Skip to main content

God is a Woman



My daughter Catherine has, as part of her life’s mission, taken on my musical education. She recommends artists to me, and by and large she’s pretty accurate in knowing what I will respond to, so, a month or so ago, when she sent me a link to the song above, Ariana Grande’s God is a Woman, I watched it. It’s the exception which proves the rule I guess. I thought the song was crap, and explained my reasons why to Catherine. A dull, repetitive, unimaginative, unoriginal tune. Clumsy, inelegant, monodimensional  lyrics. A video full of kitschy religious iconography, kind of like an animated facebook meme of the type that tells you to share to prove you love your Mom. Catherine told me I was being a pretentious old man (she is right on all three counts, of course ) and asked what did I expect from a 23 year old pop singer? She said that the video was valuable for the conversations it would generate. The video has beeen viewed, as of today, 84.5 million times, been liked 2.3 million times, disliked 297 thousand times and generated countless pages of comments, some of which were breathlessly adulatory, and almost all of which commented on the religious meaning of the song. Yep, Catherine, you're right. That’s a somewhat wider reach than the average Anglican sermon, alright. So I viewed the thing again. Downloaded the lyrics. Viewed it yet again.

Let’s be clear here, the song isn’t actually about spirituality, it’s about sex. The bottom line, take home message is that Ariana Grande is divinely good in bed. She’s so good, in fact that the lucky, unnamed recipient of her favours is going to be remade, and will worship her for reshaping him. I guess we’ll all have to take her word on that one. The video, considered apart from the lyrics, is another matter. It is a series of religious scenes segueing into one another, some  of which echo iconic images from the world religions. So Ariana Grande stands in a swirl of white clad (female) pilgrims, reminiscent of the swirl of white clad Muslim men around the Kaaba, or writhes in the flame of a candle (light of the world, geddit) or sings from behind a large group of (woman) meditators. She straddles the world and fiddles with a hurricane. A couple of the images are memorable: her goddess figure sits serenely and powerfully in a stylised city while a group of angry little men throw words at her. She takes a Thor like hammer and throws it upward to smash the glass ceiling of a basilica. The images are, of course, not about divinity. What is pictured is not God but a demiurge: her goddess is Wonder Woman on steroids. But I guess that’s exactly the point. 

What Ariana Grande has done is take a number of common images of God and change only one detail: the gender of the central figure. In doing this, the fact that the images are engineered around her particular sexual and political agenda is blatantly obvious. Which casts a glaring searchlight on the icons on which hers are based. If the imagery in her video had men at the centre they would be seen as well produced but unexceptional pieces of religious kitsch. God is a Woman exposes what most people take for granted most of the time: the unconscious and therefore unexamined sexual and political agendas which inform our own metaphorical portrayals of God.

Finally, there is, in this video an odd paradox.  The strong juxtaposition of spiritual and sexual imagery invite the  implication that the ultimate worth of a woman is tied to her sexual power over men. I doubt Ariana Grande intended this point, though her  lyrics strongly suggest otherwise. All of us think we are free from being shaped by personal, biological, cultural and political agendas. All of us are mistaken on that point and the messages implicit in our communications, obvious to everyone except ourselves, are the ones of which we need to be especially cautious.

Comments

Mr Truman said…
While a little simplistic, I prefer Gungor’s “God is not a White Man” for musing on a similar idea with fewer mixed-messages and sexualised images. - https://youtu.be/-WybvhRu9KU
Kate said…
As usual you tease out ideas and make me think. But in this case, and even making the assumption that everyone who sees/ hears this vid would extract such a useful lesson from it, do the ends justify the means? Or is it still mostly just crap?

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old