MTV: Gender & Sexuality

August 1, 1981 was a date of eager expectation for a generation of young people awaiting the blastoff of Music Television, a new channel that promised the delivery of stereo music transferred into a visual medium. Just a day or two before, as kids, teens, and young adults surfed their cable channels, they were stopped in their button-pressing tracks by the curiosity of old NASA footage from Space Shuttle Columbia and Apollo missions. With the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”, the rock music started playing and young viewers were hooked, much like 11-year-old me at the time. Suddenly, how an artist looked was equally as important as how they sounded, and subtlety had no place in this mix. Gender and sexuality, consistently a part of what made rock music so visceral, attractive, and controversial, turned into caricatured versions of their original representations in an effort to grab the audience’s gaze. As with Elvis Presley and the Beatles before, television brought these performers into the lives of viewers, bringing with it not just music, but also new ideas that changed the actions, fashion, and directives of all genders and sexual orientations.

Most MTV viewers could tell you who they wanted to be and who they wanted to be with based on everything they saw on the channel. It turned Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Michael Jackson, Boy George and Madonna into fashion icons as well as objects of lust. Over time, the fashions on the bodies of my fellow classmates at school reflected these fandoms, as hairstyles got higher, and bright neon colors, lace gloves, sunglasses, Adidas, high heels, and skinny ties got their time on the catwalks also known as the school hallways. Some classmates however, tended to tease others who were presenting looks that did not fit what they saw as the “gender norm”. For as acceptable as it was for us to see the androgyny of Prince or Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics on MTV, and for as encouraged as fans felt to find themselves in their form of dress, not everyone understood and so they were sometimes ridiculed. David Bowie, who had been gender-bending at least a decade prior to MTV, was currently in a more masculine phase, but he was still fully embraced by the channel due to his exceptional ability to present a fully fleshed out and complete visual package to go along with his music.

In the case of how women were represented on MTV, it could be split into two factions: empowerment or objectification. Sometimes the lines between the two blurred, and while Madonna and her fans felt she was representing an empowered female, detractors were given plenty of ammunition with her BoyToy belt buckle and dancing (or writhing, as many reporters called it then) as a bride on a wedding cake singing “Like a Virgin”. Artists like Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, and Tina Turner received less opposition even though their music and fashion choices had plenty of sexuality on display. They were shown as being strong and in full control of their own presentation of their sexuality, whether that was accurate or not. Objectification of women happened most often in videos by male artists, where the women were shown, as in Kiss’ “Lick it Up” and “Heaven’s on Fire”, as merely a set dressing, intended to sex up the background over which the artists’ could lip-sync their lyrics. Hair metal bands were blamed the most (Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”) but as rap came into the mainstream, “video vixens” became a true phenomenon and model/actresses would pride themselves on how many rap videos they had “starred” in.

The unspoken secret of MTV was who was gay and who wasn’t, and more importantly to some, who was out. One of MTV’s first beloved icons was Boy George, who had fans of all genders dressing like him. Upon receiving one of their MTV Award “Moon Men”, George thanked the audience for “knowing a good drag queen when you see one” complete with a kiss at the end of the sentence. For as obvious as it was that he was a cross-dresser, no one wanted to hear whether his songs were written about men or women. For as unapologetically flamboyant as he was, it was still a balancing act to make sure middle America would still buy his band’s records without him coming out publicly. Plenty of early MTV mainstays were at least partly in the closet if not completely in it. The popularity of Elton John, George Michael of Wham!, and Joan Jett were in full swing, but not a thing was mentioned about their sexual preferences whether they wanted to talk about it publicly or not. It was not until the early 90’s that artists like Melissa Etheridge finally stepped up and came out instead of hiding behind well-placed non-gender specific pronouns. By the way, her coming out was fully explained and discussed on MTV offshoot channel VH1’s “Storytellers”. For all the efforts the channel had previously given to hiding artists’ orientation, they eventually turned to embrace and celebrate it. I wonder if showing these artists in the earliest days of MTV was a dipping of the toe into the waters of being more open about gender and sexuality, and once the avenue was established, it was open for anyone to step forward and be the first to be out.

MTV had an exceptional opportunity to spread their particular brand of pop culture worldwide, and it not only followed cultural trends but also started them. At a time when moral restrictions had loosened, the channel had a chance to become bold in their depictions of gender and sexuality, and even in the Reagan era’s attempt at the re-tightening of morality, MTV managed to stay on the edge of the issues, at least until they stopped showing music videos. But that’s another decade and another discussion entirely, which I hope to cover in a future writing. Until then, enjoy the following links to various videos showing the examples I cited: