Tag Archives: Body image

‘We can twerk it out’

… is the world’s first twerksploitation movie, in which our heroine exchanges her small but dull town for Capital City in order to compete in the inaugural National Twerking Championships, and wins, but along the way forgets what’s important. Whilst rehearsing for the World Finals, in Twerksopp, she suffers an horrific accident and can never twerk again, but finds true love with the dull, second choice ex-.

There will be an amusing scene with an adorable dog, Coldplay are pencilled in for the love theme. Jennifer Lopez’ people are interested. Jennifer Anniston’s too probably, who cares. Inspired by this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CddMD3QqTFs

Okay that’s not actually true.

I was going to write about whether twerking was a harmless bit of fun, an authentic cultural expression of a Afro Caribbean sexual identity challenging Western expectations around body image and behaviour or a symptom of the extent to which the sexualisation of our culture through factors like online pornography and the exploitative visual language of advertising and the music industry (RIP) has skewed our norms and values to the extent that  young women are pressurised to be complicit in what feminist cinema critic Laura Mulvey called  ‘the male gaze’, a centuries-old enjoyment, objectification and punishment of female sexuality through visual representation in which we are all ultimately trapped. The movie thing was a hook.

I have actually been banned from twerking in my house following the incident with the waterproof trousers, which I was testing in the kitchen. The image of an early middle aged man from Middlesbrough performing bottom-led rhythmic dance in functional fabric clothing is probably too erotic for many, but it’s in your head now.

Incidentally, the trousers have ‘Altura Night Vision’ written on the side of them and – whilst I don’t want to turn down a sponsorship opportunity because amazingly this blog has not made any money yet – I wore them the other night and everything looked the same, which is disappointing.

See you on the streets.

PS the twerk fail video is a fake. everything is fake.