There’s a reason why on You Tube you have to verify that you are eighteen or older to watch the S and M video by Rihanna and when a friend recently told me that she felt uncomfortable listening to her six year old daughter singing along to Kelly Rowland’s Down for Whatever, I totally understood – after all our Kel might “wanna make love on the floor”, but the average primary school student shouldn’t have even come across French kissing just yet, yet alone discovered the world of varied and interesting places to get down and dirty.
However, one has to question; is it fair to call these women ‘bad role models?’
Younger generations aside, these women should be celebrated not vilified and (for anyone over the age of eighteen anyway) they are the perfect role models.
Homing in on what Madonna did and by pushing the boundaries further, the likes of Rihanna, Kelly Rowland, Christina Aguilera and even the vivacious Lady Gaga, have taken their position firmly at the helm of the feminism battle, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Okay, so none of them are your average Germaine Greer and they certainly won’t be throwing themselves under horses ala Emily Wilding Davison, but they have most defiantly moved women’s rights forward, officially or not.
These strong, talented ladies have made it acceptable for women to openly discuss their enjoyment of sex, something that has always been surrounded by slight taboo (even if we aren’t all perhaps into “whips and chains”) and to demand pleasure rather than merely give it.
They celebrate their bodies. Whenever you see Rihanna and co on stage, in music videos and spread across the pages of magazines world wide, you get the distinct impression that they are dressing (or undressing) very much for themselves, because they are proud of how they look and are not simply offering them up for the pleasure of the men that might be watching them (ie. Like your average page three girls, strippers and lap dancers). Kelly Rowland once said “We can’t allow the rest of the world to tell us what beautiful is. We have to go in all guns blazing and say ‘this is my life, this is me and you either accept me or you don’t.”
In their working and their personal lives, these women have known what they have wanted and demanded it, washing away the doubts that the rest of us mere mortals might have about doing the same. They’ve shown that hard work pays off, that sexy can be just as much about integrity and dignity as it is about taking your clothes off – but that integrity and dignity doesn’t then mean that you have to hide away from who you want to be and how you want to dress because society doesn’t approve.
I think I would hesitate to allow my six and seven year old to listen to the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, however I hope that these women continue to make music as they do now. For my generation they are the perfect role models.
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