Last Friday, the music video for Katy Perry’s new song “Woman’s World” premiered on YouTube. Two days later, on Sunday, Perry tweeted “You can do anything! Even satire!” (I’m sparing you her caps lock). As one of the most-liked replies notes, if you have to clarify that something is satire, it probably didn’t land right.
For those who haven’t suffered through the music video and don’t plan to, let me help you get the vibe. There are female construction workers dressed as though a cheap, construction-themed porno is about to start filming. The power tools have been bedazzled. There is conspicuous whiskey-drinking and awkward dancing. Later, there is a monster truck pulled on a rope by a woman with giant boobs. Perry, wearing weird leg armour and a bikini, fills her butt cheek with petrol from a petrol pump. Nothing makes sense.
If it’s not satire, and Perry is just scrambling for cover after a negative reaction (well, a “negative reaction” to the tune of 8 million views, and trending at #2 for music on Tuesday) we’d have reason to be depressed indeed about the state of feminism. The best that can be said—which is actually not nothing—is that at least it’s a song that both uses the word “woman” and knows what a woman is. We see a sparkling uterus hanging from the rear-view mirror, and a ring light in the shape of the female sign, which Perry steals and flies off in a helicopter with. “She’s a sister,” “she’s a mother,” Perry sings.
The worst that can be said is that we have yet another vision of hot! sexy! cool! women lined up with their perfect, toned, oiled, scantily clad bodies and perfectly made-up faces ready to tell anyone female watching that “they’re living in a women’s world” and “lucky” to be. Hey lady! You too can be hot, sexy, and cool, while working on a construction site or drinking whiskey or finding a way to pee standing up (here’s one) just like men.
I don’t like to be depressed about feminism, so let’s take the satire claim more seriously. Maybe it didn’t land; but what might it have been aiming at?
Is Perry Satirizing the Idea That Women Can Have It All?
Here’s one interpretation, which comes from leaning into the word “superhuman,” sung twice in Perry’s song.
Feminists in both the first and the second wave tried to bring about dress reform, getting women out of decorative, constraining clothing and into sensible, functional clothing. For a brief moment, there was the “bloomer costume”; nearly a century later, some feminists went in for trousers and dungarees, although many went back to skirts. In the middle of these two attempts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland imagined a female-only utopia in which everyone had the same simple, functional, movement-facilitating clothing. That was to remain just one author’s utopia (except, for a spell, in some communist countries).
Make-up has never really gone away, and today there seems to be a renewed enthusiasm for the feminine aesthetic—the hair, the make-up, the jewellery, the perfume, the clothes! (If you don’t believe me, watch a Married At First Sight Australia dinner party). There might have been a brief moment where feminists thought that freedom and equality for women would mean freedom from rigid expectations about appearance, or women eventually winning the same freedom as men to be poorly dressed but brilliant; fat but undeniably charismatic; or ugly but a wonderful actor; but that moment was not to arrive. (Or, it was to arrive for a few very rare exceptions only).
Instead, the new freedoms are piled atop the old constraints. Women should be thin—or curvy in exactly the right way—and beautiful and decorative and sexy but also have an accomplished career and be a loving and fully present wife and mother. (Perry’s “you can do anything!” becomes “you must do everything!”) Researchers into norms of femininity call this the “superwoman” norm.
Perhaps this is what Perry’s construction workers show us: you can be a construction worker, so long as you’re a hot construction worker. You can have some of the things men have, so long as you keep showing men that you know you’re different and you keep making yourself look different just so everyone’s clear that you two are not really the same type of person under it all. You might both need a hammer, but yours has diamantes, and your lipstick is perfect while you bang the nails in.
It won’t have escaped Perry’s notice that even Beyonce and Taylor Swift, the most successful female music artists in the world, performing to packed-out stadiums wherever they go, still perform large parts of their sets in their underwear. One of the few women who initially refused to conform, Adele, then re-emerged with a 100 pound weight loss, looking like any other Hollywood starlet. Another, Billie Eilish, insists that her baggy gender non-conforming clothing wasn’t about refusing to be sexualised, but about not feeling good enough to be sexualised.
If That’s Not the Joke, What Is?
If the satire is not commentary on the ridiculousness of the superwoman norm, and of claiming to be in a “woman’s world” just because women get to be all the things they were expected to be pre-feminism and also have jobs, what else could it be?
Let’s look to some of the descriptions of women from the lyrics, to see if they offer a clue. Woman is: sexy; confident; heaven-sent; soft; the feminine divine; a flower; a thorn. This is a complementarian view: woman is like this, man is like that. They are different but they fit together. Could Perry be satirising this view, implicitly defending the liberal feminist view that men and women are more or less the same? Against this interpretation: a scene where all the female construction workers stand before a urinal. Is the joke of course we’re not the same, or is the joke of course we’re the same? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s both: simply by naming all the things one might say that woman are—she is sexy and confident, but he of couse is not, he is too busy doing maths—reveals the ridiculousness of the project. Why does she have to be a “flower”? Is the woman in paint-splattered overalls clambering up the scaffolding a “flower”?
Yet “what is a woman?” is a project with a history. Those who have earnestly given their attention to it do not consider the question remotely ridiculous.
Andrea Dworkin insisted that assuming the sameness of the sexesis axiomatic to feminism. She wrote in 1983 that:
Feminism as the liberation movement of women proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex. In this sense, feminism does propose—as antifeminists accuse—that men and women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.
Lest a reader be tempted to read her as requiring a single moral standard that is nonetheless compatible with believing in substantive sex difference (woman the flower, man the… gigantic anvil that drops mid-video to flatten Perry?), let me counter that in the chapter in which this claim appears, Dworkin argues against all three logically possible difference views—complementarity, female-supremacism, and male-supremacism. While it’s true that being treated the same doesn’t mean being the same (it could be that women are naturally good at decorating themselves and men are naturally good at maths and yet we make sure to give both sexes make-up and maths lessons), there is very little wiggle room once we consider the rest of the what she says. Whether men and women are the same or different, feminists must demand no more and no less than universal human rights, human responsibilities, and human freedoms. If Dworkin is right, then anyone who thinks there are two different standards of human dignity, rights, responsibilities, freedom, corresponding to men’s and women’s different natures, is an antifeminist (indeed, that is the name of her chapter: “Antifeminism”).
(Because there are likely to be difference feminists reading this, let me emphasise that only those who think substantive sex difference justifies differential treatment of men and women, whether under the law or more generally, attract Dworkin’s pejorative label. If you just think there are “average differences,” or that men and women would flourish by living in accordance with (what you think are) their different natures but should be free go against their natures (as you see it), you’re fine. And of course, you might not care too much about Dworkin’s definition of a “feminist”—I have a different one myself).
Could Perry be satirising difference views, implicitly siding, so many decades later, with Dworkin?
Of course, sameness is liberal feminist orthodoxy (and radical, for that matter), and liberal feminism is the mainstream feminism of the moment. So it wouldn’t be surprising for Perry to have this view—especially given that she’s probably quite busy and not thinking about feminism all that much. The more relevant question might be why the satire didn’t land.
The answer might just be that a great many people still seek a substantive definition of woman as distinct from man—and they’re looking for something a lot more filled out than the “adult human female” as distinct from “adult human male” gender-critical feminists have to offer. Interests from across the political spectrum have converged on this project: religious women with complementarian views; evolutionary psychologists; those who are difference feminists or cultural feminists for non-evolutionary and non-religious reasons; those invested in the sex-differentiated status quo who seek a rationalisation for it; those seeking trans inclusion. With this diverse new coalition seeking to define anew the “eternal woman,” suddenly descriptors like “the feminine divine,” “soft,” and “flower” don’t sound quite so anachronistic.
Perhaps this is why trans activists are enraged not by what the video has to say about women and the feminine, but only by the fact that by including a uterus and a female sign it has been made clear that transwomen—being male—are not among the subjects of the song. The transwoman Julia Serano in his book Whipping Girl, for example, is insistent that the problem of feminism is not femininity but merely the devaluation of femininity. Andrea Long Chu told The Point Magazine in 2018 that he has absolutely no interest in dismantling gender. It’s okay if she’s a “flower,” so long as he can be a flower too.
Liberal feminists, not detecting any satire in the video, may be inflamed by what appears to be its difference feminist viewpoint. They don’t want her to be a flower and him to be an anvil, they want us all to have whatever our heart desires from the liberal individualist mood board.
Radical feminists, also not detecting any satire, may be irritated by the claim that it’s a “woman’s world” in which women get to be just as sexualised and objectified as they have always been, while pretending that feminist progress has been made because they’re allowed to do men’s jobs with pink versions of men’s tools.
At least we’re all annoyed, though. There’s some equality in that.
