Most of today’s Beyonce headlines will be telling you how she dropped $100k on mother Tina’s birthday, and how Kris Jenner and Jennifer Hudson turned up. But while, yes, the fact that there’s a photo of them together is fabulous and all, there’s some other Beyonce news we’d like you to know about. It’s about her trying to draw a line under that ‘Is Beyonce a feminist?’ question once and for all, by writing a lengthy pieceabout how gender equality is a myth.
‘Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77% of what the average working man makes,’ she writes. ‘But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. Men have to demand that their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters earn more—commensurate with their qualifications and not their gender.’
And that’s not all. She implies that she’s set out to teach Blue Ivy how to be an independent woman, too. ‘We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect. We have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible.’ She sets a pretty good example, too: last year Beyonce earned £32 million, while husband Jay Z lagged behind earning only £26 million (only 81.5% of her earnings).
The piece, written for a non-profit American media organisation, is bound to get pick-up – not least because she’s double-barrelled her name, crediting herself as Beyonce Knowles-Carter for the first time. Ever since Beyonce admitted to Vogue last year that she wasn’t sure that she’d call herself a feminist, there’s been discussion around what she and her songs represent as a message for women.
DJ Jameela Jamil picked up on it last month when she wrote a contentious blog postin response to the nudity in Beyonce’s new videos. ‘Flawless is a phenomenal song, with a brilliant video! Why is she wearing lingerie in a WAR with her underboob out, totally pointlessly?’ she wrote. ‘Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Miley, Iggy Azaelea, what separates Beyonce anymore? These are just talented women who have talked themselves into the idea, SET BY MEN, that a woman’s sexuality sells above all else. They have deluded themselves into thinking it’s “feminism” if you get your fanny out on “your terms.”’
But of course, Flawless is also the song that sampled part of a TED talk given by Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – something Beyonce said she stumbled across ‘when scrolling through feminist videos on YouTube’.
Hmmm… casually browsing feminist speeches online, quoting them in your songs and now penning articles drawing attention to the plight of the modern woman against inequality… sounds pretty feminist to us.
Picture: beyonce.com/Rob Hoffman
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.