Even better, in the video Katy Perry is wearing a white wedding dress as she first sings the line, signaling that she does not want to change her dress, she wants to continue as the bride. The groom on the other hand is too girly to marry. The bride is "man enough" to make a commitment, the groom not.
This tough girl talk is also the aural strategy in many conservative political commercials, where the voice over is a (white) woman passing along skeptical remarks about Barack Obama. Because the voice sounds female, it gets away with remarks that might otherwise sound like a harraning white guy. This seeming contradiction defines the rhetoric fascination for Sarah Palin, and all those other soccer mom spokeswomen for the right-wing, -- she speaks more like an old white guy than any old white guy, even as she sounds female. Feminine is definitely not how the woman speaking wants to sound, because in this rhetorical context femininity becomes a negative attribute that the conservative, tough-guy female voice accuses the male liberal of having become--soft, indecisive, moody and eager to spend money, a string of attributes that are meant to mock his claim to masculinity.
Just wait, conservative political women are going to sound more and more like Katy Perry--minus the whipped cream spraying.
The tough gal voice-over was especially prevalent in opposition to the health care reform bill, if I remember. What I found interesting about that variant, if you will, is that the voice was similarly "old white dude" even as it invoked a "strictly maternal" position as the family's nurturer. This is the nature of the Grizzly Momma or whatever the hell she's calling herself.
ReplyDeleteYes,there is even a certain kind of tough mom sarcasm that pretends to mock the world from the kitchen table
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