The Idol: everything that sexual liberation isn’t.
Welcome to part two of the Sex Politics series. I hope you enjoy and are enlightened somehow by the topic of Sexual Liberation. For this part, I explore what it looks like when patriarchy has co-opted it and thinking through ways we can potentially reclaim it.
In a Rolling Stone article, people who claim to have worked on The Idol described Levinson’s newest project as a “r*pe fantasy.” This rings true to me. For those who haven’t seen The Idol and don’t plan on doing so, the story follows Jocelyn, a pop star who’s been in the music industry since she was a kid. In the first episode, it’s confirmed that Jocelyn has had a lot of mental health struggles, partly caused by her mother’s recent death, at which she was present. This trauma compounds the pressure to continue her career as an “Idol”, resulting in her having a severe breakdown and subsequently being institutionalized . What’s sad is that I think the plot had a lot of potential. But Horrific writing and embarrassing dialogue aren’t even the worst elements of The Idol. The worst part about Sam Levinson and The Weeknd’s new show is what it reveals about the way the idea of “sexual liberation” has been corrupted by the mainstream media. The problem is not with the idea of sexual liberation itself— no, what’s wrong is that the patriarchy has turned the revolutionary ideology of sexual liberation into sexual availability for men rather than an embrace of one’s own sexual agency, which was its original message. For this video, I’ll be using Dr Caroline Heldman’s outline for sexual objectification to analyze how The Idol uses this sinister reconfiguration of “sexual liberation.”
