Katy Perry’s new music video “Woman’s World” made headlines this weekend, but may not for the reasons she was hoping for. The first single from Perry’s upcoming seventh album had all the hallmarks of her typical pop anthems, but the video was an odd collage of ideas that left fans scratching their heads at best. Perry herself didn’t seem too concerned about the initial response.
“Woman’s World” finds Perry singing and dancing in a parody of a construction site with all kinds of hyper-feminine props before she is crushed by a CGI anvil. After that, she stands up wearing a bikini and a set of robotic armored greaves, walking through surreal dystopian scenes with no apparent aim. She pauses to fill her legs with gasoline, then steals a smartphone and ring light from a young woman before flying away on a helicopter. She ends the video by triumphantly shouting: “I’m Katy Perry!”
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The whole thing has many fans confused and some downright angry. Jokes aside, many critics feel the ostensibly feminist message of the song are undercut by the list of men who worked on it. Here’s a look at some of the top responses to the video so far.
Dr. Luke
First and foremost, critics couldn’t believe this would-be feminist anthem was produced by Lukasz Gottwald, better known by his professional psuedonym Dr. Luke. Gottwald is the producer whom Kesha accused of sexually assaulting her. Gottwald denied those allegations. On top of that, fans pointed out that nearly everyone credited for this music video are men, except for the fashion director and the second assistant director.
Which Women’s World?
As for the content of the video itself, commenters felt it did a poor job of representing an imaginary “women’s world,” noting that it included many hyper-sexualized images of women’s bodies. One Instagram user wrote: “‘It’s a woman’s world’ and 99 percent of the video is white women with the same body type hmmmm.”
Outdated
Commenters felt that Perry was playing to an older audience and using an outdated idea of “feminism” in general. They felt that Perry and her collaborators were going for an inoffensive form of female empowerment that had its heyday in the previous decade, but guessed that it would fall flat with the younger generation. One user on X summed this up by saying that Perry knew her target audience.
Perry’s Explanation
Perry posted a video on Instagram trying to explain the idea behind “Women’s World,” but it didn’t do much to win over her detractors. She said: “We’re kind of just having fun being a bit sarcastic with it. It’s very slapstick and very on the nose, and with this set, it’s like, ‘ooh, we’re like, we’re not about the male gaze, but we really are about the male gaze.’”
“And we’re really overplaying it and on the nose because we’re about to get smashed which is like a reset, a reset for me, and a reset for my idea of feminine divine,” she went on. “And it’s a whole different world we go to after this.”
Fans’ Reactions
Fans had some clear ideas of why Perry’s explanation didn’t work for them. One person wrote: “Without any discernible critique of the system that creates the circumstances ostensibly being ‘satirized’ in the first place, it isn’t ‘satire,’ it’s just aimless caricature.” Another added that a successful satire wouldn’t have needed “this much of an explanation.”
Intersectionality
Fans were put off by the scene where Perry took a smartphone away from a Black woman, saying that intersectional feminism requires greater representation for non-white women. One person wrote: “Trying to satirize white girlboss feminism while still being a white girlboss feminist just doesn’t work.”
Jojo Siwa
Finally, some fans pointed out the similarity between Perry’s construction outfit and the similar get-up worn by Jojo Siwa in a recent video. However, they couldn’t reach a consensus on where this idea started and who might be copying whom – if anyone.
