Women in Pop Music and Pornography

Emily Simski

February 27, 2015

Fifth Blog Entry

Women in Pop Music mixed with Pornography

            Over the course of the 90s, women in pop music weren't shooting up the music charts except for a few due to the music world being male dominated. However in the essay titled Women, Pop Music, and Pornography by Meredith Levande, she discusses how women in pop music were shown through “pornographic images that were dominating the mainstream of the visual world” (Levande 294).   

            During the 90s, pornography images were generating revenues between $10 billion to $14 billion dollars, which right there I believe is pretty ridiculous. Everything from pay-per-view movies, websites and hotel services were streaming these images for people to see. Some companies that made profits from these images included AT&T, Yahoo!, Marriot, Westin and many others. I don’t understand why some of these big names such as AT&T would want to show images of naked women for everyone to see; it makes no sense to me. According to Levande, “images of women in music began to mirror attitudes, body language as well as behaviors that were pornographic fare”. So in my opinion, it didn't seem to matter if people were showing these images or not.

            Also during this time, television and magazines were doing all they could to portray women to be sexy just to please the public. One example was in the New York Post where they published a picture of Christina Aguilera in a beautiful dress, but for the caption they placed “SeXtina”. Why would a company go as low to do this? While I understand that people were happy that Christina cleaned up her act during this time, the Post just had to take it a step further and sex her up in order to sell one lousy magazine. Apparently there was this message that “women become “more” by wearing “less”” (Levandre 301) which shouldn't be the case at all. All women should be able to express their music as well as not have to be stripped down to scantily clad by the press just to make them sexy.

            Pornography is a mass that continues to happen to this day of women stripped down to please the public, especially the men, in order to make a name for themselves. I believe that everyone women has the right to show their beauty and not be forced to be sexualized in order to make young girls believe that being naked will get a men to fall for them.  Music and pornography should be two concepts that should stay far away from each other in my opinion.