Crotch-Grabbing! Different Sex? Different Rules!

Rihanna has been receiving a lot of flack for supposedly “simulating masturbation” in her latest music video for the song You Da One. Whilst I don’t find crotch-grabbing the most attractive thing in the world it is amazing the amount of attention it seems to be getting simply because Rihanna is a young woman.

Men have been crotch-grabbing for as long as I can remember in the music business. Is it really so shocking that women are following suit?

I appreciate that some of the furore is because Rihanna has a wide fan base of young women who may be influenced to act in the same way. But would that really be so, so terrible? Surely an image of a woman grabbing her own crotch is more empowering than many other images that are shown daily in music videos.

And, given that the same could equally be said of men making sexually explicit gestures in music videos, that argument is pretty weak. It seems to be one rule for men and another for the women.

It seems then that much of the disapproval of the crotch-grabbing in this video stems from the idea that a higher standard of behaviour is expected of young women than of young men. To me, that sounds like something straight out of a Jane Austen novel. An attitude from the past that, quite frankly, belongs there.

Contact the author here: jmw@morningquickie.com