Smack My Bitch Up May 16, 2007
Posted by michele in MTV, music video, prodigy.trackback
All of our talk about music videos made me think of Prodigy’s 1997 video for “Smack my Bitch Up.” The song, which is backed by a very strong techno beat, was criticized for promoting violence against women (get it?…smack my BITCH up). The band defended themselves by stating that the song was about “doing anything intensely.”
What I think is particularly interesting about this song is the video that accompanied it. (watch it after the jump!) Banned by the BBC and played only after midnight on MTV, the video was very controversial but also very popular. Filmed in the first person, the viewer is taken along on a journey as this person gets ready to go out and fuels the evening with obscene amounts of alcohol and lines of cocaine. The rest of the evening becomes a blur of violence, sexual violence against women, drug frenzied dancing, and graphic scenes at a strip club. The next scene involves our protagonist taking home a stripper from the bar and having sex with her.
warning: this video contains drug use, sexual violence, nudity, and a lot of other bad things
But it is in the final scene that as the stripper leaves, we finally see our protagonist. I remember being far too young to be seeing this video when it came out, but being shocked that the eyes we were seeing out of were those of a woman. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one that was shocked at the end.
Perhaps it was just stereotypes in our minds that prevented us being considering the fact that the protagonist was a woman. The first scene of the video is her getting ready in the bathroom and we see her measuring out some shaving cream and sitting down on the toilet, but those actions seem to be intentionally ambiguous when the viewer looks back on the video
The other thing that may have lead the audience to assume that it was a man is the intense sexual violence against women, the violence against men, and the scenes of sexual attraction towards women. But we know that women can abuse other women, women can fight, and woman can lust and be attracted to other women.
I personally think that it’s great the way that this video ends up. It provides a great shock at the end but I also feel like it’s very clever and eye opening. Although I don’t think many people want women to have a reputation as drug using, violent, and sexual abusive gender, but it’s nice that woman can do that if they want to.
I honestly think that it was a man until the ending, when the protagonist is sitting down and we seen the image of a woman. I watched the video over and over and it really looks like a man (the hands give it away; they just don’t match the thin female shown). The video hints from the beginning that the protagonist is a male. From the shaving cream, to the dirty sneaker, to the “woman” going into the men’s bathroom to vomit and use drugs (no one can tell me that the arm that we see using the drug is not a man’s arm), we are supposed to think that the viewpoint that we are given is a man’s.
Why then change it to a female’s? I think that the video is making a statement rather than using the visuals to entertain its viewers while they listen to the music. The music isn’t even playing for about half of the video. If the controversy preceded the video, then my guess is that the video was used to show people that we all have these assumptions about men and women and we shouldn’t assume anything.
I find it interesting that the word “bitch” has been associated with females so long that it has become a synonym almost. Even when one does not intend to use the word as a reference to women, it is automatically presumed that the subject is female. This way of thinking is not healthy for women or the media for that matter. There are reasons why women believe that they are always targets because of their gender and are usually sexually or physically degraded by the word “bitch,” BUT ‘bitch’ does not equal “female.”
I think the video makes an interesting statement about the male gaze and how women can partake of it too. I personally don’t think it’s empowering though, because whoever is holding the camera throughout the video is not treating the women s/he encounters with respect. I also think the video would actually have garnered more controversy if the person in the mirror turned out to be a man after all, because women are seen as less threatening than men; saying that it’s ‘empowering’ for women to objectify other women is a way to sidestep the issue of objectification in general.