First: watch this video.
Lyrics here.
Rebecca Drysdale made this video for Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, and I hereby dub this video my favorite thing on the Internet. I challenge you to find something online that I will love more than this video–seriously, go for it.
I love so many things about this video.
It’s hot and fun and funny.
Having fun has a very important role to play in the process of enjoying and promoting sex positivity. After all, sex is about pleasure and ecstasy and just plain feeling that. Watching this video makes me feel good. Pleasure is an important theme throughout the video—what the youth find pleasurable, what adults find pleasurable. In addition, the video itself provides an opportunity for us (the viewers) to enjoy the pleasures of the entertainment media—comedy, music, and dance.
It makes me want to throw a dance party.
I have been searching for sex positive hip-hop and pop music for many years now. This song promotes positive messages about queerness, community, and sexual empowerment. What other song would you rather dance you? (Read: another challenge for you to post sex positive links in the comment section.)
It is an active, multidimensional demonstration of how better it can get.
She did not just tell us that it gets better–she proved it by making this video. We can see that she is a smart, talented, edgy, hilarious young artist. She also shows the personal, professional, and sexual confidence necessary to sing loud and proud a plethora of explicit sexual slang and anti-gay slurs effectively used to communicate a clear positive message. Furthermore, she has a community. You heard her at the end–there were over 50 people involved in making the video! They embrace her artistic talents and demonstrate their support of her sexual identity. If that’s not better, I don’t know what is.
Special shout outs to Rebecca Drysdale, The It Gets Better Project, and The Trevor Project for their ongoing support of LBGTQ youth. Thank you!
"And when Shannon went to college she met people just like her and she realized who the d-bags and the f*ckheads really were"
ReplyDeleteI think that's the line that most disturbs me about this song. At first, I loved the whole campaign. It was awesome. The more I hear it, the more it sounds like people have to wait until college and college is this magical place where everything is good. The videos aren't "we can make it better". The videos are "it will get better if you can survive until college". It feels defeatist: that adolescents are mean people and there's no way we can change that; that you need to find people like you to protect you since we cannot stand for what is just; that we are passively taking what the world has to offer rather than being actors in our existence.
Yes, I understand that this is (hopefully) a first step and I can be prone to hyperbole, but I hope that we move beyond this passive message in the next few years. The seeds are already being planted for this. Anti-bullying bills are getting passed in many states to provide protection even without surviving until college. It's the first step that shows we're going to make it better so that no one need wait for their life to be good.