Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video

Dreamworlds 3, the highly anticipated update of Sut Jhally's groundbreaking Dreamworlds 2 (1995), examines the stories contemporary music videos tell about girls and women, and encourages viewers to consider how these narratives shape individual and cultural attitudes about sexuality. Illustrated with hundreds of up-to-date images, Dreamworlds 3 offers a unique and powerful tool for understanding both the continuing influence of music videos and how pop culture more generally filters the identities of young men and women through a dangerously narrow set of myths about sexuality and gender. In doing so, it inspires viewers to reflect critically on images that they might otherwise take for granted.

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Since MTV started their operation 1981 by playing this video from the Boggles entitled video killed the radio star.

Music Videos have become a central and vital component of the music, entertainment and media industries.

No longer limited to just one channel, they are spread out to the entire culture and across musical genres.

They have moved from the margins in relevant innocence of the culture to its every center and to a cauldron of controversy around the nature of sexual imagery that quickly came to define it as a genre.

Do we have enough girls?

You can never have enough girls.

All about the girls.

In fact from the very origins music videos like other forms of advertising have relied very heavily on stories concerning female sexuality to fulfill their function of selling CDs and albums for record companies.

Right up to the present it is clear that women’s bodies have functioned as an important currency through which the stories of music videos are told.

Of course as accentually promotional vehicles themselves their closest to form and content to advertising which has used the depiction of female sexuality to draw the attention of viewers in a crowded and noisy environment.

Across the whole range of our media culture the link between a women’s identity her body and her sexuality is told in the most compelling of forms.

But nowhere in popular culture is the story more focused and told in such relentless fashion then in the music video examining stories that music videos tell us about both male and female sexuality about what is considered normal allows us to do more understand one aspect of our culture.

It gives us a way to think about how the culture in general teaches us to be men and women it gives us a way to understand ourselves.

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In fact just as music videos tells us a story of female passivity it equally powerful story of masculinity being tied to power intimidation and force.

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As these ideas of male entitlement and power become glamorized and normalized in a culture, we have to ask what effect to they have on the real life behavior of men and women.

During 2000 Puritan Day Pride Parade in NYC the public space of Central Park turned into a literal war zone for scores of women. Who were doused sexually assaulted and stripped of their clothing by groups of men that felt that they had an entitlement to enact their desires on any female body.

This footage used by the police to identify and prosecute the assailants shocked and out raged the country when it was broadcasted.

But when virtually identical images have been played out over and over again on our television screens with virtually no comment why should we be shocked. In fact what was most striking about these images was how familiar they were.

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While there are chilling similarities between the popular culture images and the real life attacks at central park there is a major difference. The women in the real world where not enjoying it they weren't smiling, this wasn’t their dream world. It was someone else’s, which had turned into their nightmare.