Lögnen om den manliga blicken i samhället (male gaze)

Shortly after the United Nations speech that made her a feminist icon, Emma Watson, inevitably, weighed in on that other feminist icon, Beyoncé. “I felt [Beyoncé’s] message felt very conflicted,” Watson said, “in the sense that on the one hand she is putting herself in a category of a feminist, you know this very strong woman and she has that beautiful speech in one of her songs [“Flawless”] but then the camera, it felt very male, such a male voyeuristic experience of her.”

Watson’s comments echo a consistent feminist criticism of Beyoncé, who has often been accused of being too sexual and too eager to perform for the male gaze. This criticism has continued even though Beyoncé has recently emphatically claimed the feminist label, sampling Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech “We Should All Be Feminists” and appearing at the Video Music Awards in front of a giant sign reading “FEMINIST.” Nonetheless, Annie Lennox recently called Beyoncé “feminism lite” and added, “I think what she does with [sex] is cheap….” Janell Hobson, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, told me that following her Beyoncé cover story for Ms. magazine, she received a ton of pushback from feminists who felt that, in Hobson’s words, Beyoncé was “too sexy to be the ‘perfect feminist.’”

Again, Watson’s assumption, and the general assumption of critics, is that Beyoncé’s sexual performance is a display for men. She’s seen as anti-feminist because she plays into a “male voyeuristic experience.” Beyoncé’s audience, however, is, for the most part, not composed of male voyeurs. It’s overwhelmingly female.

A study from February ranked artists on a music-listening service based on the gender of their listeners. Beyoncé was the third most popular artist for women; for men, she was 24th. Rihanna, another artist known for her sexualized performances, was first among women and only eighth among men. Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga also ranked higher among women than among men. This ranking dovetails with anecdotal observations: Sharon Marcus, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and a self-declared Beyoncé fan, told me that in her experience, “the straight men I know have no interest in Beyoncé whatever, and even seem to be averse to her…. Beyoncé’s fanbase is primarily women and gay men.”