So Many Levels, So Many Levels

Just diverting from my usual interest in only promoting feminist-themed and antiracist-themed images and videos, to just share a very popular music video, "Ayo Technology," passed on to me by a student of mine.



I don't know what disturbes me most: the fact that, now the white male and black male have come together - via Justin and 50 Cent - to create this interracial brotherhood of male dominance, the fact that so many subliminal (and not even!) images of cell phone video and other hi-tech surveillance of women's bodies (presumably taken at strip clubs or male-themed parties featuring strippers) encourage men to surveille and invariably violate the private boundaries established between sex partners that are later uploaded onto the Internet (think Paris Hilton's sex tapes), or the fact that, even underneath this text is the other subtext of what happens in incidents that mirror the Duke Lacrosse party, in which many cellphone images captured the accuser's bodies and later circulated in mainstream news reports, and other scandalous videotapes (featuring R. Kelley and his violations of underage girls).

The lyrics - "I'm tired of using technology" - suggests desires to break those boundaries between fantasy and reality, to merge the symbolic capture of women's bodies on camera, on strip club stages, on Internet porn sites with "real" sexual encounters, only for "real" sex acts to be recycled into the symbolic realm when video surveillance cameras (Big Brother's or your lover's cell phone) reproduce the sexualized female body in the space of music videos, YouTube, MySpace, etc.

As I said, so many levels, so many levels...