SALON

Wednesday, Mar 30, 2011 10:03 PM UTC

Is kink the new girl-on-girl kiss?

Rihanna is the latest in a line of pop stars using S/M as an edgy symbol of empowerment. Too bad it doesn't shock

By

Topics: Sex, Gender, Gender Roles, Love and Sex,

Is kink the new girl-on-girl kiss?Stills from the music videos for "Not Myself Tonight," "Alejandro" and "S&M"

Have you heard? Rihanna likes rough sex. Just in case you didn’t get the message from her recent single “S&M” — which contains the subtle lyrics, “chains and whips excite me” — she clarifies her position, so to speak, in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone: “Being submissive in the bedroom is really fun.” She adds, “I like to be spanked. Being tied up is fun.”

…

Oops, sorry, still there? I dozed off for a second. Signaling an interest in mildly kinky sex has become pretty banal. Madonna and Janet Jackson have been there, done that — and now we have a whole new generation of starlets who are acting like they invented the riding crop. Like the women before them, the latest set of kink-loving pop stars are using it as shorthand for female sexual empowerment — the kind that, importantly, is still commercial and alluring to straight men. S/M is like the new girl-on-girl makeout. Forget “I Kissed a Girl” — I fully expect the next breezy summer hit to be something along the lines of “I Was Spanked (And I Liked It).” As with most mainstream depictions of women’s erotic power, I find it sad and totally exhilarating, all at the same time.

In case you’ve missed the recent flood of bondage-themed ephemera, allow me to fill you in. Rihanna is just the latest entrant with her ode to sadomasochism. The song itself is very sexual, of course, but the music video is more TV-friendly. She’s shown trapped behind a wall of saran wrap in front of a bunch of tabloid reporters who are wearing ball gags. A nasty journo scrawls “slut” in capital letters in his notebook; a headline about her “daddy issues” scrawls across the screen. She takes bitchy gossip blogger Perez Hilton for a walk — or crawl, really — on a leash. It’s S/M as a metaphor, a way for Rihanna to punish and humiliate the haters. She’s saved the more literal S/M for her lyrics, wardrobe and interviews.

Ever since her post-Chris Brown reemergence, she’s been playing with symbols of toughness. First it was guns, helmets and tanks (a look I went nuts for); now it’s leather, whips and chains. She went from fearsome superheroine to sexy dominatrix and sometimes submissive. It’s understandable that someone whose battered face went viral would take on just such a sexual persona. She even admits in the Rolling Stone interview that her taste for kink might have something to do with the abuse she suffered from her father; and, while it’s by no means the rule, it isn’t uncommon for people to cope with, and sometimes triumph over, past abuse through S/M. In that sense, Rihanna’s kinky turn has depth — but, make no mistake, it’s also commercial as hell. In one shot from the music video, she’s shown tied up, and everything — her makeup, her outfit, the rope itself — is in bubble-gum hues. It’s rough sex mixed with the Harajuku Girls aesthetic. It’s pop kink.

Of course, Lady Gaga has also toyed with bondage. The music video for “Alejandro” shows her mounting and dominating a muscle man clad in high heels; later, he takes a turn manhandling her. She’s incorporated the kinky aesthetic into numerous photo shoots and performances; and let’s not forget her single, “I Like It Rough.” Lady Gaga being Lady Gaga, she manages to make the S/M overtones potentially subversive and threatening by pairing her light kink with some serious gender bending.

The same cannot be said for Christina Aguilera, who premiered her video for “Not Myself Tonight” last year. It’s like she took the entire contents of a fetish store and dumped it on a Hollywood sound stage. She crawls around on all fours in a catsuit, dons a diamond-encrusted ball gag, wields a riding crop, writhes in a face mask, pours liquid latex all over herself — and so on and so forth. (Aguilera is no stranger to attention-grabbing sex tricks, as her “Dirrty” phase proved.) The most authentically sadomasochistic thing about “Not Myself Tonight” is that it’s torture to sit through. Per the usual, it’s just a starlet playing at being bad. She even croons, “In the morning when I wake up I’ll go back to the girl I used to be.” Don’t worry, she isn’t one of those freaks who is actually serious about playing with leather and latex 24/7.

I won’t lie — I love hearing a pop starlet sing unapologetically about how whips and chains excite her. “S&M,” “Not Myself Tonight” and “I Like It Rough” are probably among the top 30 most-played songs on my iPhone. This is because I have horrible taste in music — but also because there’s an element of aggressive female sexuality and subversion in these songs that I can’t help wanting to celebrate. They speak to me on a visceral level. At the same time, I fully realize that the female sexual power in these songs is ultimately empty and limited. But it’s the same as it’s always been: Female pop stars expressing their sexuality in ways that are palatable to the mainstream straight (in all senses) audience. Whether it’s by prancing around in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform or slipping into a latex jumpsuit, it’s fundamentally the same damn thing.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook. More Tracy Clark-Flory.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 23 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations