In Get Lucky, Daft Punk tells us:

She’s up all night ‘til the sun
I’m up all night to get some
She’s up all night for good fun
I’m up all night to get lucky

This paints a clear picture. Women are out to party and have fun and men are trying to have sex with them. This is the usual narrative. How can a man trick a woman into sleeping with him? Here’s my message to any young men out there: If you need to trick a woman into having sex with you then she doesn’t really want to have sex with you. It is my firm belief, and also the belief of all right thinking, moral Americans, that you should only have sex with people who want to have sex with you. If you find that you need to resort to tricks maybe you should work on developing a better personality or get a killer butt and ass-less chaps. I’ve also found that rakishly winking at women while shouting communist slogans gets great results exactly 20% of the time.

I think I got a little off track there, but it is an important message. Anyways, if you are doing it right you can find women who, without tricks, are interested in sex. Do you know why? Because women want to have sex too! Just ask Salt-N-Pepa:

This song is fun! I especially love how the opening line sets up the song, “Here I go again. Girls, what’s my weakness? Men!” The video starts with Pepa flirting.

She is interested in this man.

She sees him out on the boardwalk and is super into him. She asks for his number. “A ho, no that don’t make me. See what I want slip slide to it swiftly,” she says. Yes! Women should be able to chase men and it doesn’t make them hos. This is great. I think this whole song has a really positive message.

The video, on the other hand, gets confused. She is singing about seeing a stranger, feeling “it in my hips”, and then wanting to have sex with him. If the genders were reversed and this was a song by men wanting to have sex with women the whole video would be sexy women on the beach jumping around. Instead, we get this:

It makes no sense! Did the person directing this video not listen to the song? There should be men dancing and thrusting their parts around! The sign should say MEN MEN MEN. It’s raining men! MEN! This is a real bummer. The video is shot from a man’s view and it pretty much ruins the message of the song.

The second verse doesn’t fare much better. The women, Salt in an amazing hat, go to a basketball game.

There is a pretty good part where Salt says, “I wanna know how does it hang,” and the man responds like this:

I imagine he is saying, “This big.” I would hope so because otherwise I can’t see a reason for those baggy shorts. Based on the content of the song I think the man should be wearing short shorts and doing this:

The third verse brings the women to the beach.

Finally we get some hot man action.

This little piece of man-on-man face-to-butt stuff is pretty good, but neither of them seem to be enjoying it.

Then we get this man.

Finally:

Okay, this is what I’m talking about.

This video finally gets on the right track. Then, though, they have a man do a verse! What?!? Salt sees this man and gets very excited.

All the women crowd around him.

Just when things were going well everything gets screwed up again. Rather than confidently seeing this man and trying to pick him up, the women are just fawning over him. You never see the guys in Ratt doing this to a woman, so I don’t want to see Salt or Pepa doing it.

The video ends with some of the right stuff.

Those guys in the background are wearing the right type of shorts.

Everything except for the look on this guy’s face is good:

And then there is the men grabbing each other in the butt area.

I think this video really missed a great opportunity to say something about gender and sex in music videos. I guess it did say something. It said that women are the sexual objects that we want to look at, no matter who sings the song or what it is about. I guess I just wished it said something else.

Note: Due to the religious holiday I will not be posting tomorrow, December 24, or the day after, December 25. I’ll return on Sursday!

-PTD