If you have been listening to the radio for the past couple of months, you’re probably sick of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” like the rest of the planet. But don’t worry – this sassy singer has a new tune to get stuck in your head for weeks on end. Trainor recently released a video for her newest single, “Dear Future Husband,” and although the song is very catchy, I’m not too crazy about the music video.
The video depicts Trainor as a stereotypical housewife, and she is doing everything from cleaning the floors to baking a pie. Although her video can be seen as cute, colorful and fun, it is not making a great statement about modern marriage and the roles that women play in it. Instead, the video comes across as very sexist.
“Dear Future Husband” portrays a wife’s duties as staying home to mind the housework. But modern marriage is not like this: Women have careers and more to do than just cook, clean and take care of children. In most of the scenarios that are played out in the video, Trainor is conforming to what society stereotypically thinks a married woman should be doing. As a woman, I feel like Trainor’s video is suggesting that all that is expected of me is to cook and clean.
Additionally, the message of the video is be damaging to young girls because it doesn’t give them an accurate image of a modern marriage, or of how they can successfully use the potential that they have. The video is instead telling these young girls to get comfortable in the kitchen. Young girls should be seeing a positive example of modern marriages where the housework is split between husband and wife. These girls should be seeing marriage as a team between a man and a woman. Trainor could have created a better video that was more like that, or just something that didn’t display wives as Susie Homemakers. Women have made great strides since the ‘50s housewives era and have many more options for work today and how they choose to live their lives as wives.
However, as much as I believe that Trainor’s music video is sexist and doesn’t paint married women in a good light, I do give Trainor and her songwriters props for some of the lyrics to this song. Even though the video shows Trainor performing “housewife duties,” in the lyrics she sings, “You got that 9 to 5, but baby so do I.” Given these lyrics, it doesn’t make sense for the video to be just her cooking and cleaning when she is singing about having a job herself. It would have made more sense to show Trainor out in the workforce with a job like the type of woman she is singing about. Even though Trainor has been quoted saying that she doesn’t think the video is sexist, I have to disagree with her. For a song with a lot of potential to make a good statement about modern marriage, she could have done a lot better.
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