Watching Katy Perry perform this supposed “feminist anthem” with a self-affirming final scream is as scary as watching her husband Orlando Bloom play an action hero in the recently released “Blood Pact.” It’s as if they had agreed: we’re going to make the most simplistic, outdated and unintentionally parodic song and movie of the year.
The video clip that illustrates the opportunistic ‘Woman’s World’ is as subtle as the lyrics: a parade of feminist icons that seem to have been taken from a cardboard collage made by some elementary school children. We begin with Rosie the Riveter sitting on a beam like in the classic photograph ‘Lunch on a High-Rise Building’ (Charles Clyde Ebbets, 1932), we continue with some fallopian tubes hanging from a monster truck as a pine air freshener and we end with a tripod with the missing symbol of Venus, which the singer brandishes like a fanatic monk brandishing a cross in the Crusades.
In between, we see something like a stripper show with a supposedly empowering discourse. A sort of show for bachelor parties with girls dressed as sexy workers -with Swarovski hammers and, uh, clitoris suckers-, as an inflatable doll convertible into a bionic woman and as a strong Midwestern truck driver (played by the influencer Trisha Paytas). A mix of supposedly satirical references that work like a “funny” t-shirt with a message, ideal for dressing up a discourse that is more artificial than those delivery men making out in the middle of a traffic accident.
