Monday, February 7, 2011

Sex in the Air, RiRi Likes the Smell of It





Predictably, Rihanna’s video for “S&M,” the newest single off her album Loud, has scandalized the world – or at least, everyone seems to be talking about how scandalous it is and at one point MTV was considering editing it before showing it. The single is apparently too hot for radio or television in the 11 countries where it was banned. I find the treatment of the single even more preposterous than that of the video since the song’s lyrics are rather innocuous unless you already know what sadomasochism is, and are certainly not as bad as, for example, the incredibly graphic and Grammy-winning ways Eminem has described killing his ex-wife.

The chorus of Rihanna’s catchy new single goes:

Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it
Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me
Apparently the BBC has taken the step of censoring the song – their version “Come On” removes the words “sex,” “chains,” “whips” and the parts where RhiRhi chants the offending letters in the song’s real title. All of which adds up to outrageous conservatism. I highly doubt that listening to this song will lead listeners into a life of submission, domination or sexual role playing, and if it does than I fail to see the problem with that either. Have we had a spat of teenagers engaging in S&M against their own will? Are our impressionable youth putting on latex, grabbing riding crops, and leaving home?

Which of course leads us to the provocative video for this track which RiRi dropped last week. (You can watch it here without having to prove you're 18).

The video plays as a garish campy revenge fantasy with Rihanna taking blood thirsty journalists hostage, walking gay celebrity blogger Perez Hilton on a leash, and wearing a dress made of the worst rumors-as-news that have been slung at her. “S&M” opens with Ri being hauled into a press conference for “Cox News” and placed behind cellophane. Here she is glamorous with long red-black curls and that newspaper dress, explaining the joys of pain and pleasure from behind Saran Wrap that suggests Friedan’s classic Feminine Mystique. From the outset, however, the video suggests that the balance of power is more complicated than we might think, because the journalists wear s&m ball gags and nod in unison at her words, suggesting that while she is their captive, they are also captive to her. Rihanna as dominant arrives in a latex couture walking Perez Hilton in front of a suburban home, taking him to pee on a pink fire hydrant, spanking him with a riding crop, and tickling his stomach. Then the scene cuts to Rihanna in latex lingerie with a hood relishing the discomfort of the journalists, now bound and gagged in her subterranean lair. She grinds on the unwilling journalists, spanks them, pours a bucket of sweet meats on them, and kisses one of the women. Our scene changes to Rihanna’s body splayed across a desk in a newsroom with journalists snapping photos and ultimately covering her body with pop art Post-Its.

Intercut throughout are shots of a wild sex party with Ri and an orgy of ambiguously gendered people and sex dolls, all filmed with a fish-eye lens to heighten the drunken feeling of the proceedings. We also see flashes of vulnerable Ri standing against a backdrop of streaming offensive headlines, and Ri dressed in anime-inspired pajamas and fighting the strings that have her trussed up.

What does it all mean? It’s hard to watch this video without thinking of Rihanna’s assault by Chris Brown, but I am a little disturbed that her celebration of power and violence within consensual s&m must be read through this incident. Jezebel’s brief commentary pushes a bit too hard on the seemingly crazy idea that “one who’s been called a victim” might “recast oneself as authoritative and commanding.” I guess my issue is not so much with us looking at “S&M” as an expression of self-assertion in the wake of intimate partner violence but rather that Rihanna’s position as “victim-survivor” (to use Traci C. West’s terminology) should limit her right to express sexuality (whether it be hers or one that was constructed merely for shock and sales). By casting her sadomasochistic relationship as one between her and the media, Rihanna in many ways cleverly predicts fall-out from this video and suggests that it is all a bit laughable. In the video she shows reporters branding her a slut, a whore, and a princess of the Illuminati. While Chris Brown is never mentioned, his actions contribute to the media frenzy.

Rihanna’s blackness adds another layer of complexity. Sadomasochism as a way to grab sales is nothing new in pop music – Madonna’s 1994 music video “Human Nature” mocked those that were scandalized by her Erotica album and Sex book by putting her in black latex and letting her spank backup dancers. Christina Aguilera’s homage to Madonna and other pop provocateurs in the video for “Not Myself Tonight” similarly played with BDSM. The difference, of course, is that, as Steven Shaviro has noted, white female pop singers can play at other edgier identities and still retreat to the comforts of their whiteness. Black female singers cannot escape the long shadow of being stereotyped as sex-starved animals. Controlling images, according to Patricia Hill Collins, are “designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life.”

Ciara kicked up a storm of controversy in her “Love Sex Magic” video with Justin Timberlake when the white pop singer tugged on a chain around her neck. Later in the video JT uses CiCi as a table and spanks her when she’s on all fours. The unreleased single “Blindfold Me” by Kelis describes a fantasy of being blindfolded and bound brought to life. Kelis and then-husband rapper Nas acted this out in a fascinating video that opens with the nightmare scenario of a woman abducted in a parking lot late at night and unfolds to show the kidnapping as a planned BDSM encounter within a couple. Obviously, the difference between the videos is that of racial difference – the image of a white man yanking a black woman by a chain holds a deep historical memory that popular culture is not comfortable playing with. “Blindfold Me” shows an encounter within a relationship between two African Americans – it still gives the viewer the unnerving image of a black woman in bondage, but the power dynamic is not as freighted with racial significance.

Rihanna’s video avoids much of this by placing the singer in the role of dominatrix for much of the action, yet we are still given the shot of her trussed up. Here though, the video wants to play the image for laughs – this doesn’t reduce the complexity of the image shown, or its seeming lack of cohesion with the overall thrust of the narrative – but does alleviate some of the discomfort we might feel. Writing about s&m, Pat(rick) Califia notes that “A sadomasochist is well aware that a role adopted during a scene is not appropriate during other interactions and that a fantasy role is not the sum of her total being.” Califia and other pro-s&mers are adamant about the performance aspect of power play and that these scenes are entered into with consent. Califia argues that the props and sexual acts in an s&m scenario are “metaphors for the power imbalance” at the center of the proceedings. Queer theorist Leo Bersani argues against the potentially utopic understanding of power play noting that these excursions into role play are “nothing more than a comparatively invigorating release of tension” and one that actually valorizes existing power dynamics. Turning back to “S&M” we can see that RiRi plays with existing dynamics between celebrity and the media, but cannot undo the overall structure, in part because that would be tantamount to biting the hand that feeds her own fame.

What I found most subversive about “S&M” in contrast with the videos by Kelis and Ciara, is that along with asserting herself as the dominant party, RiRi is also removed from a dyadic sexual exchange. Kelis and Ciara are both paired with an erotic partner within the frame of the video; Rihanna is shown sheparding a group of journalists and romping with a room full of gaudy and genderqueer people. The only individualized male figure is Perez Hilton as her submissive/ dog – but he is not shown as a viable sexual outlet and our extratextual knowledge of him identifying as a gay man removes him as a sexual possibility. Or, alternately, this opens up the far queerer reading that “S&M” suggests – that in the video’s frame Rihanna’s desires are polymorphously perverse and sadomasochistic, that her sex play encompasses crowds of people without respect to gender or sexuality. Where the previous video’s off Loud celebrated masturbatory self-love (“Only Girl In the World”) and vaguely feminist coupling (“What’s My Name”), “S&M” removes her from the heteronormative running and instead shows her in a bizarro world offered by deterrotorializing the body via BDSM.

Taking that power as a woman of color makes “S&M” more radical, placing Rihanna in a position similar to Madonna in “Justify My Love” or taking a step further the dominatrix façade that Beyoncé suggests but never explores with her framing and posturing in her videos. Rihanna flips our racial script and shows the complexities of power play, the ways in which we cannot completely slip the yoke of dominant structures, but if we open up our sexual options beyond the dyadic twosome this way lies fun, perversity, and wicked humor. That's not to say this video cannot be read as just a recapitulation to the controlling images circulating, that someone might not see RiRi as proving that once again black women like to have sex, a lot, like so much that they kidnap people for it. The key here, as with all S&M is that for her it's consensual, and for the kidnapped media it's a fantasy. Rihanna takes power, yields power, holds power within the fantasy scenario - her body is object, but also actor, and that works against the controlling image of black women as simultaneously sexual animal, and passive sexual good. It's a complicated text that could read as complicit with hegemonic ideals, but than what popular text isn't?

An addendum, according to the BBC the version of "S&M"/"Come On" they are playing is a remix from the Rihanna camp, a sanctioned censored version. That hasn't stopped RhiRhi from voicing her dislike. Ah capitalism.