Anitta DOES NOT represent Brazilian women. I tell you why.
Music videos and song lyrics with explicit sexual content are not exclusive offers from Anitta, the Brazilian singer well-known for hits like “Envolver” and “Boys don’t cry”. Diving deeper into the music industry, we can see from Madonna, Spice Girls, and Britney Spears to Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, and Doja Cat — among others — an increased hyper-sexualization of women over time. It seems like the more time goes by, the more pornography content the music industry needs to give to the public. Otherwise, women singers won’t succeed.
And that’s true. MEN (not women) make the music industry. They know what sells and what is not — and we all know sex and porn sell like hotcakes. Pornhub gets around 120 million visits a day. What almost everyone ignores is that porn is the major cause of sex trafficking, sexual violence, abuse, rape, pedophilia, and, of course, objectification of women. [plus: no one tells that consuming porn decreases sexual performance and increases erectile dysfunction rates in men, but there is much evidence supporting it. Just to name a few: 1, 2, 3, 4]. However, the worst thing — besides higher suicide rates among porn stars — is that porn is shaping our culture, and here we can find the music industry.
Producers and managers in this field are smart: if porn attracts tons of people (especially men), a soft version of this porn viewed on the internet could be portrayed through songs and music videos by…. Women singers! The Instagram audience of Doja Cat is 58,9% male, and Nicki Minaj has a surprising 91,7% of the male audience. Just to make a comparison, H.E.R’s Instagram audience is 44,2% male.
Ok, sex in music sells and people like to consume it. What’s the problem? Well, this sexual content in music is going far away from just “entertainment”: A meta-analytic literature review showed that sexual content in songs and music videos is related to risky sexual behaviors and attitudes. The strongest effect was found in rap music, the genre with more sexual content. The reason is simple: people –especially the younger ones — tend to believe that what is pictured in media is the reality.
A report by Division 46 of the American Psychological Association concluded that this increased sexualized content in songs and music videos is shaping youthful identity and gender role development. This public is more likely to decrease their respect for women based on what they see and listen to in music. Despite many songs being about love and romantic feelings, other many ones “include demeaning messages of men controlling women, sex as a top priority for men, objectification, sexual violence against women, sexual exploitation, degradation of women, women being defined by having a man, and women as not valuing themselves without a man”. The same report includes a lot of studies basing these assumptions.
Coming back to Anitta, it is not different. Besides herself being a role model to girls (and we can include the youngers of Gen Z), their image outside Brazil is reinforcing the wrong view of Brazilian women as sluts and prostitutes. Unfortunately, we have a long history around this topic. From the ’70s to the ’90s, Brazil had a sexual connotation in its tourism advertising campaigns. Not sufficiently, recently, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, said that “anyone who wants to come here to have sex with a woman, feel free’”. When we have insults from men, that’s an ordinary thing, nevertheless, being insulted by a woman (who should be supporting other women) is worst. In an interview for Nylon Magazine, Anitta said “In America, people just want to look cool. In Brazil, everyone wants to have fun and get laid. I want to bring that energy here”. In another interview, this time for Jimmy Fallon, she mentioned “the Brazilian energy” as having many sexual partners, and said poor people living in slums here “party really hard” (for nonnative speakers, “party hard” can mean using illicit substances and having sex in a crazy way)). All this scenario leads foreigners to think Brazil is a rager. During the World Cup, for example, many children were obligated to work as prostitutes and many other ones are nowadays being abused and sexually exploited. It’s awful to think that a person who could have changed the international view of Brazilian Women didn’t do it, on the contrary, she reinforced this perspective.
And this is my opinion to all women singers doing this: instead of selling their bodies as a product, they should sell their talent on the women’s behalf. Telling people that their hyper-sexualization is a type of “women’s empowerment” is the kind of feminism that sexist men love. Have you noticed that only women are sold like sexualized products, not men? Have you noticed, as a few studies found, “African American music artists are more likely to display sexual content in their songs and to dress more provocatively in comparison to White artists”? As I’ve read in a text, “not only do these lyrics [and performance] depict acts of willing female submission, but they also suggest that, by willingly submitting to pain and degradation, a woman holds sexual power — a paradoxical line of argument if ever there was one”. When Playboy Magazine was created, Hugh Hefner claimed he was “helping” women in their empowerment inside Sexual Revolution. Now we can listen to the same old story: black and Latin women having their bodies and image exploited by this soft porn music industry in the name of “empowerment” and “feminism”. Feminism from whom? Rich white men?
It’s such a waste of talent many great artists — like Anitta, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and so on — surrender themselves to misogynistic lyrics and performances. You, girls, can rock! You can raise black women and Latin women’s names! You can make a difference! But, please, be yourselves, not what this (pornography) music industry is demanding.
