By Peter Lawrence Kane
When Pussy Riot’s three members went to prison for “hooliganism and religious hatred” — and two of them languish in the gulag yet — it was a defiant gesture in the face of an authoritarian fusion of church and state. It was also when you started hearing the word “pussy” on BBC Radio a lot. That’s the same BBC that used to ban everything, even “I Am the Walrus.”
American capitalism is much nimbler at absorbing and neutralizing dissent than Russia is. (Ours is a society where you can find Susan G. Komen ribbons at 7-Eleven, a dubious synergy in pursuit of women’s health if ever there was one). Consequently, satire has to be savvier to make a splash. Three women breaking into a church to perform in ski masks wouldn’t necessarily come off as quite so revolutionary here. But three women candidly rapping about their periods does.
Brooklyn-based hip-hip trio Hand Job Academy’s “Shark Week” is a delightfully insouciant, in-your-face feminist screed against both the stigmatizing and the sugarcoating of women’s bodies. The lyrics and video are a brilliant litany of references to menstrual blood, from “a werewolf is living in my uterus” to “I’m kinda worried about toxic shock/I’ve had a tampon in my box since four o’clock.”
The song sounds like a purposeful jab in the eye of a culture that stubbornly refuses to recognize that there is such a thing as women and that women have bodies, but it’s actually almost a tonic. Unlike some other “period rap,” “Shark Week” isn’t particularly angry. But it is really clever, a send-up of a cultural landscape where menstruation is taboo except in a commercial sense, reduced to abstract but recognizable codes.
If this all feels absurdly over the top, consider how Wired magazine noted how the new Android OS designates some 1,400 mostly medical words as illegitimate and worthy of auto-correction. Among them are “condom,” “butt,” and “asshole,” as well as “uterus,” “lactation,” and “Tampax.” Google hasn’t banned anything outright, but by actively discouraging your thumb from typing certain words and your eye from reading them, it manages to influence mind and body alike. It’s a curious filter, too, from the supposedly libertarian tech quadrant in the supposedly liberal Bay Area.
The irony that you can hear the word “pussy” on the air only to be dissuaded from typing it is not lost on Hand Job Academy’s Clara Bizna$$. “We don’t know how we can be billed on radio. People could say ‘HJA,’ because people know who NWA is. Our name has gotten us a lot of attention, but it has kept us out of corporate money. I heard after the fact that some buttoned-up marketing team planning a South by Southwest Showcase shot us down immediately. We’re not the Butthole Surfers — we’re not even Circle Jerk. Maybe we’ve missed out on opportunities. But Nikki Minaj’s name is a pun on ménage à trois, and she’s a role model for little girls.”
The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 labored hard to produce a “Newspeak” dictionary, which reduced the English language to the bare minimum in order to purify every mind. Dissent was to become, literally, unthinkable. Meanwhile, “Shark Week” nabbed the coveted “lowbrow/brilliant” corner on New York mag’s “Approval Matrix.” That you can watch the video on YouTube (part of Google) while texting the details to a friend on your Galaxy III with a small bit of difficulty shows that there is no unified push to airbrush pop culture in this manner. But it’s the inconsistency that’s so troubling, indicative as it is of how easy an unexamined attitude towards the realities of half the population can slip right in. However inadvertent or halfhearted, censorship is still censorship. It wasn’t that long ago that married couples on TV couldn’t even share a bed.
