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Or a third option: young female performers (take the case of Britney Spears) get steered by older male managers into "now it's time for your hot horny bitch phase" under the pretext of "no, no, this is empowering you, you're claiming your sexuality!" and similar guff. By the time they wise up to what's going on, it's too late and they're stuck with this image. I hate that girls are being taught that 'yeah, you gotta send nudes to your boyfriend if you want to keep him, that's just how it is' and then we get 13 year olds finding out that their private photos are being shared around for laughs and wank material.
But I'm a dinosaur. The socially conservative society I would prefer has been dynamited and we're all standing in the rubble.
Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn. "What do you mean, you don't want to suck my dick? Fine, you don't want to do that, I'll find another girl who will". Now blowjobs are just commonplace parts of what is the expected sexual repertoire. Heterosexual anal sex has gone the same way: from something only seen in porn to something daring when discussed in the mainstream to "spice up your sex life, ten top tips for having butt sex and keeping your man happy". See Dan Savage's "Good, Giving and Game" where if your partner doesn't want to engage in whatever kink or fetish you apparently can't live without, then if they're not willing to give in you are perfectly entitled to look for someone willing outside the relationship, or dump that partner's vanilla prude ass. That was in the context of gay sexual relationships, but the advice was trickling out for straight relationships as well: if she won't do it for you, then you are justified in finding someone who will.
Are you really surprised young women have learned this is what is expected of them? OnlyFans and the rest of it are just the fruits of this taken to its logical extreme.
Well, I suppose if you’re a pop singer who started out as a teenage girl and you aren’t explicitly Christian, keeping up your clueless romantic virgin schoolgirl persona becomes tiresome, limiting and cringe after you turn 21 or so in a society where premarital sex is normalized. Thankfully I’m not that knowledgeable about this entire sleazy subject but as far as I can tell, Britney Spears also had scarce intentions herself of maintaining her good girl image after a while.
(On a related note, do all such pop singers have sleazy old men a managers? I wonder.)
Hold up. So where was it normalized first? Real life or porn?
Taylor Swift seems, to my limited knowledge, to have navigated the problem of getting older and remaining popular/a star without resorting to the "oops, all my clothes fell off!" stage.
Look at Pink, who was big, and now is not so big. She, too, went through the "yeah I'm empowered" unconventional fashion choices. She's still touring but is not, I think, as relevant as she was; her audience is getting older along with her. They're loyal, but the 20 year olds aren't flocking to her (if I'm wrong, please correct me). Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.
Look, I don't think pop stars are very smart, and the managers and record producers do tend to older guys. See the 80s line of manufactured boy bands and girl singers churned out by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman as songwriters/producers. And I do think that the career trajectory for the disposable pop girly does go through the "slutty is empowered" stage on the way to "you're 30 or older now, the teenagers aren't buying your records any more, the exit is that way" ending, because Sex Sells and 50 year old men know that hot slutty 20 year old girls will get press attention and publicity, and even better if it can be sold on the back of fake feminism.
I don't think Taylor Swift or Pink ever had an early good modest girl image though.
Pink no, but that was Taylor's whole thing. Kinda still is.
Quoting two comments from a Manosphere blog in 2012:
So...yeah. According to the "new normal", she isn't a slut per se.
Odd that they consider her so attractive. De gustibus non est disputandum I guess? But I'm going to anyway: a big part of Swift's success is that she isn't that hot. She's good looking, but she's the exact level and type of woman where most women within one standard deviation of the median can relate to her. She's built like a romance novel protagonist, like a hollywood version of an everywoman.
I'm not going to fundamentally disagree but I ask you to consider what % of women "within one standard deviation of the median" are fat or frumpy.
A huge portion, that's sort of what median means.
But Swift isn't a Sydney Sweeney or a Margot Robbie or a Marilyn Monroe, or a Britney Spears or a Madonna in music, a gorgeous and unattainable figure of perfection who men want and women want to be. I don't think her schtick would work if she were that hot.
Swift is above average, but at her most made up, she's still built like an ironing board with no sexual charisma.
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