You may or may not have seen the new Mastodon video, The Motherload. The song itself is brilliant – the best one on the album by a mile, with a tune the size of Cthulhu’s balls – and the album has been a huge success, both commercially and critically. This video, however, is extremely confusing, particularly for those of us who regard ourselves as politically enlightened. Aside from the band miming gainfully along to their song, it features a startling and (almost) comically OTT quantity of large female bottoms and frenzied twerking, much as we might expect to see in one of those high budget hip-hop or pop videos. It is what those of us who lean to the left on such matters generally regard as “a bit sexist”. And I’m being generous to Mastodon here.
But no, Dom, I hear you cry, it’s not sexist. It’s funny! Look at those vibrating butt-cheeks! Brilliant. It’s probably ironic or something. Well, no. It’s still sexist. I don’t care how much irony you throw at this. It was sexist when it happened in past videos and it’s still sexist now. The fact that Mastodon are an ostensibly bright bunch and very much not from the heavy metal old school – where, back in the hallowed day, sexism was widely tolerated – is not a sufficient get-out clause by any stretch. Neither is this video excused from being tarred with the sexist brush because a proportion of women immersed in alternative culture have decided that it’s OK.
When Front magazine closed down a few months ago, there was a faintly hysterical online debate about its merits (or lack of them) and one of the things I kept reading was people defending the magazine’s principal diet of tattooed tits on the basis that providing pierced and Hitler-fringed teens with wank fodder was somehow not the same thing as what those awful, awful people at Nuts and Zoo did in their filthy rags. It was the same thing, obviously, but, you know, I was reliably informed that the girls’ personalities were given a chance to shine in Front … so, it’s different … or something. It wasn’t. I’d much rather people put their hands up and said: “Yeah, it’s sexist but I don’t give a shit!” rather than trying to make out that anyone who objects to this stuff is the enemy of fun and laughter or Millie Tant from Viz.
more:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/30/mastodon-the-motherload-misogynistic-new-video-sexism-metal
