Women in Philosophy: When Is it Ethical to Consume Sexist Art?

by Alida Liberman

As a young feminist killjoy who didn’t want to listen to sexist music, I indignantly walked out of my eighth grade school dance in protest when the DJ started playing “The Thong Song” by Sisqo. I was recently reminded of this moment when the same song popped up on a radio station I was listening to. I’m still a feminist killjoy, but I didn’t switch the station this time—I turned it up and found myself laughing at the cheesy lyrics and grooving to the beat.

I’ll never understand why a disc jockey thought it would be a good idea to play a paean to revealing underwear at a middle school event. But I do understand why I didn’t want to listen to it as a young teenager. The rhythmic repetition in the song is super catchy, and the chord changes sound awesome. But the lyrics are also clearly objectifying. And it’s frustrating to have to listen to degrading messages while trying to enjoy pop music.

What should we do in situations like this? Is the right response to register your disapproval by walking out of the dance, even though this means missing out on some of the fun? Or is it better to keep on dancing, even though this means gritting your teeth while trying to ignore a sexist message, while perhaps worrying that you might be a “bad” feminist?

Many funny, beautiful, entertaining, or otherwise valuable works of art and products of popular culture contain misogynistic themes, imagery, and messages. From graphic novels to crime procedural shows to arthouse cinema, popular storylines frequently normalize or even glamorize violence against women, and women characters are often one-dimensional stereotypes—when they’re even portrayed at all. It’s even worse when we consider this in light of the intersectional ways in which women face oppression on the basis of both their gender and other aspects of their identity: lots of sexist art is also racist, xenophobic, ableist, homophobic, and more. Complicating matters further is the fact that, as the Me Too movement has made increasingly clear in recent months, art is often created by artists who have raped, harassed, beaten, or sexually assaulted people.

One reason you might refrain from consuming morally troubling art is that doing so sometimes leads directly to bad consequences: it might put money into the pocket of a known abuser or contribute to an environment in which sexual assault is treated with impunity. If these consequences are bad enough, this gives us sufficient reason enough to avoid supporting the art. But in many cases, such consequences are minimal or non-existent, and we cannot morally assess whether the art is worthy of our support on purely consequentialist grounds. My leaving the room when “The Thong Song” came on didn’t affect whether the song was played or what other people thought of it, and the same is true of my listening to it on the radio.

What should we do when our choices about what art to consume signal what we support but otherwise don’t have any tangible impact? In such cases, many of us are inclined to stand behind an artwork in virtue of its good features and despite its bad ones. We might, for example, enjoy the cynicism and humor of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors while simultaneously decrying the alleged crimes and misdemeanors of the film’s creator and star. Is this sort of split attitude ever defensible? Put aside cases in which you’re consuming art for some legitimate further purpose (such as analyzing it as a historical artifact), and focus on the usual reasons for which people choose to consume art: to be entertained, or to be edified, or to expand your horizons, or to appreciate beauty, etc. Morally speaking, can it be permissible to consume art that has good features but includes sexist content or was made by sexist creators?

This is a difficult and complicated question, which has been helpfully addressed in various specific ways by a number of writers, feminists, and philosophers. Here, I want to suggest some generalizable criteria that we can use to help us figure out when it is morally okay to support a problematic work of art because of its good features and in spite of its bad ones. (These good features are usually positive aesthetic features of the artwork, while the bad features are generally negative moral features of the artwork or bad moral behavior of the artist; while there may be differences in how to think about these two kinds of negative features, I think they’re subject to the same broad criteria.)

Separability: Can the good features of the artwork be conceptually distanced from the artwork’s bad features, or from the bad behavior of the artist? If not, it doesn’t seem possible to support the artwork in virtue of its good features and despite its bad ones, for the good and bad features are inextricably intertwined. In some cases, we can draw a clear and sharp line between an artist’s actions and the artwork that he—for, statistically speaking, it’s nearly always he—created. For example, Harvey Weinstein has been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting dozens of women, and was recently arrested on rape charges. But these crimes are not closely connected to the movies he has produced; at least in some contexts, one can watch a Weinstein-produced film like Shakespeare in Love or Gangs of New York without being vividly reminded of or implicitly condoning Weinstein’s noxious behavior.

This isn’t always so. For example, comedian Louis C.K. has admitted to sexually harassing women by masturbating in front of them. In 2017, Louis wrote, directed, and starred in a film called I Love You, Daddy, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (but was ultimately never released in the United States). In one scene, Louis’s TV producer character Glen takes a call on speakerphone from Grace, an actress. For the duration of the call, Glen’s buddy Ralph enthusiastically mimes masturbation, which he continues doing even when Glen’s female fellow producer enters the office. One simply can’t watch this scene without immediately thinking of Louis’s real-world sexual misconduct and worrying whether the film condones it: the artwork and the misdeeds of the artist are in this case inseparable, which should make us hesitate before consuming it. (And this does not even take into account the other ways in which aspects of the movie—whose plot revolves around Glen’s teenage daughter engaging in a romantic relationship with a 68-year-old famous director whom Glen idolizes—are morally troubling.)

Proportionality: Sometimes, the bad features of a work of art are so terrible that the artwork is unworthy of endorsement no matter how good the positive features are. This is arguably true of a song like Eminem’s “Kim”, which depicts the brutal murder of Eminem’s real-life ex-wife, her current husband, and her four-year-old step-son. A review in Rolling Stone characterized the song as “Eminem screaming at his ex in an insane stream-of-consciousness hate spew,” though they also called the album “impossible to pull your ears away from.” But it seems to me that no degree of masterful lyricism is worth stomaching such violent and misogynistic content (especially because the violence is arguably a deliberate attempt to increase sales).

When the bad features of an artwork aren’t disqualifyingly terrible, we have to make a comparative judgement about whether the good features are sufficiently weightier than the bad. For example, Parks and Recreation is one of my favorite sitcoms. It’s really funny, it centers female friendship, and it features well-rounded and powerful women characters, which is rare for mainstream TV comedies. It also contains mean and unnecessary fat jokes. Are these jokes bad enough to make the show as a whole unworthy of endorsement? I don’t think so, although I think there could be reasonable disagreement about this. Contrast this with the recent Netflix show Insatiable, which is about a teenager who loses 70 pounds after her jaw is wired shut, and who seeks “revenge” on her classmates by, among other things, participating in beauty pageants. The show—which was popular with audiences but panned by critics—has some positive features, such as darkly funny jokes. But I think that Insatiable’s bad features—including, centrally, relentless fatphobia and the perpetuation of demeaning stereotypes about fat women—are so bad that they outweigh its moderate amount of enjoyable humor, making the show as a whole unworthy of endorsement.

Constrained choice: When considering whether to consume art that contains a sexist message or was created by a sexual abuser, we should think about whether there are non-sexist alternatives that we might consume instead. For example, some people criticized the 2013 film Pacific Rim because it failed the Bechdel test, which assesses gender representation in film by asking whether there are two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. Pacific Rim has only one female main character: Mako Mori, a pilot who fights off interdimensional monsters to avenge her murdered family.

A commenter on Tumblr pushed back against this criticism, noting that Mako is “a well-written Japanese woman who is informed by her culture without being solely defined by it, without being a racial stereotype, and gets to carry the film and have character development,” which “almost NEVER comes along in mainstream Western media. And honestly—someone like her will probably not appear again for a very long time. So you’ll understand why I can’t throw her and the entire film away as meaning nothing in terms of representation—because she’s all I really have right now.” Her idea was that East Asian women are in a situation of constrained choice when deciding which movies to watch. Ideally, its best to support movies that have decent gender representation and include more than one female character. But because so few Hollywood films feature positive, three-dimensional depictions of East Asian women as main characters, any films that do so are worth watching: there simply aren’t enough good alternatives. A similar claim will likely be true for art that fails the Bechdel test but offers nuanced and positive depiction of people from other underrepresented groups.

Other films with poor gender representation are not worthy of endorsement. For example, comics writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has coined the “sexy lamp test” to criticize stories that treat female characters in such objectifying ways that they could literally be replaced by objects (such as a “sexy lamp”). A film that fails the sexy lamp test may have gorgeous cinematography or great action scenes. But we’re not in a situation of constrained choice regarding such films, as we can usually find other movies in any genre that are beautiful or exciting and that portray women in ways that give them at least an ounce of agency. Films that fail the Bechdel test may still be worth watching, provided they represent their female characters in other positive ways; films that fail the sexy lamp test probably are not.

In general, I think that these criteria—separability, proportionality, and constrained choice—are widely applicable, and can help us assess the moral permissibility of a wide range of endorsements. Should I vote for a politician with good social policies but bad economic policies? It depends: just how damaging are the economic policies? Should I watch American football for its athleticism and despite the traumatic brain injuries received by players? Probably not, as I think this fails the proportionality criterion (even though NFL fans may be in a situation of constrained choice if football has distinctive goods that other sports lack). Should I support a Confederate monument that stands for Southern pride but also signals white supremacy? A definite no: the “states’ rights” valorized by such monuments include the right to own slaves, and are thus inseparable from white supremacy.

In the end, we’re likely to discover that many of our faves are problematic, and that the patriarchy is so embedded in our society that at some point we’re bound to wind up consuming sexist art and engaging with the work of men who abuse women. When the problematic aspects of our faves are separable from and proportionate to the good aspects, and when we’re in a situation of constrained choice, I think that such consumption can be morally okay. So I won’t leave the room in protest the next time “The Thong Song” comes on. But I also won’t endorse the song whole-heartedly, and I’ll work on finding other upbeat and catchy songs that aren’t objectifying to enjoy as well.

*This post is based on a paper that I presented at the 2018 Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics, a version of which will be published in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.

Alida Liberman is an assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research is in theoretical and practical ethics. Recently, much of her work has been spurred on by feeling frustrated by what she’s reading in the news, and trying to sort out what’s going on philosophically under the surface of these stories. You can find out more about her research and teaching interests at her website, www.alidaliberman.com.