making edible playdough is hegemonic.

Here is the video for a song called “Do it like a dude,” sung by Jessie J:

In case you scrolled past the video without watching it, I’ll just tell you that it’s an absolute celebration of gay ladies and the sex they have together. Here are some lyrics:

I can do it like a brother
Do it like a dude
Grab my crotch, wear my hat low like you

Do it like a brother
Do it like a dude
Grab my crotch, wear my hat low like you

We can do it like the man’dem, man’dem
We can do it like the man’dem, man’dem
Sugar sugar sugar
We can do it like the man’dem, man’dem
We can do it like the man’dem, man’dem
Sugar sugar sugar

Boom Boom, pull me a beer
No pretty drinks, I’m a guy out here
Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ money like a pimp
My B I T C H’s on my d*ck like this

Dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty sucka
You think I can’t get hurt like you, you motherf….

I can do it like a brother
Do it like a dude
Grab my crotch, wear my hat low like you

Some have expressed concern about the message of this video. Over at the woman-slanted queer site Autostraddle, riese tells us that though her first response was “YES THIS YES THIS LIKE IT YES THIS!,” more careful consideration led her to conclude that “despite its genderfucking qualities, many might argue that ‘Do It Like a Dude’ paradoxically uses men/maleness as a golden standard by which to define itself.”

The gay male-targeted blog Manhunt suggests that “Do It Like a Dude” is about, er, penis envy. If that’s so, or if it’s a reasonable interpretation of the song or video, then this is an additional reason to think hard about whether it’s fair for the queerlady community to embrace it.

But I don’t, believe that it’s reasonable to interpret this song or its video as being about penis envy. First, this is a queerladies-only song–no straight men allowed. The video especially makes its hostility and righteous anger clear: The camera becomes the “you,” the “dude” of the song, and Jessie J lunges and menaces at it like this:

The jerkiness of the women’s bodies, the refusal to sexualize or to make palatable their limbs or breasts or lips or attraction to other women, that’s an outright “fuck you” to the male gaze.

There’s one quick juxtaposed shot that Autostraddle finds problematic: The only women in the video who actually kiss look like this:

Riese asks: “why do we have all these hot dykes of color dancing in wifebeaters but the only women who kiss in the video are these two, dropped in mid-frame like out of someone else’s music video?”

I think the reason is simple: the kissing women are a ‘fuck you’ to a male-dominated, heteronormative culture that likes its lesbians girly and wet dream-ready. They seem like they were dropped in from someone else’s music video because they really are absolutely out of place in this spike-lipped, sausage-butchering world. Since the rest of the video is so seamlessly hostile and angry, since there are no other instances of women touching in a heteroerotic way, it seems valid to assume that the clip was inserted, Tyler Durden-style, into the Fight Club world of Jessie J.

This is a smart, sassy video that’s probably only sexy to a subcategory of queerladies and maybe a few queergentlemen. I found it deeply sexy, FYI, and though god knows I like to be critical of stuff I find no solid foundation on which to critique this song or video as heteronormative or a product of penis envy.

As to the language of the lyrics, the “Boom Boom, pull me a beer / No pretty drinks, I’m a guy out here / Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ money like a pimp / My B I T C H’s on my d*ck like this”: It is a misconception and an enormous disservice to genderqueerladies and butches and drag kings to assume that women who perform ‘masculinity’ want to be ‘like men.’ Even when they say, for example, that they can ‘wear my hat low like you,’ they’re not imitating men–they’re (re)claiming ‘masculinity’ for their own purposes. When a (cisgendered) man dresses in drag, we don’t assume he wants to be just like a woman; we assume–and rightly so, in my view–that he is claiming a gender identity that crosses, transgresses, or transcends a gender binary.

That’s what the Jessie J video does, and nearly perfectly. And thank christ for it–we finally have a good reason to replace Katy Perry’s ridiculous, insipid, and problematically straight-friendly “I kissed a girl.”