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JLo tries (YAY!) but fails (AW!) to change gender roles

"Why do men always objectify the women in every single video? Why can't we, for once, objectify the men?"

A good question, and one that it's great to see anyone mainstream asking, so we love the concept behind Jennifer Lopez's new music video for "I Luh Ya PaPi".

The video begins with JLo and two of her friends listening to a guy from her record company offer her ideas for her new video. The ideas get more and more lame and cheesy until JLo's friends snap, insisting that, "If she was a guy, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all."

"If she was a dude, they would seriously have her up in a mansion with all these half naked girls."

They suggest that her video "could start with her on the bed with a bunch of naked guys for no reason."

So, of course, it does.

A lot of the video is a great parody of how women are usually represented in guy videos. Men strut around in underwear, obviously existing entirely for the sexual pleasure of the women around them.



The best scene has to be the car-wash, where the male models lather up in a way we're used to only ever seeing from women.



Unfortunately, JLo kinda fails to make her point, as a great deal of the video still relies solidly on female sexual objectification. 

To effectively create a video where the roles between men and women are reversed in a way that properly shows the imbalance, JLo and all other women featured in her video would be fully clothed while all men around them would be wearing next-to-nothing.

Think Robin Thicke's video for Blurred Lines.

Instead, JLo is clothed in as little as she usually is, she still dances and poses and generally is at all times as sexy as possible, and the camera still holds male gaze quite a lot.



When French Montana features, he is fully clothed while scantily clad women, including JLo, dance around him in exactly the sexy decoration role women get given that the video is supposedly criticizing.

Hells, one of the women, dressed in skin-tight tiger-print leggings and a tiny tiger-print bikini top, crawls and writhes around in front of French Montana, looking vaguely like an animal on heat.



So, all in all, a nice sentiment JLo, but the delivery pretty much fails. Also, the song is horrible. See for yourself:



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