Why Does J.Lo & Iggy’s Booty-Shaking Feel So Wrong?

2014 is truly The Year Of The Butt. There was Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda cover art and film clip; Miley Cyrus still can’t stop goddamn twerking — well, poorly attempting to twerk — which is bad enough without donning a large prosthetic butt that’s culturally offensive in more ways than one; Beyonce’s performance at the VMAs literally featured a backdrop of golden butts; Meghan Trainor’s also piped up about her desire to bring booty back; and Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea have now dropped their new video for the aptly-titled Booty.

If you haven’t watched it yet, the Booty video sees J.Lo and Azalea shaking their butts, solo and against each other, in a selection of soaking, skimpy bathers, half the time with some sort of lube-y substance dripping off them. That’s pretty much it. 

In the music world (and also the general world) women are still told that sex sells, and then are shamed for being overtly sexual or ‘slutty’ (see this juxtaposition of slogan hats which is a good, sad summary). Combine that with the idea that a woman owning her sexuality, being in control of it and using it as she pleases — putting her ass on display as often as it takes her fancy — is something that modern feminism fights for, while also actively attempting to dismantle and subvert patriarchal expectations of women, and it can get pretty tricky to navigate. When discussing anything to do with female agency, the male gaze (that is, anything that first and foremost caters to the eyes of largely heterosexual men) and the sexual empowerment of women (and certain groups of women), it’s important to put it into context.

I’m all for women flaunting whatever they’ve got. I’m all for women loving their bodies and showing them off. Lopez is 45 years old — if you had a body like hers why the hell wouldn’t you? Yet, watching the Booty video made me uncomfortable (and bored — you can only watch a coupla butts jiggling for so long without anything else to it before it feels like a single .gif looping over and over); I wasn’t cheering about it like I was when I first watched Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda video. On the surface, they both celebrate booty — so why did I find the former off-putting while praising the latter?

Perhaps Booty would have been ‘just another racy video’ not worth talking about except for its raunch factor — had it not followed up the excellence that is Minaj’s Anaconda, which not only satirises the male gaze (the imagery of Minaj slicing up a banana and throwing away the peel while sneering will be remembered for years to come) but also the ‘exoticism’ that can be offensively projected on women of colour (by way of the video’s jungle setting). It’s playful and self-aware — Minaj’s image is a huge part of her persona and she knows how to use it to her advantage.

Even the lapdance Minaj gives Drake at the end of the vid is subversive, as she’s the one in control, slapping his hand away at the first sign of him tentatively reaching out and then leaving him sitting there at the end with an expression like he’ll never go on living life in the same way again. The booty broke him, poor fella. The song itself is all about Minaj’s pleasure — and recognisably samples Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back, an ode to big butts, yes, but more than that, a stance against white beauty standards and the thin body ideal. This is made clear from the prelude at the start of Baby Got Back, where two white girls are all like, "Oh, my God, Becky, look at her butt! It is so big. She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends. [...] They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute. Her butt, it’s just so big. Gross... She's just so... black!" Minaj repurposes the “Look at her butt!” comment as a positive refrain, going on to say: “I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club, fuck you if you skinny bitches!” She’s giving the finger to the toxic culture that prizes size zeros. It’s also worth noting that you never see Minaj’s butt without also seeing her face, her defiant stare — in fact, out of all the shots of butts, there are only two brief flashes where you’re not able to see the dancers’ faces.

Women are so often told we’re not allowed to own our bodies. Black women are particularly scrutinised for their appearance, plus sexualised and fetishised in all manners of ways — Minaj is hitting back and not only owning her body and sexuality, but making sure that you cannot miss it. We have white Australian women who, bafflingly, fancy themselves the arbiters of ‘good taste’ up in arms over twerking, or not looking into the African-American history and hip hop culture of twerking and thinking Cyrus ‘brought it back’, admittedly being “confused and embarrassed” over Anaconda... Kinda sounds like the grown-up versions of those girls at the start of Baby Got Back. A more recent example of the damaging connotations that still follow black women, no matter what they look like or do: Django Unchained actress Daniele Watts was briefly arrested after expressing affection for her (white) husband in public — police officers thought she was a sex worker and asked her for ID. An analysis of OKCupid data reveals that black women receive 25 per cent fewer first messages than any other women on the site. So when Minaj and Beyonce strut their stuff, show sex appeal and are killing it in their fields, while also speaking about their womanhood and feminism, it’s meaningful. It’s not vanity for vanity’s sake and it’s not as simple as merely selling sex.

Before getting stuck into Booty (lol), let’s revisit Lopez’s video for I Luh Ya Papi, the first single off her latest album. There’s a prelude in which a male director’s pitching cutesy (lame) video ideas to Lopez and two of her friends, and the friends sass him about it, saying, “If she was a guy, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all,” and “If she was a dude, they would seriously have her up in a mansion with all of these half-naked girls, or maybe even in a yacht.” The rest of the video sees J.Lo and her gal pals living it up on a boat, by the pool, in a mansion’s bedroom etc. with a horde of chiselled, muscular blokes in Speedos — emphasis on what’s beneath the Speedos. (Cue dudes crying ~sexism~ and “Oh, so it’s totally fine when women objectify men, then?” Go upvote some r/mensrights posts, cretins.)

For Lopez to then come out with this soft-porn male fantasy sequence in Booty that’s essentially the antithesis of I Luh Ya Papi’s whole concept feels... insincere? It’s like when someone stands up for something then goes back on their word. So how’s this video so different to Anaconda? How can ass-shaking mean different things? For a start, in Booty, it seems like there are just as many if not more shots of detached butts than Lopez and Azalea’s actual faces — it’s less ‘here’s a woman who is showing off her great body’ and feels more like reducing women to body parts. Lyrically, the song itself puts more focus on the needs of men rather than Lopez, or a woman’s, desires: "It’s his birthday, give him what he ask for." Lopez sings about other women’s booties, not her own — yet in the video it is hers (and Azalea’s) that’s the focus. Speaking of Azalea, that fact that she — a white rapper who has adopted African-American culture — is in a video like this and may be benefitting from something that her black counterparts are derided for, is worth thinking about. These all might seem like splitting hairs but they’re important distinctions. Hetero men will always benefit from the sexual liberation of women, even if women are doin’ it for themselves —  it’s an inevitable side effect — but there are ways for women to express their sexuality without co-opting male gaze clichés, or at the expense of other (groups of) women. I’m not saying that any time a woman displays her body it has to be subversive or a statement; rather, it all contributes to the way women’s bodies are seen in media, so we should be mindful of that. Perhaps it can even be boiled down to: Lopez had fun in I Luh Ya Papi, but Booty, for all its explicitness, just feels like business without the pleasure.