Aviva is currently pursuing her MSW at Smith College, and is a
former relief staff member at Safe Passage’s shelter program. She lives
in Amherst with her partner and pet bearded dragon, and has a strong
love/hate relationship with American popular culture.
As someone who spends a great deal of time working and building relationships with young people, I often find myself engaging with tween popular media – which I tend to broadly define as popular media consumed by tweens, whether or not that was the original intention. Tweens are the most reliable source of what is hip: which new social media site is trending and which artist is topping the charts. By virtue of living in our highly consumerist and technologically savvy society they know what capitalism wants them to know, whether or not they are developmentally or emotionally ready.
Which brings me to Maroon 5’s new hit single “Animals”. The music video for this song, which was only released this past August, currently has 127 million views on YouTube, and holds the number 4 spot on the Billboard Top 100 List. Clearly this song is gaining in widespread popularity, and more and more people are engaging with it either on the radio, Pandora, or some other Top 40s popular music site. What this really means though is that if you have or know of a young person in your life, chances are they have engaged with this song and/or music video.
While I don’t feel Adam Levine (the lead singer of Maroon 5) wrote this song with a 12-year-old in mind as his audience, it is important to remember that young people are exposed to all forms of popular culture on a daily basis, not just what was written with them in mind. As large consumers of social media and television programming, young people often find themselves in the presence of media that they may not fully understand or be emotionally mature enough to fully comprehend. So in an effort to help break down the wall of silence between adults who aren’t cool enough to consume popular media and the youth who are but don’t know what it is exactly that they are consuming, let’s start with a conversation about “Animals”.
However, before I launch into a more critical feminist analysis* of this new song and music video, I want to acknowledge the greatest barrier to our collective deeper conversations about the content our children consume: the song is catchy. I will admit that before I finally caught some of the lyrics and forced myself to watch the music video and really engage with this song’s content, I too was guilty of just letting it play on as background noise in my car on the way to work. When popular music is catchy and fun to dance to it is easier to blindly consume it, and not take the time to break down what messages artists are putting out there. This does a disservice to everyone in our society and helps to breed a culture of unchecked violence. Let’s break this silence by unpacking the content and cultural messages embedded within “Animals”, in the hopes of empowering adult consumers of popular media to have conversations with the young people in their lives about what they are really absorbing.
The video begins by rapidly cutting between images of a young, hypersexualized, traditionally feminine woman in a butcher shop, who is being watched by a man taking lots of photographs of her without her knowledge, and then developing them from inside the butcher shop’s hanging meat locker. Right away audiences are invited to engage in voyeurism along with the male protagonist and feel as though we too are stalking this young woman. The lyrics begin with “Baby I’m preying on you tonight/Hunt you down eat you alive/Just like animals, animals, like animals-mals/ Maybe you think that you can hide/I can smell your scent for miles/Just like animals, animals, like animals-mals”. Maroon 5’s Levine effortlessly makes the connection between preying on this young woman (played by his real life wife), and preying on animals to be killed and sold for their meat. While this is disturbing in and of itself, what I find even more horrifying is the justification for his violent actions as a man: that he has an animal “beast” desire within him that allows him to “hunt down” this woman, and that she can’t “deny” her attraction to be with someone that is going to harm her. Sounds a lot like male justification for intimate partner violence as not being able to help themselves, right?
From within Levine’s meat locker hideaway, he is seen looking at and developing hundreds of photographs of the woman he is watching, while simultaneously erotically touching the hanging carcasses; reminding us that meat equals woman. In one particularly unsettling scene, he is inside her apartment standing over her watching her sleep without her consent or knowledge of his presence. Meanwhile he sings “But you can’t stay away from me” and “But don’t deny the animal/That comes alive when I’m inside you”, justifying his actions and putting the onus of what he is doing back on her, someone who clearly wants to be stalked, hurt, and followed just to have a sexual tryst with her assailant. The video culminates with Levine and the woman he has been following having sex amidst the hanging meat, both completely naked, and covered in blood, leaving viewers questioning if within this fantasy the blood is animal or human.
What strikes me as most dangerous about this video and song versus other forms of media that are clearly violent against women, is the openness with which this video does nothing to hide its intentions and the message of the content. Women are meat. Meat is prey. Men are animals who can’t help but hunt prey. Men are animals who can’t help but hunt women. See how easy it was to draw that connection from this song and music video?
The Centers for Disease Control (2014) reports that 15.2% of women nationally have been victims of stalking at some point during their lives, that the perpetrators are almost exclusively male, and that the perpetrators are almost always someone with whom they had previously interacted with, either as a partner, family member, or acquaintance. Popular media like “Animals” helps to spread the message that stalking is erotic and sexy, especially since the entire narrative is Levine’s sexual fantasy of stalking (and potentially hurting) his real life wife. This then creates a national narrative that stalking is romantic and that men can’t help themselves from being drawn to the women (and sometimes men) in their lives, erasing the real danger behind stalking and its potential for breeding further violence.
Just to be clear: stalking is NOT sexy, it is NOT wanted, and it IS dangerous.
In order to change the national narrative around stalking, folks can start by engaging the young people and adults in their lives about the dangerous messages in “Animals”. Passively listening to this song and not stopping to have conversations about its content helps to continue to allow women to internalize that being stalked is sexy and that men should not feel guilty about their acts because they are biologically unavoidable. If we are going to change the way we talk about stalking and gendered violence as a society, it is especially important to call young people in, invite them to question the media they are consuming and the messages embedded within.
So the next time “Animals” comes on the radio, you hear it at a club, or the young person in your life is about to buy Maroon 5’s music, don’t just passively hum along to the catchy beat, and instead invite those around you to have a conversation about stalking and gendered violence. More than 50% of all women who are victims of stalking are under age 25 (CDC, 2014). Silence isn’t an option.
If you or someone you know is in need of help or resources regarding stalking, please visit these sites for more information:
http://www.victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/stalking-resource-center
http://stalkingawarenessmonth.org/about
http://www.loveisrespect.org/is-this-abuse/types-of-abuse/what-is-stalking
_________________________________________________________________________________
*For the purposes of this article I am going to talk about men and women from a largely cis-gendered binary standpoint; however I would like to acknowledge that there are many different forms of gendered violence that exist outside of this paradigm.
As someone who spends a great deal of time working and building relationships with young people, I often find myself engaging with tween popular media – which I tend to broadly define as popular media consumed by tweens, whether or not that was the original intention. Tweens are the most reliable source of what is hip: which new social media site is trending and which artist is topping the charts. By virtue of living in our highly consumerist and technologically savvy society they know what capitalism wants them to know, whether or not they are developmentally or emotionally ready.
Which brings me to Maroon 5’s new hit single “Animals”. The music video for this song, which was only released this past August, currently has 127 million views on YouTube, and holds the number 4 spot on the Billboard Top 100 List. Clearly this song is gaining in widespread popularity, and more and more people are engaging with it either on the radio, Pandora, or some other Top 40s popular music site. What this really means though is that if you have or know of a young person in your life, chances are they have engaged with this song and/or music video.
While I don’t feel Adam Levine (the lead singer of Maroon 5) wrote this song with a 12-year-old in mind as his audience, it is important to remember that young people are exposed to all forms of popular culture on a daily basis, not just what was written with them in mind. As large consumers of social media and television programming, young people often find themselves in the presence of media that they may not fully understand or be emotionally mature enough to fully comprehend. So in an effort to help break down the wall of silence between adults who aren’t cool enough to consume popular media and the youth who are but don’t know what it is exactly that they are consuming, let’s start with a conversation about “Animals”.
However, before I launch into a more critical feminist analysis* of this new song and music video, I want to acknowledge the greatest barrier to our collective deeper conversations about the content our children consume: the song is catchy. I will admit that before I finally caught some of the lyrics and forced myself to watch the music video and really engage with this song’s content, I too was guilty of just letting it play on as background noise in my car on the way to work. When popular music is catchy and fun to dance to it is easier to blindly consume it, and not take the time to break down what messages artists are putting out there. This does a disservice to everyone in our society and helps to breed a culture of unchecked violence. Let’s break this silence by unpacking the content and cultural messages embedded within “Animals”, in the hopes of empowering adult consumers of popular media to have conversations with the young people in their lives about what they are really absorbing.
The video begins by rapidly cutting between images of a young, hypersexualized, traditionally feminine woman in a butcher shop, who is being watched by a man taking lots of photographs of her without her knowledge, and then developing them from inside the butcher shop’s hanging meat locker. Right away audiences are invited to engage in voyeurism along with the male protagonist and feel as though we too are stalking this young woman. The lyrics begin with “Baby I’m preying on you tonight/Hunt you down eat you alive/Just like animals, animals, like animals-mals/ Maybe you think that you can hide/I can smell your scent for miles/Just like animals, animals, like animals-mals”. Maroon 5’s Levine effortlessly makes the connection between preying on this young woman (played by his real life wife), and preying on animals to be killed and sold for their meat. While this is disturbing in and of itself, what I find even more horrifying is the justification for his violent actions as a man: that he has an animal “beast” desire within him that allows him to “hunt down” this woman, and that she can’t “deny” her attraction to be with someone that is going to harm her. Sounds a lot like male justification for intimate partner violence as not being able to help themselves, right?
From within Levine’s meat locker hideaway, he is seen looking at and developing hundreds of photographs of the woman he is watching, while simultaneously erotically touching the hanging carcasses; reminding us that meat equals woman. In one particularly unsettling scene, he is inside her apartment standing over her watching her sleep without her consent or knowledge of his presence. Meanwhile he sings “But you can’t stay away from me” and “But don’t deny the animal/That comes alive when I’m inside you”, justifying his actions and putting the onus of what he is doing back on her, someone who clearly wants to be stalked, hurt, and followed just to have a sexual tryst with her assailant. The video culminates with Levine and the woman he has been following having sex amidst the hanging meat, both completely naked, and covered in blood, leaving viewers questioning if within this fantasy the blood is animal or human.
What strikes me as most dangerous about this video and song versus other forms of media that are clearly violent against women, is the openness with which this video does nothing to hide its intentions and the message of the content. Women are meat. Meat is prey. Men are animals who can’t help but hunt prey. Men are animals who can’t help but hunt women. See how easy it was to draw that connection from this song and music video?
The Centers for Disease Control (2014) reports that 15.2% of women nationally have been victims of stalking at some point during their lives, that the perpetrators are almost exclusively male, and that the perpetrators are almost always someone with whom they had previously interacted with, either as a partner, family member, or acquaintance. Popular media like “Animals” helps to spread the message that stalking is erotic and sexy, especially since the entire narrative is Levine’s sexual fantasy of stalking (and potentially hurting) his real life wife. This then creates a national narrative that stalking is romantic and that men can’t help themselves from being drawn to the women (and sometimes men) in their lives, erasing the real danger behind stalking and its potential for breeding further violence.
Just to be clear: stalking is NOT sexy, it is NOT wanted, and it IS dangerous.
In order to change the national narrative around stalking, folks can start by engaging the young people and adults in their lives about the dangerous messages in “Animals”. Passively listening to this song and not stopping to have conversations about its content helps to continue to allow women to internalize that being stalked is sexy and that men should not feel guilty about their acts because they are biologically unavoidable. If we are going to change the way we talk about stalking and gendered violence as a society, it is especially important to call young people in, invite them to question the media they are consuming and the messages embedded within.
So the next time “Animals” comes on the radio, you hear it at a club, or the young person in your life is about to buy Maroon 5’s music, don’t just passively hum along to the catchy beat, and instead invite those around you to have a conversation about stalking and gendered violence. More than 50% of all women who are victims of stalking are under age 25 (CDC, 2014). Silence isn’t an option.
If you or someone you know is in need of help or resources regarding stalking, please visit these sites for more information:
http://www.victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/stalking-resource-center
http://stalkingawarenessmonth.org/about
http://www.loveisrespect.org/is-this-abuse/types-of-abuse/what-is-stalking
_________________________________________________________________________________
*For the purposes of this article I am going to talk about men and women from a largely cis-gendered binary standpoint; however I would like to acknowledge that there are many different forms of gendered violence that exist outside of this paradigm.
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