Katy Perry Reflects A Man’s Vision of a “Woman’s World”

In 2014, Beyoncé posted an image of herself as Rosie the Riveter. The photo quickly racked up millions of “hearts” and, at the time, became the most liked offering on her Instagram account. It was the same year Beyoncé also took to the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to perform an almost seventeen-minute medley of tracks from her then-new, then-groundbreaking self-titled album, famously “surprise dropped” on December 13, 2013. In the audience watching Beyoncé perform that night was none other than Katy Perry, dressed as Britney Spears in the famous denim dress from the 2001 American Music Awards. Her matching denim “Justin” was, of all people, Riff Raff (who was cashing in on a bit of “fame” at that moment after James Franco played a riff on him in 2012’s Spring Breakers). Yet another man in Perry’s life who hasn’t exactly been a ringing endorsement for her sense of feminism. That aside, it seems telling that the camera flashes to Perry while Beyoncé sings the portion of “Blow” that goes, “Turn the cherry out.” Words that Perry gleefully sings along with. It’s the kind of visceral, “fuck me as hard as you want” phrase that men are known for wanting to hear. And yet, like Perry with “Woman’s World,” Beyoncé was presenting it through a supposed “female empowerment” lens.

The night of that performance also happened to be the one where Beyoncé was famously positioned in front of the word “FEMINIST” projected behind her in big, bold white letters. A word extracted from the “We Should All Be Feminists” speech delivered by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at a TEDx Talk in 2012 (later, the speech was adapted into a book-length essay and released the same year as Beyoncé’s self-titled album). That speech would become the centerpiece not just of “Flawless,” but of the entire record. This despite the fact that many of the lyrics on it reinforced traditional ideas of femininity, including being sexually desirable to a man (e.g. “Let me sit this ass on you/Show you how I feel/Let me take this off/Will you watch me?/That’s mass appeal/Don’t take your eyes, don’t take your eyes off it/Watch it, babe”).

That Bey tapped Justin Timberlake to co-write three of the “sexiest” songs on the album, “Blow,” “Partition” and “Rocket,” is also telling of the fact that there is no pure sense of “female empowerment” here, so much as the perspective that a man lends to what that is “supposed to” mean in “safe,” color-within-the-lines patriarchal world. And yes, Timberlake would go on to become an even more overt symbol of toxic masculinity in the years since Beyoncé‘s release (while Ngozi Adichie would go on to negate some of her feminist cachet by being frequently accused of promoting TERF rhetoric). Though not quite as much as Dr. Luke, who has gone back to his original stage name after wielding another alias (Tyson Trax) for a while. This in the wake of some “bad publicity” from his long-standing Kesha vs. Dr. Luke legal battle, which only recently came to an end with a settlement on both sides, the details of which are unknown.

At a certain point in the case, Katy Perry’s name was brought into the fray when texts that Kesha sent to Lady Gaga stated that Dr. Luke raped Perry as well. Perry was then brought in to give a testimony saying that the claim was false. She also mentioned that she felt “pressured” in general from both sides, but in particular to support Kesha because otherwise, she was “supporting rape” instead. In order to distance herself from the entire affair, Perry avoided working with Dr. Luke on her 2017 album, Witness, considered her biggest flop…until 2020’s Smile. She did the same with the latter album, but now, it seems, she feels enough time has passed to return to the collaborator who has “given” Perry her biggest hits. And yes, it’s not implausible that she’s gone crawling back to him precisely because she’s interpreted his absence on her last two records as the reason why they weren’t as successful as previous ones.

But she must have lost her damn mind if she believed that, of all the songs to bring him in for, one called “Woman’s World” would be the most appropriate choice. As the title—one that Cher already used for the better in 2013—suggests, it’s supposed to be an anthem of feminist triumph. But, like Dr. Luke producing the majority of a record called Planet Her, any attempt at “empowering” the “divine feminine” is automatically lost with the presence of this nefarious man. One who, as Abigail Breslin rightly pointed out, represents how “working with known abusers in any industry just contributes to the narrative that men can do abhorrent shit and get away with it.” And, in case there was any doubt about how she was referring to Perry’s new song, Breslin added, “On another note, I love @KeshaRose and she gave one of the best shows I’ve ever been to last year <3 stream Kesha!” Sadly, such support from Perry, despite being—once upon a time—good friends with Kesha (who even appeared in the “I Kissed A Girl” video), has never been openly displayed.

As if a certain writer and producer credit on the song weren’t already a strike against it, then come the banal lyrics, “It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it/You better celebrate/‘Cause, baby, we ain’t goin’ away.” Ummm, was there ever a threat that women were supposed to “go away”? Because it’s not like they haven’t been “on the scene” at least since the Rosie the Riveter days (after all, people are only “counted” in this life if they work for pay). Which brings us back to that problematic trope Beyoncé also proudly touted back in 2014—one that Perry has seen fit to reanimate for her totally nonsensical “Woman’s World” video.

Directed by Charlotte Rutherford, the “concept” (if one can even call it that) presents Perry as a sort of hybrid construction worker/welder (in the spirit of Jennifer Beals from Flashdance). This largely because it gives someone the opportunity to add a “WO” to the “MEN” in a “MEN AT WORK” sign. From there, Rutherford cuts to an image of Perry in Rosie’s signature muscle flexing pose while perched on a suspended beam in the center of eight other women. Like Beyoncé, however, Perry didn’t seem to get the memo that Rosie the Riveter isn’t really all that feministic. The entire reason for her existence, first of all, is because of a man’s “marketing” idea.

Originally “created” by J. Howard Miller, the intent of the design and poster was never to “empower” women, but merely to get those who were already employed in factories during WWII to work harder and more compliantly. In short, to tell them to “giddy-up” without complaining. More sexist still about the beloved image is the fact that women were only invited to work “men’s” jobs when society was absolutely desperate because those with dicks had to be sent abroad for a brief time. And when those men came back, the women who had taken over and done just as well (if not better) at the job, were told to simply go back to the kitchen. Where they had also still been working anyway—expected to embody both gender roles in the absence of men. Something that men themselves are never asked or expected to do, even in the most crisis-heavy situations.

So yes, it does say something that Perry has opted to dress in this guise. A guise deliberately made to look like a sexy pinup rather than a worker. One who would actually appear beleaguered and decidedly unsexy. Because, let’s be honest, it’s hard to look sexy on minimum wage. Or even medium wage, for that matter. So it is that rich women like Beyoncé and Perry cosplay at embodying the “everywoman,” the “hard worker” without understanding what that really looks like. And yet, they expect to be lauded for championing “women’s equality” by reverting to a symbol that represents anything but that.

As for the other nonsensical elements in Perry’s video, there’s the scene of her drinking from a bottle of “Whiskey for Women”—as if, what, she couldn’t handle a bottle of so-called Whiskey for Men? Is the Whiskey for Women slightly diluted or something? Just in case she doesn’t want to get taken advantage of by Dr. Luke? In the next scene, Perry and her backup dancers are shown swinging their nonexistent dicks in front of a urinal while still clad in their sexy construction worker outfits. Only adding fuel to the flames of the Freud-backed male belief that all women have “penis envy.”

The urinals are soon “swept away” in favor of another set (something about it also smacks of Britney’s “Joy of Pepsi” commercial), an industrial rooftop that gives Perry the chance to rip off her already scanty “worker’s” vest and showcase an even scantier jeweled (and star-shaped!) American flag bikini top. The effect? More pandering to the male gaze. This compounded by additional moments that will have viewers asking: is she for real? Including, giving a porno expression while holding a drill, drinking the “Whiskey for Women” in such a way so that it “sensually” pours all over her body and deciding to throw in an arbitrary message about self-pleasure by momentarily parading a vibrator as she makes the moanier sounds of the track.

When an anvil drops on her head as though to indicate this portion of the video was all just a satirical joke, things don’t improve much when we see a flattened Perry in a white-knit bikini top and robot-esque “pants” (designed by Victor Clavelly). Because she then, of all things, blows herself up. Not “explosion-style,” but balloon-style. In other words, she’s positioning herself as that other male fantasy: a blow-up doll. Even though the intent, in her mind, seems to be that women can reanimate no matter how many times they’re knocked down, or literally squashed.

In the next iteration of the completely cracked-out video, Perry wanders the streets of an apocalyptic-looking realm, making her way to more middle-of-nowhere territory. Whereupon her body “breaks down” and she stops at a gas station to “pump herself.” With gas. So again, more male fantasy imagery involving a woman being pumped and “thing-ified.” An entity designed solely for something to be inserted in. To make the video even more incohesive, Trisha Paytas shows up out of nowhere pulling a monster truck with a rope behind her so that she can give Perry a ride. That Paytas has come out to identify as a man rather than a woman also lends more “women through men’s eyes” meaning to this video.

From there, the two take a bumpy ride while Perry applies makeup in a “sloppy” way—this being her lone (and, yes, very flaccid) attempt at showing the women don’t have to be “pretty.” Subsequently, they roll up to a random house that Perry infiltrates (with Paytas disappearing as haphazardly as she appeared). Walking through it, she breaks through a glass door (one assumes that’s her lazy metaphor for shattering the glass ceiling) that leads to the backyard of a girl doing some TikTok bullshit. The girl’s selfie stick also “happens” to be in the shape of a female gender symbol (♀), which such products already kind of are to begin with.

As Perry joins in to dance with her, she abruptly decides to steal the stick (no comment on what would go down if the shoe were on the other foot and a Black girl stole something from a white woman) before hopping on a helicopter that conveniently materializes to take her away. When the girl shouts out to her, “Who are you?!” Perry “roars,” “I’m Katy Perry!” A name that, thanks to this song and video, is now forever synonymous with misogyny. She might as well have done a cover of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” A song that Brown took all the credit for despite it being written by Betty Jean Newsome, whose misogynistic lyrics reflect the time she grew up in. The same can’t be said for Perry and this abhorrent visual, paired with lyrics and music co-helmed by an abuser.