal to men but are superior.

The ‘teaser’ trailer (watch it here)  for her video shows us how we have become “empowered”- yes, through the use of our bodies.

The video merely panders to beauty standards and encourages women to show as much flesh as possible to attract men, despite the apparently ‘feminist’ lyrics.

Despite telling us that women run the world about a million times, she finishes with the words:  ‘Boy I’m just playing, come here baby, hope you still like me.’

The hypocrisy of making a stand for women then subtly apologising to her ‘boy’ and begging for his approval is hugely irritating. It seems that, no matter what we do, we must seek male approval to back our every move.

Women objectifying themselves is not empowerment, no matter how it’s labelled. But nor should we blame the women who do this.

Instead, we should look at a society that promotes the idea that a woman can only be powerful/empowered if she’s half naked.

Beyonce seems to want to challenge the stereotypes of feminism by dressing it up in cosmetics, high heels and bare thighs but this is faux feminism and we shouldn’t fall for it.

  1. Actually, the lyrics go:
    Boy I’m just playing, come here baby, hope you still like me,
    F you, pay me.

    Really she’s saying she DOESN’T need his approval and she’s not going to be a doormat just to win his affection.

    So, you’re way off base there! It seems like you didn’t really listen to the words/read the lyrics if you missed this point, or else you were manipulating the lyrics to prove a point (which I assume you were not doing).

    I know this comment comes way after you posted, but I found this article in a google search and it really irks me that the entire point of your post is based upon a fallacy.

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