Last Sunday, Super Bowl 50 drew more than 111 million viewers, making it the third most watched show in television history. And many of those viewers were subjected to a double assault on the senses at the halftime show, when Beyonce kicked off a spectacle that also featured Bruno Mars and Coldplay with a controversial performance of her new single “Formation.”
Much of the hubbub about the song stemmed from its heavy political rhetoric, paying tribute to the Black Panthers radical activist group while also taking shots at police over the racially charged incidents that have plagued the nation over the last couple of years. But the choice of attire and dance moves used by Beyonce and her dancers were also offensive to many who were trying to enjoy a family-friendly sporting event.
More, though, the spectacle raised questions about why some female performers feel obliged to strip down. Thankfully, other top female performers refuse to pander to demands that they bare more. Superstars like Adele, Alicia Keys and Taylor Swift have run circles around Beyonce’s commercial success without taking off a stitch of clothing. And with the Grammy Awards on Monday night, America will once again far more skin that is appropriate at prime time.
On Super Bowl night, Beyonce and her crew of fellow female dancers wore what amounted to a leather one-piece bathing suit, but one which not only rode so high up in back that their derrieres were hanging halfway out. Add in the fact that their idea of dance moves involved not only shaking their booties suggestively but also thrusting their legs forward and opening and closing them repeatedly in rapid-fire fashion as cameras zoomed in for close-ups, and one had to wonder if anyone at all involved in the planning gave a thought to what was appropriate for tens of millions of young children to see.
Meanwhile, Bruno Mars and his male dancers were able to keep their clothes on, no problem.
Meanwhile, Bruno Mars and his male dancers were able to keep their clothes on, no problem. Dressed stylishly from head to toe in what looked like shiny leather outfits, they engaged in trading lines and turns on the dance floor with Beyonce’s bunch, and the contrast was remarkable.
No matter how rich, successful and ostensibly powerful Beyonce (or many other female singers – R&B ones in particular) becomes, she has to still wear outfits that would put hookers to shame if she wants to make it on the Super Bowl halftime show. Men just have to show up and sing.
It’s a sad tradition that’s been going on since rock and roll began getting sexually looser in the 1960s, and certainly many other female singers have also been at fault. But Beyonce is treated by the media as the queen of the pop music industry, is a married mom, and still carries on in this manner on countless awards shows while proclaiming to be a feminist icon.
The mainstream media tries to paint feminism as a movement which intended to break women from the idea of being treated as sex objects and become respected for their minds and as overall equals. Yet it seems like it is long overdue for Beyonce to truly explain how she can justify using the word “Feminist” in glowing letters onstage after having just crawled across it in her lingerie, panting about her husband’s sexual prowess – while he “duets” with her while wearing a full tux, before grabbing her rear end throughout the song and then posing together like they’re fresh out of a PTA meeting.
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Julia Sonenshein, contributing editor at feminist pop-culture website TheGloss.com, wrote that “the problem was that a lot of white women were not understanding that there might be a different African-American version of feminism in which a woman might want to use her body as a tool, not someone else use it but she use it as a tool.” By extension, white women and others who find her behavior offensive “just could not recognize that.”
This analysis is a bit disturbing to say the least, for rather than breaking out of a tradition and history in which black women were exploited, by this explanation she’s embracing it and merely trying to build on it. What kind of message does this send to her own daughter, much less an entire generation of black girls and young women?
Bill O’Reilly is one of the few major media figures to call Beyonce out on that. On an episode of “The O’Reilly Factor” shortly after her aforementioned Grammy appearance, he noted that for young girls lacking parental supervision, Beyonce’s attire and actions could have a negative impact.
“This woman knows that young girls getting pregnant in the African-American community,” O’Reilly said. “She knows and doesn’t seem to care.”
But Beyonce’s former rival in raciness, Rihanna, declared enough’s enough to Vanity Fair magazine. After years of progressively more revealing outfits, Rihanna declared, “We can’t do this again for a while. No nipples, no sexy s***, or it’s going to be like a gimmick. That night [at the CFDA awards] was like a last hurrah; I decided to take break from that and wear clothes.”
If a single woman about a decade younger than Beyonce can figure that out, let’s hope that Queen B can learn to do the same. Not only for her own self-respect, but also for the respetct of millions of girls looking up to her and her own daughter.
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