Katy Perry's feminine divine looks a lot like AI slop
It's a whole different woman’s world we're going to... after this
“Woman’s World” is the name of the video that’s left Katy Perry to contend with the biggest backlash of her image-based pop music career—putting a damper on what was supposed to be a comeback after four years away from releasing music. The mundane and simplistic criticism centres on its exaggerated representation of feminism with overdone tropes, pissing off critics who still take this stuff seriously.
In response, Perry ventured to justify herself in a behind-the-scenes confessional posted to Instagram. Flanked by backup dancers who nod in agreement, her expression oscillates between girlboss farce and her real-life self, at times making eye contact with the camera as she stresses that the video is meant to be comical:
“We’re kind of just having fun being a bit sarcastic with it. It’s very slapstick, and very on-the-nose.
With this set it’s like, oooh, we’re not about the male gaze, but we really are about the male gaze. We’re really overplaying it.“
For me, “Woman’s World” subverting feminist imagery is just glossy lacquer to the deeper message, which is about shattering realms, and imagining what can be, and unburdened by what has been. The narrative begins in the era of the Second World War, with the singer and her backup dancers posing as workmen in the iconic photograph “Lunch atop a Skyscraper.” Perry then dances as scantily dressed Rosie the Riveter, as an anvil abruptly falls and smashes her to the ground.
We are then further invited into her subconscious by a low-fi montage of working women from the 1980s set in TV static. She awakes with a start, and as she inflates her flattened body it resets as a futuristic cyborg-centaur with Rubenesque robotic legs. Perry struts with the conviction and thousand-mile-stare that can only be acquired by a newly found enlightened consciousness, as she sings: “Fire in her eyes, feminine divine, she was born to shine, to shine, to shine, yeah!”
“Women’s World” finds Katy Perry taking feminist visual symbols and gendered academic concepts such as “male gaze” to a farcical extreme, slathering them in glitter and gloss, creating a kind of artifice of it. It’s as if she herself is an AI generator training itself on popular imagery prompted with the words “feminine divine” and spitting out a fantastic appropriation of what that concept could be.
In her aforementioned Instagram posting, Perry becomes more confrontational by abandoning the girlboss persona to face the camera in an earnest explanation of her intent that’s almost vulnerable. It’s as if to say, all joking aside, this is how I really feel:
“We’re really on-the-nose and overplaying it because I’m about to get smashed, which is like a reset… a reset for me… and a reset for my idea of feminine divine.
It’s a whole different world we go to after this.
We wanted to open this video making it look a super high gloss pop star video… and that’s what it is! Woah!”
This disparaged video actually offers a pivot point—a reset—in the evolution of popular feminist theory which is historically interconnected with popular visual aesthetic and female visual representation. As a pop star characterized by her high-gloss production and on-trend aesthetic, Perry’s comeback needed to mark its turf in today’s popular visual realm—which means AI-generated fantasy with synthetic textures, futuristic subject matter, and uncanny pastiches of the real and the surreal. The best comparison is the “Shrimp Jesus” images now defined as AI Slop.
My grain of thought:
And for an artist like Katy Perry, artificial intelligence offers new opportunities for how visual depictions of female-ness can be. By firmly implanting itself in the slop aesthetic, “Woman’s World” doesn’t so much take viewers to a new realm as it holds up a mirror to where we currently are. Just as AI generators blend existing imagery we’ve created, and then horrify us with their Frankensteinian attempts at acceptable general likenesses, the video is less of a step into a future so much as it is a characterization of the present. The question for everyone invested in creative arts: Are we prepared to see what we look like, in this particular moment in time?