Lana Del Rey found herself embroiled in controversy this week after an Instagram post in which she appeared to criticize other women, mostly women of color, for the sexual nature of their hit songs.
By LORRAINE ALI TELEVISION CRITIC
Lorraine Ali is television critic of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was a senior writer for the Calendar section where she covered culture at large, entertainment and American Muslim issues. Ali is an award-winning journalist and Los Angeles native who has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to Rolling Stone and GQ. She was formerly The Times’ music editor and before that, a senior writer and music critic with Newsweek magazine.
MAY 22, 20204:34 PM
Forget #MeToo for a minute. Right now, it’s all about #WhiteWomenBehavingBadly.
Callous comments from two famous white women about other female celebrities of color have hit multiple progressive triggers in recent weeks, causing cancel culture to wrest the upper hand back from COVID-19 on social media. Woke Twitter emerged from quarantine, sleepy-eyed but energized by something familiar to rage around: racism, mean-girl dragging, white entitlement, good vs. bad feminism, sexism, cultural appropriation and cutting boards (seriously).
Singer Lana Del Rey and chef Alison Roman incited firestorms when, in separate incidents, they complained bitterly about the success of female peers, almost all of them women of color. Earlier this month, in an interview with the New Consumer, New York Times food columnist Roman flippantly called Netflix star Marie Kondo a “bitch” and “sellout” and said Chrissy Teigen’s brand omnipresence was “horrifying.”
You are probably wondering: Who are all these people?
Alison Roman is a cookbook author famous for her recipe for chocolate chip cookies made with salted butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chunks, which sounds tasty but not actually all that ingenious: if you start with salt, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate, it’s not that hard to end up with something people like.
Marie Kondo is the Japanese de-cluttering lady who came up with a good Shinto-Minimalist question to ask yourself when trying to make up your mind what to throw away: “Does this spark joy?”
But now she has gotten into selling her fans morestuff, because, while you can make decent money helping rich ladies throw stuff away, you can make a huge amount of money selling not-rich ladies more stuff, such as this $58 brass cookbook stand, which, now that I was trying to make up something to say that was bad about it, I realize I kind of really want one, although I don’t recall ever having successfully used a cookbook to cook anything in my life.
Kondo is about as progressive as a kamikaze pilot, and has had the good taste to not to get involved in this race card spat, unlike:
Chrissie Teigen, who is a Norwegian-Thai
Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who has become a cookbook author so that you too can eat your way to being a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.
Lana del Rey is a good-looking singer, a throwback in the postwar torch singer/chanteuse mode.
Despite her Spanish surname stage name, she’s a Scottish American from Lake Placid, NY, so she’s a villainess in this:
Beyoncé is of course above all criticism, according to all the mulatto hairdresser guys in America. It’s a national tragedy that she has only won 22 Grammys.
Cardi B is a stripper-rapper.
On Wednesday, Del Rey dropped a lengthy Instagram manifesto addressing age-old criticisms that her work is anti-feminist but that those same detractors give artists such as Beyoncé and Cardi B a pass. They have “number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, [having sex], cheating…” she wrote.
There’s more to their conversation and complaints, which were reckless and entitled at best, but the reaction was predictable. Women attacked Roman and Del Rey for attacking other women, as if there wasn’t enough scorn, shame and judgment to go around. The two were accused of making racist statements and flaunting their white privilege, and Del Rey was asked by half of Instagram why she hadn’t gone after artists such as Taylor Swift. (Del Rey defended her original post on Thursday, writing, “Don’t … call me racist”; Roman had her New York Times column suspended, a decision of which Teigen did not approve.)
The solution, of course, is — just as all PoC’s must unite against whites — for all women to unite against all men:
… In music, for instance, there’s been so little space at the top for women, and such a dearth of shared power, that artists like Del Rey fall prey to measuring themselves, and other women, against standards instituted by sexist dudes who ran (and still run) the game.
Women who’ve spent even a fraction of their life in a traditional workplace know that it’s exhausting navigating a system that wasn’t meant for you, or worse, that was specifically designed to keep you out.
For example, think how hard Chrissie Teigen had to work to shatter the stereotype that only men could be Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.
We’re held to higher criteria for lower pay, given the grunt work while our male peers are given promotions. The lopsided playing field is no surprise.
Our moms warned us that to get ahead we’d have to work harder, be better and complain less than the guys, at least until we were running things. Then all bets were off. Though they hoped the world might change by the time their daughters entered the workforce, it’s still a man’s world, a reality that bears out in study after study. We fight it, work around it, slog through it — and still we persist.
Along the way, however, expectations for how female colleagues deal with one another have been built on the belief that women generally behave better than men, and that we’re all part of the same gender underclass. Surely we’d all pull in the same upward direction, toward a more equitable tomorrow.
What a lovely idea — if not for racial discrimination, ambition, greed, socioeconomic disparity and everything else that’s part and parcel of a capitalist empire.
