By Madeleine Kearns
Friday, May 29, 2020
‘Our culture is sick,” said Lana Del Rey, with unnerving
accuracy, after being accused of racism for identifying a feminist double
standard. After tumbling backward accidentally over a progressive tripwire, the
34-year-old singer-songwriter made no apologies. “I remain firm in my clarity
and stance in that what I was writing about was the importance of self-advocacy
for the more delicate and often dismissed, softer female personality,” she said
in an Instagram video.
Good for her!
This (entirely pointless) controversy began when Del Rey
argued for “the need for fragility in the feminist movement.” She pondered in
an Instagram post why it was that other artists — women she admires, she later
clarified — such as “Doja Cat, Ariana [Grande], Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and
Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé” all achieved praise and success with “songs about
being sexy, wearing no clothes, f***ing, cheating, etc, [sic],” and yet her own
work “about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the
relationship is not perfect,” had resulted in her being “crucified” (perhaps a
slight exaggeration) and accusations that she was “glamorizing abuse.”
Del Rey’s crime was that she had failed to notice that
her list of comparators were all women of color. Teen Vogue’s Danielle
Kwateng-Clark deplored “the Caucasity of it all.” Slate columnist
Jamilah Lemieux tweeted: “I don’t know who was giving Lana Del Rey a hard time
but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Black women. Girl, sing your little cocaine
carols and leave us alone.” (Which is funny, at least.) Jezebel writer
Ashley Reese wrote: “The optics of Lana, a white woman, complaining about
feminism lacking space for her while critiquing the acclaim allotted to several
black pop artists is mortifying.” Another writer for BuzzFeed called her
“arrogant and ahistorical.”
But wait — who said anything about race? Del Rey is
adamant that this was not at all her point. “The fact that they want to turn my
advocacy for fragility into a race war is really bad,” she said. I’ll say!
Further, she’s adamant that racializing feminism says more about her critics
than it does about her. “I’m sorry that a couple of the girls I talked to, that
I mentioned in that post, had a different opinion of my insight,” she wrote.
Still, an experience such as this “makes you reach into the depth of your own
heart and ask, ‘Am I good intentioned?’ and of course for me the answer is
always yes.” Always? The saintly celeb then unwittingly continued to stoke
progressive rage by making yet another comparator to an artist of color. “When
I get on the pole, I get called a whore, but when Twigs gets on the pole, it’s
art.”
“I barely ever share a thing, and this is why,” Del Rey
said in response to the uproar. “There are women out there like me who have so
much to give and don’t quite get to the place spiritually or karmically where
they’re supposed to be because there are other women who hate them and try and
take them down whether it’s other singers, mal-intented [sic] journalists or,
you know, men who hate women. But I’m not the enemy.” Indeed.
The episode recalls that of Alison Roman, whose food
column at the New York Times was suspended after she criticized two
successful women, Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, who happen to be of Asian
descent, and then — contrary to Del Rey — after criticism conceded that her
non-racial remarks must have been, subconsciously, racial. What Roman actually
said was that Teigen’s business model was too commercial, which “horrifies”
her, that Marie Kondo had “f***ing sold out.” But bizarrely, in her apology she
wrote:
I’m a white woman who has and will
continue to benefit from white privilege and I recognize that makes what I said
even more inexcusable and hurtful. The fact it didn’t occur to me that I had
singled out two Asian women is one hundred percent a function of my privilege
(being blind to racial insensitivities is a discriminatory luxury).
By refusing to back down, perhaps Del Rey will come out
of this asinine controversy with newfound dignity. Then again, perhaps not. “As
ever I’m grateful that my muse is still here and that I’ve been blessed, have
had the ability to be able to channel two books worth of beautiful poems,” she
said. Out of interest, I checked some of her poems and was pleasantly
surprised. Despite using text-speak and emojis, some possess striking images
and a commendable lyricism. Del Rey also makes good use of allusion, as can be
found in “What happened when I left you.”
My life is sweet like lemonade now
there’s no bitter fruit [fruit emoji]
Eternal sunshine of the spotless
mind
Similarly, in her song “hope is a dangerous thing for a
woman like me to have — but i have it,” she invokes the “muse” of Sylvia Plath:
“I’ve been tearing around in my f***ing nightgown, 24/7 Sylvia Plath/writing in
blood on the walls cause the ink in my pen don’t work in my notepad.”
Anyway, all this to say that I have newfound respect for this singularly independent celebrity mind. In particular, her sign-off to her I am not racist! follow-up video struck just the right tone. “God bless,” she said to her some 16.5 million followers. “And f*** off if you don’t like the post.”
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