There has been discussion over the last few years as to the depiction of women in video clips on shows such as Rage, Video Hits and MTV. The criticism is that women are portrayed merely as sex objects belonging to males, or as slutty, and that the images presented are unsuitable for impressionable young females going through formative years. This is especially so in that the young people are watching such shows at increasingly younger ages. Most of Saturday morning free to air programming is taken up with music video shows.
It is not my intention today to enter into that debate. Everyone will have their fixed views on the topic and, as Frank Zappa once said, people will agree with you if they already agree with you, you don’t change people’s minds.
What is interesting is how the depiction of women in popular music has changed. (Or has it? There may be arguments that women are still depicted the same way although appearing superficially to be different).
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, references to women in popular music typified the attitude referred to by Anne Summers as “Damned Whores and God’s Police.” Summers, in her 1975 book by that name, examined the colonisation of women in Australia. It is her thesis that the Judeo-Christian notion that all women could be considered wholly good or wholly evil came to Australia with the First Fleet. However, because of the preponderance of convict women in Australia for the first 50 years, nearly all the women were categorised as whores (“damned whores” as Lieutenant Clark referred to them). Female convicts who obtained their freedom remained so categorised, they did not alter status to the women who were considered pure and virtuous, the God’s police. Wives of the soldiers fell into the latter category. Summers maintains that these attitudes and imbalance underlies the role of women in Australia to the present, hence the need for activism.
