It was only four years ago in 2012 when five teenage girls wowed us in “The X Factor USA” as Fifth Harmony. Now its lead single “Work From Home” from the second album has me turning my head. What were those lyrics?
It seemed like a fun pop song about women in the work force (#BreakThatGlassCeiling) until I looked a little closer at the lyrics. Now it seems like the song is less about balancing that home-work life and more about domination in sex industry (#FiftyShades).
1. “Put in them hours, I’mma make it harder/ I’m sending pic after picture, I’mma get you fired”
2. “‘Cause baby, you’re the boss at home”
3. “Let my body do the work”
4. “We don’t need nobody, I just need your body/ Nothin’ but sheets in between us, ain’t no getting off early”
5. “Girl, go to work for me/ Can you make it clap, no hands for me?”
Excuse me? This is so disappointing for a song that could have been about empowering women to become professional businesswomen, lawyers, artists or doctors. Instead, these 19- and 20-year-old women are pretending to be women of the night. The music video features the women and men in construction garb twerking at a construction site – make of that what you will. Still the girl band claims the song empowers them and is, in fact, about gender equality.
“That’s something that’s been instilled in us by our moms and our families since we were very little, because obviously — especially in the music industry — it’s very male-dominated,” the group’s Camila Cabello told SPIN. “I think that’s what’s helped with this new social awareness of what it means to be a feminist and what it means to be a woman and what it means to fight for equality and destroy all the gender-institutionalized thinking that existed before about gender roles.”
While it’s totally fine for women to sing about their sexuality, these lyrics are less about gender empowerment and more about playing into age-old sexist stereotypes of the woman pleasing the man. That’s not a typical feminist value. Sorry, Fifth Harmony.
Between this and a raunchy performance in Las Vegas, this might just be the permanent vibe of the band. In the meantime, I might be turning off the radio.
Video courtesy of Simco Ltd./Epic Records via fifth-harmony.tumblr.com)