And now I must write about this

First, I'll point out that I'm always hard pressed to find things in this world that I think about in black and white terms. Perhaps most notably, I'm not wholly convinced time exists. More than that, I get that my opinions needn't be "right"...and that others needn't be wrong to make my thoughts valid enough. I especially feel this way about issues like race, religion, class, gender, etc. With that:

Blurred Lines.

The beat is fun. I feel like I'm listening to Millenium Funk Party all over again, with a tempo-ed up, pitched down Ohio Player or two.

The music videos are also fun, whimsical, the one with the clothes more so. The director of the videos calls them meta, Mr. Thicke purports he's existential, but I think everyone's just being a clown. Pretty clowns in a circus, inspired by over-sized and shiny things plus topless photography. This is all okay with me - as social science research icon Brené Brown might point out, as adults, we too have to play.

Some of the lyrics are different. While the title of the song, confounded by the album title and the song's lyrical content, is going to be deemed anything from benign and honest to insulting and dangerous depending on interpretation, it's undeniable that, overall, the lyrics take an extreme power position in favor of men.

There's no point in comparing these lyrics to those in any other song; this is an original creation, and it can stand on its own to critique. Here the female video director goes ahead and calls the words misogynistic, but not sexist. Another place I can be clear is in my disagreement with her - it is impossible for something to be misogynistic without being sexist. The actual silliness of the videos and even the frivolity of the beat, which I like, are compensating for often demeaning, controlling lyrics, clouded in a guise of silliness. Some these words/string of words are truly offensive, objectifying, and/or imbalanced ("Just let me liberate you"/"You the hottest bitch in this place"/"Yeah, had a bitch"/"I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two"/"So I just watch and wait for you to salute the truly pimping"). All sung in a very cutesy way.

Overall, I feel the best term for the lyrics is chauvinist. Michael Korda describes male chauvinism as "blind allegiance and simple minded devotion to one's maleness that is mixed with open or disguised belligerence toward women. It is also usually associated with an unconscious ritual to ward off anxiety engendered by these same women (emphasis added)." The fact that this associated and unconscious anxiety-based ritual is being written up in the lyrics and dolled/dressed up by beat and videos is reinforced in my mind by Robin Thicke when he retweets Pharrell's quote of François Truffaut (did I just write that?): "In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs."

Mostly, honestly, I listen to the few lyrics I like plus the melody, and I hope I forget the rest. There's a tension to this. To me, the only way to see the lyrics to this song with any dignity is to view the whole of this work as a parody of anxious, aroused men provoking false notions of power concerning the women about whom they fantasize, and women who are truly provoking their own equally-false notions of coyness. The these sentiments are engaged with very playfully, and I find myself being simultaneously being happy and sad about it. I can be happy that flirtation is part of the dance of romance, and I can be sad that we live in a world of extreme sex-and-gender stereotyping.

Other things I feel I can do as I listen to this song this summer: I can also want Robin to apologize for his egregiously flippant - and just plain egregious - comments about the pleasure of degrading a woman, I can sigh at people who don't get why feminists are upset (by the way, reading through comments sections is my personal standard of hell), and I can understand that it's mostly about making money.

Preferably, I can to all of this while dancing.