So I was trolling around Google News, as you do, and suddenly there was a photo of Britney looking smoldering, as usual, with the news that she’s out with a new video, title: “Make Me.”
Yeow. The title alone… knowing Britney’s background as a very sexy girl… the news that it contained a lyric that goes “I just want you to make me. Like it ain’t a choice for you.”
OOOOkkkkay, I thought, that sounds very promising. Then I clicked over to the video: Very unpromising. Very unsexy. More of the sanitized schlock that Hollywood thinks women want.
Britney is holding a casting call for male dancers with a bunch of her (carefully racially balanced) girlfriend/backup dancers acting as judges. They leer and giggle together behind the judging table as the uniformly pretty male dancer/actors work very hard to win the job by throwing come hither glances, doing a lot of “Magic Mike” style contortions, as preparation for what Hollywood seems to think is the piece de resistance, the ripping off the shirt to reveal the perfectly developed, waxed, evenly tanned, six packed torso.
Where did Hollywood get the idea that women are really mesmerized by men ripping off their shirts to reveal perfectly developed, hairless, tanning-boothed chests? Where did Hollywood get the idea women are sitting around panting for men to rip off their shirts to reveal their chests anyway? If there’s going to be any shirt ripping, then it should be them ripping off our shirt to reveal our chest. There’s a reason the enormously lucrative genre of female romance novels are informally known as “bodice rippers.”
There’s a great old blues song whose title — perhaps it’s just the first verse — is “Don’t Want No Man Who’s Prettier Than Me.”
Sorry, if you want the “carefully controlled longitudinal studies suggest that women don’t actually like having relationships with men who look like male models” bit you won’t find it here.
Here’s the truth: By and large most women don’t want no man who’s prettier than them. And a guy with perfect abs, zero body hair, and perfect tan on his chest is spending way more time on his chest than I ever have. I don’t even have the patience to let fake tan dry on my legs before I’m running around the house smearing it on the sofa, so the Instagram-ready chest is a complete turn off. I sense that if we got together Mr. Dancer/Actor wouldn’t be interested in me and my prettiness (and to a man who loves you, you are always the most beautiful in the room) he would be interested in himself and keeping his perfect chest from getting, I don’t know, smudges and scuffs on it the way a guy with a new car gets obsessive about the perfect finish.
Well you can keep your perfect chest, Mr. Hollywood Dancer/Actor.
I prefer a beautiful male torso as much as the next person, but I’d prefer to see muscles that were formed painting houses or chopping wood or even, for an urban version, carrying furniture up the stairs in walk-up buildings, not carefully crafted with the mirror in the gym.
There’s a sort of ancient primal dynamic that us some of us old school (and old) broads find very exciting and that’s hunter and prey. Being the prey is fun. It’s way more fun to be chased, to be desired than to be the anxious, needy one on the other end.
OK, as a nod to feminism I will admit that being in control, the knowledge that you have a man wrapped around your little finger is fun too… a bit… occasionally. And I suppose this is a good place for the obligatory anti-rape statement so here it is: “No: Saying that a video titled ‘Make Me’ is sexy is not an endorsement of rape. Rape is never sexy.” In the end, the hunter and prey thing is kind of game. He’s not a hunter in the really primal sense. He doesn’t have, like, a spear… not the killing kind anyway.
But these endless domanatrix fantasies we see in popular culture with the women always, monotonously on top? Really? There was a reason “Fifty Shades of Grey” sold a billion copies and that is because sex refuses to be politically correct. Try it, millennial girls. Make him make you.