My Least Favorite Song

This week my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, finally took a stand against my least favorite song of all time, "Stupid Girls" by Pink. Yes, the song is over two years old. But it was sort of topical because Sasha Frere-Jones, their pop music critic, was reviewing her new album Funhouse. He writes:

Two songs on "I'm Not Dead" showed the strain of constructing the perfectly balanced anti-commercial commercial act. ... More troubling yet was "Stupid Girls," a song that tries to recapture the mission-statement feeling of "Missundaztood" but fails owing to a lack of generosity. The song and the video seek to distinguish Pink from Lindsay, Paris, and Jessica, and the lyrics sincerely ask, "Where, oh were, have the smart people gone?" Pink has shown no small amount of flesh in her rise to the top, so calling out anyone else's bra tactics is a highly suspect move. She's no stranger to the Hilton Doctrine ("I'll do what I want, cuz I can"). And "Smart" isn't really Pink's stock-in-trade. She's a female version of Aerosmioth's Steven Tyler, a skilled ham, long on humor, spritz, and vigor, but hardly a visionary.

What I like about this is that he's not saying it's bad that she's showed skin or that she follows the Hilton Doctrine, just that it's "ungenerous" of her to criticize others for doing so. What I don't like about this review is that it isn't negative enough.

Here is the offending song.

I get so angry whenever I hear this song being recommended as a feminist pop song, and that's obviously what Pink thinks she's making. But, really, how hard is it to figure out that a feminist song wouldn't and shouldn't be called "Stupid Girls"? Is this the reason that there's not a female president? Because girls are stupid? This is the worst feminist song ever!

From the wikipedia page about the song:

The single was praised by Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling on her official website. She wrote, "'Stupid Girls', is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness."

Good point, J.K. Rowling. The antidote to all of the negative messages about thinness in our culture that cause girls to have eating disorders is to call girls who want to be thin stupid. How did no one figure this out before?

Also from wikipedia:

According to International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, the song "highlights the culture's relentless and unrealistic pursuit of thinness and unattainable drive for physical beauty".

Yeah, it highlights it by mocking people who have bulimia and portraying them as brain-dead idiots. Seriously, if you haven't watched the video, there's a skit in the middle where Pink pretends to be a stupid bulimic woman, complete with retching sounds. I don't really know much about the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and I'm sure they do really good work, but I'm so dissapointed that they would promote a song that mocks people with eating disorders and call them stupid. Is that how eating disorder professionals deal with their patients one on one? Do skits about them being airheads? Did Pink not consider that a skit of someone vomiting in the middle of her music video could be triggering? Did she not consider that low self esteem is one of the causes of eating disorders, so maybe a whole song about how people who have eating disorders are stupid may not be a solution?

It's the bulimia skit in the middle that really makes this my least favorite song ever. I can't even give Pink credit for good intentions. This song is just her congratulating herself for being smarter than other women. That is not feminism.

In order to cleanse my palate from blogging about this awful song, I will post this song that I've really been enjoying a lot this month. What It Is by Sophia Fresh ft. Kanye West:

Science is Both Sexist and the Worst

Next time someone tries to tell you either 1) that science isn't sexist; or 2) that science isn't the worst, show them this article from today's New York Times: In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes are in Competition. For example:

Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.

Yep, those men with their mechanical systems and their lack of social development, and those women with their hypersensitivity and psychosis!

For the record, the article doesn't give any evidence why genes from the father lead to the autistic spectrum and genes from the mother lead to the psychotic spectrum. I guess we're just supposed to take it for granted?