COMMENTARY | Singer Katy Perry is being savaged by some on the left, including uber feminist writer Naomi Wolf, for a video of her latest single, "Part of Me," which depicts the singer joining the Marine Corps after a breakup with a cheating boyfriend.
Wolf was not amused, as she states on her Facebook page, "Have you all seen the Katy Perry Marines video? It is a total piece of propaganda for the Marines." She goes on to claim the video glorifies violence and to demand a boycott be imposed on Perry for daring to suggest joining the Marines is a form of female empowerment.
The video in question is not that violent, depicting as it does Perry undergoing Marine boot camp, doing things like being yelled at by a DI, undergoing a confidence course, sticking a dummy with a bayonet and cavorting under an American flag. While Perry looks and sounds quite fetching in uniform, her video does not approach the awesomeness of the "Marines Charging into Chaos" video in which Chaos is about to get the mother of all butt kickings.
Wolf attempted to teach Al Gore to behave like a man, wearing Earth toned clothing and whatnot, for the 2000 election, in which he went up against someone who needed no teaching about manliness, George W. Bush. That she feels threatened by the concept of the Marine Corps as a vehicle for female empowerment says a lot.
But then Wolf is a faculty lounge feminist who spends her time whining about the patriarchy for book royalties and lecture fees. Perry is demonstrating pioneer feminism, to use a phrase first coined by Sarah Palin. Pioneer feminism harkens back to the women who helped open the American frontier, which among other things involved totting guns.
It is obligatory to mention the Marines, whom Wolf so disdains, risk their lives so that she might write nonsense about a singer glorifying them. There are some countries where women like Wolf would be stoned to death.
The Marines really do not need glorifying. Their deeds, from the ship board actions in the American Revolution, to the most recent fight in Afghanistan's hills, do that more than adequately.
