As popular music has become exceedingly hyper-produced and insipid, it is rare to happen upon a “Top 20” music video featuring an androgynous woman harmonizing with a synthesizer and wearing orange lipstick. This is why, when such happenstance occurred a few mornings ago, the orange-lipped artist seemed worthy of a Google search—after a quick glance at the date to make sure it was not, in fact, 1985.
The artist proved to be Elly Jackson, the 21-year-old English front woman for La Roux (the band name being fitting, considering her lipstick color and hairspray-swept, reddish hair). Picking Google’s brain a little further, a link to an interview with Jackson seemed intriguing. Reading through the interview, however, my feelings on Jackson and La Roux morphed from intrigue to admiration, then confusion and by the end, extreme indignation.
Jackson thinks that the overly sexualized mainstream popular culture, particularly in America, has encouraged mindless conformity, producing dime-a-dozen, big-boobed, tanned and scantily clad women. She believes that a woman can be sexy and not wear high heels or miniskirts. She thinks there is a lack of unique female role models in music for young girls to identify with. These are all reasonable and agreeable complaints.
The rub, however, lies in Jackson’s comments that “real women” can be sexy wearing “a plastic bag,” implying that women who wear high heels or short skirts to feel pretty are insecure and inferior. Jackson even went as far as to say that women who dress that way attract abusive, “arsehole” men. In her own words: “Women wonder why they get beaten up or having relationships with arsehole men. Because you attracted one, you twat.”
Besides the obvious grammatical errors in Jackson’s diatribe, her logic is also quite flawed. In her arrogant attempt to distinguish herself as a strong female trailblazer in the pop music industry, not swayed by the temptation to give in to male sexuality and patronization, she, in effect, used the same trite logic that chauvinist men have for decades. Serieusement, La Roux? Physical violence is never warranted, no matter if the woman “attracted” her abusive boyfriend after walking around in a miniskirt.
In the 1970s, feminists burned their bras and made it fashionable for women to wear pants. Yet, today there are juries that still base the outcome of rape cases on whether or not the victim was wearing a short skirt. When people like Jackson scoff at other women for their attire, it divides the female sex and alienates us from the courageous women who have fought for centuries for women’s liberation.
Sadly, La Roux’s Elly Jackson is not the first to seemingly abhor sexism while simultaneously cutting women down. Actually, it has happened all semester to the fashion columnist at The Current, Sequita Bean. When womens and gender studies students spend their time criticizing Sequita for writing about one of her passions, they are forgetting why women fought for sovereignty in the first place. As Eve Ensler says in “The Vagina Monologues,” “My short skirt is not proof that I am stupid or undecided, or a malleable little girl.” It is Sequita’s prerogative to write about fashion as it is for any woman to wear either pants or a miniskirt, play football or be a working mom. Sequita is an exemplary case of how far minority women and women have, as a whole, come toward equal rights, and as a feminist I am proud of Sequita and her sterling fashion column. It is an honor to have someone as proficient as she take on my role as Editor-in-Chief next year.
And as for Elly Jackson, her eccentricities may be refreshing, but her hackneyed attitude could use a makeover. Let’s just hope it does not involve any more neon military jackets.
Jessica Keil is Editor-in-Chief for The Current.