In July 2013, music artists Robin Thicke, Pharell Williams, and T.I released a single which then, and continually since then, generated vast polemic. From the offset of its release, many individuals have criticised both the lyrics and music video of the single for their alleged promotion of misogyny. Yet the song, despite its many opponents within the music – and indeed media industry as a whole – was a huge commercial success; it reached number one in twenty five countries globally, and was the longest running number one single of 2013 within the US. As of May 24th 2017, the official Blurred Lines music video has nearly four hundred and ninety seven million views, (which, to put into context, is over one hundred million more than Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and almost eighty million more than Michael Jackson’s Thriller). Evidently, something about Blurred Lines resonates with society, and as such it has inarguably found a place in pop culture. And if the claims of misogyny that have been levelled at the piece are founded, what does this say about us, the culture that popularised it?

A good proportion of those who condemned Blurred Lines did so on the basis of its lyrics, particularly those in the chorus of the single, which includes lines such as ‘I know you want it’ (repeated six times), and ‘I hate these blurred lines’. Both ‘lay’ critics and those heavily involved in the music industry have pointed out that these lyrics bare great similarity to what many victims of rape and assault have reported their attackers as having said before, during, or after their attack(s), with the ‘blurred lines’ Thicke sings of being the lines of sexual consent. As such, the main criticism of the lyrics has been that they are evidence of ‘rape culture’, wherein a society normalises sexual violence against women through regressive sexual assault laws, lenient prison sentences for sex offenders, and ‘rape myths’, (in this case, the myth that whether or not a woman wants sex can be ambiguous – false). I’d personally further the claims that the single’s lyrics are misogynistic based on both their exploitation of the ‘whore v virgin’ trope, (‘I know you want it, but you’re a good girl’ sings Thicke during the hook, suggesting that wanting ‘it’ and being a ‘good girl’ are mutually exclusive states of being), and a modern use of the ‘damsel in distress’ trope, (‘Baby it’s in your nature, let me liberate you’ he helpfully offers in the bridge).

This interpretation of these lyrics can be considered fairly subjective, and there have been some who have defended them; Jennifer Lai for example, maintains that ‘nothing about "I know you want it" is saying "I know you want it, and I'm going to force you to have it”’. However, the level of sexual aggression within the song and a seeming desire to inflict genuine pain on women becomes less covert and less subjective from the verse of rapper T.I onwards; ‘I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two’, he raps to the female addressee of the song, followed by Thicke’s encouragement to ‘do it like it hurts’. These lyrics, particularly when combined with the aforementioned, rape-apologetic lyrics of the chorus, and the trope-enforcing lyrics throughout, suggest what is definitely a misogynistic view of women overall, and move past the one interpretation of the song I was able to muster when trying to consider it from a viewpoint that wasn’t my own – that it was a reflection of some sort of DDLG roleplaying, male-dominant, female-submissive relationship. Because whilst the idea of a ‘good girl’ and for-male-pleasure sex is common with the DDLG community, it’s also widely recognised that the ‘submissive’ is actually the holder of the vast majority of power within the relationship, and when they say stop, and that they don’t want it, it stops. But the women that Blurred Lines discusses are not women who are ultimately in charge, they are women who are written as so powerless that they need to be ‘liberated’ by men such as Thicke, Williams, and T.I, in order for them to realise their ‘nature’ of desiring violent, painful sex.

Alongside the lyrics, one of the aspects of Blurred Lines which many criticised was the single’s music video, which features three topless, (or near topless in the censored version), supermodels – Emily Ratajkowski, Jessi M'Bengue, and Elle Evans – dancing and posing alongside the fully clothed Thicke, Williams, and T.I. Controversy over the music video differs from that of the lyrics in that no critic seems to solely disapprove of the single’s video, but rather the implications of the video coupled with the lyrics. That is, the visual power imbalance of three passive, naked, women alongside three fully clothed, active men, is exacerbated within the context of men talking (or singing) about sexual aggression towards women. Psycho-analytically, one can consider that this imbalance is emphasised through the video’s elevation of the phallic, (arguably already present through T.I’s ‘something big enough’), with giant metallic balloons spelling out ‘Robin Thicke has a big dick’ towards the end of the video, supporting the system which prioritises the affirmation of male sexuality above all else, (but especially above female sexuality). On top of these interpretations, we can even quote Thicke himself in exploring the offensiveness of the video: In an interview with GQ magazine in 2013, he agreed that ‘of course’ the video was degrading to women.

Though it has received considerably less attention from critics, it’s worth noting that the popular cultural appeal of Blurred Lines could also come from the sound of the song itself. German philosopher, sociologist, and composer, Theodore Adorno was writing about how there is an audio recipe for creating popular music way back in 1941, and little seems to have changed since then, given that Blurred Lines was considered to sound so remarkably like Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give it up that Thicke and Williams were found guilty of copyright infringement in 2015, and Gaye’s name was required to be listed as one of the contributing artists to the song.

So, really, what we can learn about the society which placed Blurred Lines as a canon of millennial pop culture, comes in the form of two explanations. The first is that the huge success of the single was a result of its placement in a society just as misogynistic as its lyrics and music video appear to be, and the second, that the single was able to make the society it was released in more misogynistic. Both conclusions have their strengths and weaknesses; for example, it’s potentially quite dismissive to suggest that the music video is simply a reflection of its culture, and it’s important to remember that the methods of disseminating popular culture, (eg. newspapers, films, television shows, and music), don’t act to simply reflect the rules of the culture they exist within, but to test them, and then potentially reinforce or change them. In fact, far from being instantly popular after its release, numerous universities across the world banned the song from being played at student functions, in reflection of their disapproval of the message they felt it conveyed. If society was already misogynistic enough to cause Blurred Lines, this surely wouldn’t be the case.

Yet, the success of the singlehad to arrive from somewhere, and Lucy Beresford, a psychotherapist who explored Blurred Lines in a British television show shortly after its release – Pop, Sex, and Video Tapes aired on ITV in 2013 - suggests that ‘as a result of testing pop culture’s boundaries, some people are copying it – it’s escalating’, implying that although Blurred Lines isn’t the product of a wholly misogynistic society, it is the product of a society misogynistic enough that it was accepted.

Both explanations are bleak, and honestly just serve as confirmation for me that when it comes to this god awful song, much like Robin Thicke’s apparently big penis, it’s really not something I want.