Article Review 3

Ashley Compton

WGST 202H

Professor Currans

Blog Topic: Women and Country Music

Article Review #3

McClane-Bunn, Ann. "Sex in the Hillbilly Field: Objectification of Women in Country Music Videos." Media Report to Women 38.4 (2010): 6,11,19-21. ProQuest. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.

            In “Sex in the Hillbilly Field: Objectification of Women in Country Music Videos”, Ann McClane-Bunn talks about the idea that the country music industry is dominated by men, yet women still tend to be the main focus in most country music videos. McClane-Bunn looks closely at the music videos presented on CMT (Country Music Television) before and after the channel became owned by Viacom, Inc., the same company that owns MTV (Music Television) and how the videos have changed since. Using her research, she argues that the women in modern country music videos are most often portrayed as sexualized objects.

            To better understand how women have been represented since the beginning of country music presented on CMT and how women’s portrayal has changed since MTV Networks’ acquirement of CMT, McClane-Bunn reviews women in general advertisements, women in country music, and women in popular music videos in any genre. Women in advertisements are more than often portrayed as thin, young, and beautiful, which women in our society try to emulate. She also points out that in advertisements, a woman’s beauty is often reduced to her individual body parts. When looking at women in early country music, she finds that the role for women was to be a housewife; therefore there was not much place for them anywhere else outside of the home. However, women slowly made progress and found a small place in country music but were not as successful as women in rock and pop music. McClane-Bunn clarifies that MTV is the biggest music video channel, which targets a demographic of 12- to 34-year-olds. She explains that since the audience is mostly adolescents, they often want to copy what they see on screen, which is not a great thing since MTV often makes women seem like they are just a visual object for men.

            To improve understanding on the portrayal of women in country music videos now, McClane-Bunn conducted a study to compare videos from before and after MTV Networks’ acquisition of CMT. While watching the music videos, she divided them into the most common sexually objectifying frames of representation of women. The frames became: focus on women’s bodies, women’s gratuitous presence, and scantily clad women. Focus on women’s bodies is characterized by the amount of time the camera spends on a woman’s body or body parts compared to the other elements of the video. Kenny Chesney’s “Shiftwork” was the example she used for this type of video because the camera focuses most of its time on women’s bare midriff and cleavage. The women’s gratuitous presence frame is characterized by the woman being a visual pleasure for the viewer, but the woman’s presence has no relation to the lyrics or is not even mentioned at all in the song. “Santa Fe” by the Bellamy Brothers was the example for this frame because it personifies a place as a female and focuses a lot on a native American woman that has nothing to do with the lyrics. Lastly, the scantily clad women frame is depicted by the overt focus of women wearing almost nothing. Sugarland’s “All I Want to Do” was an example used for this frame because the female in the video is wearing a bikini while standing next to her fully dressed male counterpart.

            During her research, McClane-Bunn found some unfortunate results. With regards to the change of women’s representation since MTV Networks’ purchase of CMT, she discovered that the music videos point to more obvious and unnecessary sexual objectification today than they did before MTV Networks owned CMT. When looking at the content of videos in relation to lyrics, she found that sometimes images, in this case women, are included merely as entertainment factors or as a way to make more money, much like advertisements do to sell products. With her found information she makes the statement that the women in country music videos are “made into mere commodities, serving only to please their male entertainment counterparts or the assumed male viewer” (19), which she believes to be very dehumanizing to women.

            This article provides a lot of very useful information about my blog topic, which is women and country music. She shows the sad truth about country music videos being extremely sexually objectifying to women and makes this objectification into a way to make money. This article is similar to Julie Andsager and Kimberly Roe’s article “Country Music Video In The Country's Year Of The Woman”. Their article and McClane-Bunn’s article both focus a lot on the representation of women in the music videos rather than the lyrics of the songs. However, Andsager and Roe present a lot more statistical data that distinguish the dominance of men in the country music industry, while McClane-Bunn focuses more on giving a good description of exactly how the women are portrayed and objectified in the videos. One thing I wish that McClane-Bunn had done is provide a few more examples of music videos that clearly represent the objectifying frames that she established. She gives one example for each, however it would be nice to have a few more to see different videos of the same frame. I think that this article is very enlightening and anyone who enjoys country music should take the time to read it.