In one of her earliest songs, “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” P!nk sang, “I’m tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears/She’s so pretty, that just ain’t me.” We’ll respectfully submit that Ms. Alecia Moore has her own share of attractive physical qualities, and also assure her: Don’t worry, no one’s about to mix you and Ms. Spears up anytime again soon.
P!nk may well be the most outspokenly, unapologetically, and explicitly feminist pop-rocker currently on the charts. While many female pop stars continue to profit from “empowering” images while ducking the “feminist” label — hi, Katy Perry! — P!nk weaves feminism into the fabric of almost everything she does. She shoes off her buff bod when she feels like it, but never in a self-objectifying way. (Somehow, we’re pretty sure she wears whatever she wants and doesn’t care what anyone says about it.) She writes songs about loving sex, hating her husband, loving her husband, and hating superficial starlets. See “Stupid Girls” for quintessential example: “What ever happened to the dreams of a girl president?/She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent.”
Call her a mean girl if you’d like — there was a bit of feminist hand-wringing over “Stupid Girls” taking other women down. But P!nk would be the first to embrace the label; she simply says what she’s thinking. And sometimes, we need to call other women out if they’re the ones bringing us down.
If there’s anything girls need to see more of in culture, it’s women who express themselves no matter what — in love, righteous anger, or even misdirected anger. Nobody does that better than P!nk — who gives that quintessentially girly color a much-needed edge.
