Back in 2010, things were simpler. When Katy Perry released “California Gurls,” it was an instant hit, its lyrics sexual and self-congratulatory, its music video perfectly campy. But times have since changed, and Perry’s “Woman’s World,” released last July, was no song of the summer.
It was dubbed “a dated attempt at writing a feminist anthem,” “too dispiriting to even approach camp,” and “the end of 2010s pop.” The song’s lyrics are vapid, girl-power feminism: “It’s a woman’s world/ And you’re lucky to be living in it.” The music video is even worse: It presents Perry as the stereotypical male’s dream, sporting a bedazzled Americana bikini top while clutching a drill and shimmying for the camera. To top it all off, Perry collaborated with producer Dr. Luke, who, since his involvement in “California Gurls,” has been accused of unsavory behavior.
After the negative press rolled in, Perry felt compelled to explain herself. “We’re kind of just having fun, being a bit sarcastic about it,” she said of the music video. “It’s very slapstick, and very on the nose. With this set, it’s like, ‘We’re not about the male gaze, but we really are about the male gaze,’ and we’re really overplaying it.”
“YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!” she added in an X post. “EVEN SATIRE!”
Nobody bought it, and it might not be entirely Perry’s fault. Maybe we just don’t have enough common ground for satire anymore.
Satire has long run the risk of being misunderstood: Madonna’s “Material Girl” is no paean to capitalism, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” is not a patriotic anthem. Maybe it’s our fault; maybe we actually don’t want our music to be that deep. When Miley Cyrus appeared in an episode of the dystopian show Black Mirror as a maximally vapid pop star, her in-show song “On a Roll” became a hit in real life.
There probably should be a truism about satire similar to the one about telling a joke: It’s not good if you have to explain it. Perry admittedly did not produce a good piece of satire (you can watch the music video to judge for yourself). But, given our current climate, was that even possible in the first place? Is there still a place for gender-related satire, especially in a society inundated with conflicting messages about women’s roles and whether sex is empowering or problematic or ubiquitous or not popular enough?
If Katy Perry is a vestige of millennial culture, Sabrina Carpenter is one of the faces of Gen Z pop, a former Disney child actor whose lyrics are self-deprecating and critical of the modern dating scene. “Whatever devil’s inside you, don’t let him out tonight/ I tell them it’s just your culture and everyone rolls their eyes,” she sings to her boyfriend in “Please Please Please,” later adding, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherf—.”
Unlike many of her peers, however, Carpenter is also very heterosexual, singing about her vulnerability to and power over men. “Oh, he looks so cute wrapped ’round my finger,” she croons in “Espresso.” But the thing that has drawn the ire of many fans is her latest album cover. In it, Carpenter appears on all fours in a tight black dress and heels, reaching out to a faceless man who is grabbing her hair. In a second photo, a dog is wearing a collar with the album title, Man’s Best Friend.
Some defended the album art on its own terms. Vogue took the opportunity to bash our “depressingly puritanical society.” LuElla D’Amico wrote for The Dispatch that Carpenter “offers audiences a levity that defies the kind of cultural purity so often expected of young women today—a rarity for female artists in a moment that prizes sharp takes and serious messaging.”
But others argued that it was clearly tongue-in-cheek. The Everygirl claimed it’s “obvious” that the cover is “satirical.” One popular tweet from a fan account quipped, “[T]he message sabrina is trying to convey is that men treat women like their pets (etc) but the cover doesn’t necessarily help that argument due to the fact that the general public is dumb and unable to comprehend satire.”
The controversy did prompt Carpenter to drop an alternate album cover, but not without some snark. “[H]ere is a new alternate cover approved by God,” she tweeted.
If Carpenter is engaging in satire, she’s doing it better than Perry. Her lyrics and persona are more knowing, less the “I’m catching up to the culture” of an aging pop star and more the “I will turn your criticism into a part of my brand” of Taylor Swift. And she’s admitted that she’s just giving fans what they want. “It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” she told Rolling Stone about her sexualized music. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it.”
But whatever mob came for Perry and Carpenter seemingly spared Chappell Roan the same fate. When the Gen Z singer appeared as a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars dressed as a blow-up sex doll, her fans loved her for it. Roan wearing the plastic outline of a naked woman (and carrying upside down the plastic figure of another naked woman) was undeniably “camp,” ridiculous in a way that’s clearly self-aware, and she faced no critics demanding that she explain away her stunt. After all, she can’t possibly be pandering to men, because she’s not attracted to them.
The idea that female pop stars have some responsibility to their fans and for how women are portrayed in the culture at large, more so than their male peers, is not new. In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, writer Sophie Gilbert bemoans that pop culture is “calibrated to male desire.” Author Kate Womersley notes in a review of the book, which came out earlier this year, that “[t]he blokeish ‘irony-as-defence motif,’ which nudges women to be in on the gag, denies the truth that sexist and racist cultural products profoundly change the way society thinks about women and therefore how women are treated.”
In other words: Yes, sex sells. But while the mainstream feminism of the past celebrated women’s hypersexuality as an extreme form of liberation, today’s feminists look at heterosexual sex more critically. Nowadays, a woman exhibiting heterosexual sexuality is accused of pandering to the male gaze—unless she has framed it as a form of satire.
But we lack a common consensus of what exactly satire is. We as a society don’t have the shared values to make satire distinguishable from a grubby cash grab, and thanks to the internet, musicians can’t even trust that whatever wry nods to contemporary issues they make will stay within their fan base.
To avoid going the way of Katy Perry, every star must be palatable to every fan at all times. (Just ask Taylor Swift.) But if you make the wrong move, you can try to hide behind a label that no one will understand anyway—that is, today’s “satire.”
