Representation of women in the music industry

Women in mainstream music videos tend to be highly sexualised (whether it is their own music video or whether there are female characters within a male artist's music video) in order to achieve universal appeal, which is the primary purpose of mainstream music. For example, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, two of the biggest names in the industry at the moment, have a tendency to dress provocatively in their music videos, such as in Telephone and Where Have You Been. Considering their influence on young people, who are consistently exposed to these kinds of texts, one could conclude that the image of women in contemporary society is being warped. Young girls may feel self-conscious about their bodies and appearances, and consider these representations to be the definition of 'beauty'. On the other hand, the objectification of women is also prevalent in rap/ hip-hop culture, where we often see scantily-clad women dancing around the men. This is mainly because the stereotypical desires for men are money, cars and women, and so including these women in their videos makes the artist more aspirational to the male audience. Sexualised women in male-artist videos also have a negative effect on young boys; on seeing how the artist acts with the women, they may change the way in which they act around girls.

As a social experiment, Bryony Kimmings and her niece Taylor set out to create the ideal superstar, or more, Taylor's ideal superstar. Taylor was completely in charge of this project; she decided what the star would wear, how she'd act, what her ideology would be, what she'd sing about, and what sort of message she'd promote. This resulted in the creation of Catherine Bennett. When Catherine isn't working at the museum as a palaeontologist, she is singing about friendship and attempting to motivate the youth of today with her songs like 'Animal Kingdom' and 'Apathy'. She wears skirts below the knee, glasses, cute shirts, a dog-bone necklace and has blue shadow and red lipstick; a tween's dream. Taylor didn't want her ideal artist to be sexualised as she thinks this is not a good trait in an artist, and that it should be solely about the music and the ideology.







Miley Cyrus has recently become a very controversial artist. As a Disney star (Hannah Montana), Miley Cyrus has many young fans, but in her latest music videos, she displays full nudity, references drug abuse, and acts very sexually. Many people have supported her, saying that she's growing up and that what she is doing is no worse than artists like Rihanna and Lady Gaga. It is the fact that she was once a Disney star that makes it controversial; she was a teen idol, and therefore her fan base remains largely young and of pre-teen ages.




After looking into the representation of women in the music industry, we decided to take the Taylor approach and design our own ideal superstar. We want to avoid the sexualisation of our artist, Ava, especially as she has a very commendable ideology. She is, however, quite stereotypically represented in terms of her girly nature, but we think that this would appeal more to a younger target audience.We could describe Ava as a 'post-modern feminist', given that she campaigns for gender equality in a civilised manner. Her 50s/ retro style may be slightly misleading, given that female oppression was rife in that particular decade, but Ava extracts the traditional values of the 1950s and combines them with contemporary female ideologies, thus appealing to young women who not only are feminists, but are irritated by the consistent, formulaic sexualisation of women in mainstream media. We drew inspiration from Bryony Kimmings in dressing Ava fairly conservatively. In addition, during our presentation, a particular point that was emphasised was that the lyrics to He Wasn't There do not correspond to her brand identity as a determined, autonomous feminist, as she is apparently singing about giving a guy a second chance after having ignored all of his wrong-doings. However, having also analysed Lily Allen's artist identity, we concluded that the lyrics were perhaps used in a satirical fashion to mock the artificiality of certain relationships. This is something that we wanted to build on in Ava's artist identity, by showing her rejection of romantic symbols.