A couple of things about Beyonce

I mentioned Beyonce a couple of times last Friday and there are a couple of things about her I'd like to note. The following is one of her most highly praised offerings but somehow I don't think you'll be thanking me for exposing you to it. The good news is that you don't have to listen to it all the way through to understand it as it repeats the same thing over and over again.



When I say repeats, I mean it repeats the same pattern with no variation and it wasn't that interesting a pattern to begin with. But critics loved it and so did the audience. Critics particularly praised the theme of "female empowerment". How exactly that works, as the song expresses values so retrograde Doris Day would have been ashamed to sing it, I don't know.

But girls and young women liked it and that is the really important thing to remember with songs like this; the audience and the market for music like this is overwhelmingly young females.

So the first thing to note is that for young women we are in a world that has not changed much since Doris Day and Rock Hudson made Pillow Talk. "Single Ladies" is a lot less sophisticated than Pillow Talk mind you but morally it is in the same groove. Doris Day says, if you want my hot body you have to marry me. Beyonce says, if you want exclusive access to my hot body you have to marry me. (And both ultimately tell women that their primary worth as women is to have a hot body, a point I'll get back to.)

The second thing to note is the heavily homoerotic aspect of it. A video whose primary audience is young women consists of three hot young women dancing around like strippers. And it's not just Beyonce. Look at just about most videos by female artists with a female audience and you'll notice a strong homoerotic aspect to it.

We don't typically notice this sort of thing because it is so common. For decades, women's magazines have consisted mostly of erotic photographs of women. And if you hook women up to a device called a plethysmograph that measures sexual response, you'll find that female fans actually respond to videos like the above by getting sexually aroused.

Women pick stars in a way that is not unlike how they pick friends. In any friendship between two women each has picked the other because she has something they do not. And one of the most significant qualities sought in in these mimetic friendships is eroticism. If a woman is highly affected by Beyonce she is responding to the particular kind of eroticism Beyonce puts out. And, pardon me if I'm blunt, it's not an eroticism that relies a heck of a lot on the quality of the expression coming out of her mouth. Quite the opposite: it says please don't pay to much attention to what I actually say or even how I say it.

Beyonce actually has a pretty good voice but her body and the shape she keeps it in is what really matters; her songs are primarily intended to show off that body rather than to express anything in particular. It's not just physical for Beyonce also touts her ability to have strong feelings but neither the intellectual content of what she is saying nor the quality of the delivery matters much. For her female fans. the proof that Beyonce really feels strongly is all in her body and how she moves it.

You might ask, "What does Beyonce know about love?" And that is a perfectly reasonable question as because even a casual survey of her life shows that she isn't actually much good at it. She doesn't seem to actually be able to pick a good partner and make a commitment to them which is the only real test of someone's ability to love. (Update: I got some pushback about this in the comments and I've come to regret this paragraph a bit. I still don't think that the Beyonce-Jay Z union, or just about any celebrity marriage, is a good example of what marriage ought to be but I can say I hope they prove me wrong about this.)

You might also wonder whether this sort of eroticism is even much good for attracting men. Beyonce fans really are overwhelmingly women. On the basis of her male fans alone, she would not be a star. Women consistently pick erotic ideals that are very different from what men pick. For example, and this is telling, the female models that succeed in markets aimed at women tend to be significantly thinner than the female models who succeed markets aimed at men.

I'm not saying men's judgment of what is desirable in a woman is superior. Quite the contrary, most men would probably pick someone like Serena van der Woodsen and she is hardly an improvement over Beyonce. But if the only thing that mattered to a woman was picking a role model that would make her attractive to men, Serena van der Woodsen is the model you want (and I'll explain why next Friday).

But that is to miss the point. Beyonce's legions of female fans are interested in something she does have and there is an important sense in which they can't wrong about that something. You may think that something shouldn't matter but it doesn't matter what you think for it does matter to women and it matters a whole, whole lot. And that is not going to change.