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There’s a song making the rounds called “All About That Bass” sung by a pastel-clad Meghan Trainor. She looks like she belongs in a badly colorized parody of Alice In Wonderland but that’s beside the point.

In the context of the song, you may wonder what “bass” means.

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the fish.

It’s not, if we’re being honest, even about the sound of bass, as in guitar or drum.

I’ve included it here in the event that you managed to miss it, so please feel free to enjoy.

Now tell me I’m wrong about the psycho candy-coating pastels.

But more importantly, tell me your impression of this video, specifically its message.

Give it a second to percolate. I’ll wait.

Here’s what I thought initially:

Huh. Chubby chick, that’s cool. We can all use a normal person in our entertainment once in a while. Empowering…. right? Yeah, empowering. Chubby chick is not hindered by her size. And proving it by being cute and popular and famous!

But something sort of bugged me and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

It wasn’t the fact that I started to suspect that she was eating the sugar roses on her tiara and thus contributing to her larger size.

It wasn’t even the requisite ass-shaking by the not-as-chubby chick, although seriously, is that like, the only move we can come up with now that the Electric Slide is dead?

My parents used to lament my generation’s “dancing” as nothing more than jumping up and down, often arrhythmically, with no actual steps to follow. If only they had been able to foresee the travesty that is twerking, they might have allowed themselves to appreciate my sporadic gyrations.

Apparently the defining factor for women in modern culture is their ability to shake their asses.

That notwithstanding, the thing that started to crawl under my skin and eventually claw its way out was that I started to think about the actual message of the song.

Allow me the privilege of parsing it for you.

Warning: language ahead. I told you this could happen if I got worked up enough about something so stop here if the occasional four letter word offends you.

Dear girls of all ages, shapes and sizes,

I’m here to tell you today that it’s ALL about that bass. And even if you have a big, fat ass, you can still get men to fuck you if you just learn how to shake it. And really, girls, if we’re being honest with ourselves, isn’t that what we all aspire to?

I understand the pain of young girls everywhere who suffer needlessly, thinking that they will never experience the joy of being objectified by a man. I’d like to prove to you right now that not only can you wear pastels but that you, too, can ignore your intelligence, capabilities and emotional worth, and be vapid eye candy. Be proud, fatties. Stand up for your right to be the meaningless object of a man’s sexual whim! Because then, my friends, is when you have won.

Or at least that’s my interpretation. Because I’m pretty sure “that bass” isn’t referencing the deep intellectual insights of women. Or their problem-solving skills. Or even their emotional sensitivity or perhaps their ability to bake a mean apple pie.

Lest you think I have overreacted and gone off some feminist deep end, allow me to quote a lyric from the song:

Yeah it’s pretty clear, I ain’t no size 2

But I can shake it, shake it like I’m supposed to do

‘Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase

All the right junk in all the right places

Based on the bubblegum pop and equivalent outfits, I’m guessing the demographic for this song is not college educated thirty-somethings with careers. I’m guessing, in all likelihood, this is being watched, emulated and modeled by your daughters. Your ten and twelve year old daughters. Maybe even your sixteen year old ones. Hell, maybe even your six year old ones. And I’m thinking this is no different than watching a Miley Cyrus concert.

At least Miley Cyrus is honest: “I’m hot. Look at my ass. ‘Cause that’s all there is.”

Songs like “All About That Bass” take a cultural deficiency and instead of sending an alternative, positive message, simply twist the message into something just as deficient and call it progress.

Allow me to continue quoting from this brilliant bit of enlightening poetry:

Yeah, my momma she told me don’t worry about your size

She says, boys they like a little more booty to hold at night

I would like to publicly thank my mother right now for never once, not ever in my life, telling me that boys would like my booty.

She did tell me that I would find someone to like ME one day, no matter how stupid the boys I liked were for not liking me back.

She did tell me that I would find someone to like me just the way I am.

She also told me to study.

To take care of myself.

To make friends.

She told me to be careful, to wear a hat and to get places on time. She told me not to follow the crowd. She told me to turn off the light when I left a room and push in my chair when I got up from the dinner table.

She told me to say please and thank you, to respect my elders, to be nice to people even if it seemed like they didn’t deserve it.

She told me a lot of things, which would warrant a whole book, let alone a blog post. And it’s funny but as I comb through the lessons or even the casual words tossed out at a cranky, frustrated teenager, I can’t think of a single time that she reminded me that my booty would please a man one day.

You can say I’m splitting hairs, that saying someone would like me “as-is” is the same thing, just couched in the more polite language of a traditional Catholic household.

But you would be wrong.

Because the premise of what my mother told me had nothing to do with attracting men and everything to do with actually teaching me that I was ok.

As-is.

And that there was a lot to me, not just in the booty sense (and I’ve always had plenty of that, never to my delight) but in my brain and my heart and my soul. Stuff you don’t sing about in pop songs where the only message seems to be, “Hey women, if you really want to feel empowered then just get a man to want to fuck you.”

Dear mom,

If you’re reading this I know you also told me not to use bad language but I’m really, really pissed off. I’m tired of the fact that the only reason women are objectified is because they let themselves be. And that, well, they seem to want it that way. Or at least that’s the permeating message. And that we’ve accepted the fact that seeing “beautiful” (and often scantily clad) women in ads and on TV shows and shaking their parts in music videos is somehow supposed to be liberating and make us all feel so strong and empowered. So please forgive my little outburst but do you know that I can’t even search for a stock photo anymore without excluding the words “beautiful young woman”? Do you know that the last time I tried to find a photo for one of my law clients to use on his website, using the keyword “justice”, that I got a whole page of “beautiful young woman…” results with mostly undressed women doing things I couldn’t equate with justice even if I had Johnnie Cochran next to me? The only bright side to this is that at least I don’t have a daughter. Because I might be really, REALLY pissed off if I did. And if this was the cultural message being indoctrinated into her brain.

There was a brief controversy recently over an ad promoting an underwear line called “The Ada Collection”. It showed women tech execs wearing the underwear in the collection. Women of all races, ages and sizes. It wasn’t provocative underwear. It was nice. Functional. Normal.

And it sounds kind of cool, right? It wasn’t an ad full of “beautiful young women” wearing impractical attire and requiring the use of ungodly things like butt glue for the sake of being a sex object. (Butt glue. It’s a real thing. I swear to God.) It was just people.

But think about it. First of all, if you are remotely aware of current events you may know that there’s been concern for some time about “women in tech”. It turns out (surprise!) that it’s a male dominated world and that women (bigger surprise!) often feel uncomfortable or get harassed for, well, having things like boobs.

There have been both social and political campaigns to get girls into coding, into tech, into science. You know, THINKING things rather than aiming for the perfect ass shake.

This has at intervals been either somewhat successful or rather a failure, depending on which story you read or which scandal breaks.

So “women” and “tech” is sort of a sensitive subject.

But even if you want to argue that even women in tech wear underwear, there’s the more damning part of this, which is the name of the collection – Ada – named after Ada Lovelace.

Despite her underwear-sounding name, Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and considered not only the first woman computer programmer but THE first computer programmer, ever.

And this was back in the 1800s when you might reasonably guess that women were hardly thought of as having a brain at all, let alone one that could DO things.

So to name an underwear line after her and then show modern day tech execs sitting around wearing it sort of seems like a whole backwards step for the idea of actually empowering women.

I mean, I get it. Women wear underwear. Even tech execs. But is the true, driving aim of society to be sure we can all see it? And to know that yes, even tech execs have those parts? And while you’re at it, aren’t they all so sexy and beautiful just the way they are? Or, rather, they way they COULD STILL BE, even if they were wearing a whole pair of pants?

I’m fairly certain that even if I managed to wipe out sexism, even in its most innocuous, insidious forms, and if I grew up to be brilliant and wise and rich and famous and celebrated, I would still NOT need to prove that I can look good in underwear.

Not because I don’t wear it.

Not even because I can’t look good doing it.

But because it just doesn’t even cross my mind. Like, ever. I wouldn’t be any more or less likely to want to prove to the world that I can brush my teeth. Or that I learned how to cross a street all by myself.

I just don’t get the obsession.

Well, I guess the good news is that at least Ada’s underwear doesn’t come in pastels.

So here’s my solution: let’s empower all the other parts of women, not just their butts and boobs. Let’s not empower women’s parts but their actual existence.

Let’s not tell girls how they can be pretty and fuckable even if they’re fat. Let’s just tell them that they’re ok. Let’s perpetrate an obsession with brains and thinking and intelligence and accomplishment.

I mean, never in my life have I heard of anyone consoling a young girl, whether as a well meaning parent or through a brainless pop song, by saying, “It’s ok honey, I know you’re not as smart as all those other girls but you’ll still be able to get a job as a waitress. Some restaurant somewhere will take you as stupid as you are.”

So why do we console them equally as absurdly about their rear views?

Let’s not put tech execs in their underwear, not even if they’re quoting Einstein and solving global warming with a brilliant new algorithm as they do it. Can we all just ASSUME they’re wearing underwear and get on with appreciating their achievements and skills?

Can we celebrate those achievements and skills and leave out the subtext about how it would all be so much better if only they could be sexy, too?

Can we have normal sized women in ads and videos without making it about how “empowered” they are because men even like the fat ones?

Can a normal sized, fully clothed female singer write a song about…. Oh, I don’t know. A bus? Or something equally NOT about her ability to compete with the hotties for sex?

Yeah, my momma she told me don’t worry about your size

That’s right, because you can’t worry about what you never THINK about, what you don’t OBSESS about, what doesn’t cross your mind to CARE about.

Because women aren’t being held back by the sizes of their asses. They’re being held back by the fact that they HAVE one. And that they seem to be ok with this as long as men like staring at it.

You are more than the sum total of your ass cheeks.

Let’s open a song or an ad or a movie or a conversation about that. Am I wrong?