Katy Perry made her pop comeback last week, releasing a video to her new single ‘Woman’s World’ from her upcoming ‘143’ album. The video, to put it bluntly, went down like a lead balloon. Perry dressed up as a sexy Rosie the Riveter, complete with a sequin American flag bikini top, denim shorts and a tool belt. Backup dancers wore similar looks.
The lyrics felt, to me, as jarring as the visuals. ‘Superhuman, number one. She's a sister, she's a mother,’ she sings; as if those are the only two identities available to women. She then asks us to ‘Open your eyes, just look around and you'll discover,’ — though what we are supposed to discover is perhaps unclear. The lyrics to ‘Woman’s World’ are what I’d imagine ChatGPT would come up with if you sent it the words ‘2004, girlboss, banger’.
At one point in the video Perry and her back ups are dancing in USA flag bikinis whilst waving around vibrators, at another they pretend to piss in urinals. We also see a random bejewelled uterus hanging in a truck. YouTube and TikTok star Trisha Paytas pops up randomly, too.
Maybe I could have overlooked the on-the-nose #Girlboss of it all, the decades-out-dated symbolism. But I can’t, and that's because Dr. Luke produced the song. Yes, you read that right, the alleged abuser and problematic music mogul produced Perry’s new ‘feminist’ anthem.
Back in 2014, singer Kesha sued Dr. Luke aka Lukasz Sebastian Gottwalk, and accused him of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. He then countersued, claiming she had defamed him, and the court battle went on for nearly a decade. Kesha and Dr. Luke settled the defamation lawsuit in June 2023.
The backlash to 'Woman's World' was instant. The Cut, part of New York magazine, published a now-viral review titled ‘Katy Perry Is Stuck in 2016’, which said, 'Perry is like Barbie in Barbie Land, stuck in a la-di-dah dimension in which Hillary Clinton is still the Democratic presidential nominee.' The commentary exploded on X too, with one user posting: 'someone needs to tell katy perry that we left that buzzfeed millennial white feminism back in the 2010s PACK IT UP.' Actor Abigail Breslin went further, saying 'Woman's World' '[...] just contributes to the narrative that men can do abhorrent shit and get away with it.'
On the 13 July, Perry released a video on social media to tell us all not to worry - that the video was actually all satire.
In the response video, she says. 'And we’re kind of just having fun being a bit sarcastic with it, it’s very slapstick and very on the nose,' She goes on to say, 'it’s like ooh, we’re like not about the male gaze, but we really are about the male gaze. And we’re really overplaying it [...] because we’re about to get smashed, which is like a reset for me and for my idea of feminine divine, and it’s a whole different world we go to after this.'
Of course, a sure sign of satire being successful is when you have to follow up and explain specifically how and why you’re being satirical.
For satire to be successful it has to provide some meaningful critique of the system that creates the circumstances supposedly being satirised. Perry does not succeed in doing this, because she is misunderstanding the topic she’s attempting to subvert. Why is she choosing to satirise women who are trying to survive under patriarchy, versus the men who create and sustain said patriarchal systems? Is working with Dr. Luke also part of this apparent satire? Was it actually sarcasm when she supported an anti-abortion mayoral candidate in 2022? Or how about in 2012 when she said, 'I'm not a feminist, but I do believe in the power of women.'
Katy Perry may need to rethink her teenage dream of empowering women via feminist pop anthems. She cannot successfully do that until she actually becomes a feminist.