Icons must practise what they preach

Shocking allegations against superstar Lizzo and apparent gaping hole between her advocacy of feminism and the behind-the-scenes lack of it highlight fact that ideology is something that is embodied

I’ve officially reached that point in my life where my existence unfolds beyond the realms of pop music. I am becoming a dinosaur; my musical preferences are possibly already dated and a Gen Z could identify that about me instantly. For example, until two days ago, I didn’t know that the riff made famous through TikTok trends—I’m the problem, it’s me—was from a Taylor Swift song. If you held me at gunpoint and asked me to hum a Swift tune, I would stand no chance. Same with Adele. I follow news about them, or news about them reaches me, because they’re so big. But I don’t really know their music. 

Because I am so caught up with being a mom, my most frequently played music on Spotify includes a sleep-bomb version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and classical music for toddlers. It doesn’t help that I live in a part of the world where English is rarely spoken and the radio features either German or Italian music. So, if you were to ask me if I knew any of Lizzo’s big hits, I would have to find a polite excuse to walk away from the conversation so as not to astonish you with the level of my pop culture ignorance.

It was my niece, who has a birthday today, who introduced me to Lizzo. I imagined her doing an eye roll when I admitted I didn’t know who she was. Because I take my Aunty duties quite seriously, I began following the singer on Instagram and later on TikTok and was instantly swayed by her powerful messaging and everything that her brand embodied. I found her beautiful and her embrace of fatness felt tremendously empowering. This has always felt like ambiguous terrain within popular culture. Because there is no dearth of celebrities who originally connected with audiences on the merit of their plus size only to turn into toothpicks under the spotlight. Each time I would tell myself it was their personal decision, if they wanted to lose weight, they had every right to and didn’t need to make themselves accountable to anyone else, especially in a fatphobic world. But one always felt slightly disappointed. I follow Lizzo because she parades her cellulite and gloriously so. She went ahead and decided her backup dancers would be big women, and that felt really cool. She began designing clothing for bigger women and it looked fabulous. Viewing daily doses of her owning her body made me feel less self-conscious about my own. Watching her use every platform she had to spread awareness about trans lives, abortion rights and other significant feminist issues positioned her as an ally.

So Wednesday morning felt like a punch in the gut when I read about allegations of sexual harassment and weight-shaming filed against her by three of her backup dancers. Like someone said on TikTok, the alarming thing is that you don’t have people lining up to say these allegations are improbable, just a slew of more voices testifying to their veracity. I’m feeling so disappointed to learn about a potential gaping hole between her advocacy of feminism and the behind-the-scenes lack of it. I’m so tired of how feminism gets weaponised by popular culture icons who do not embrace the living of it. All the flamboyant activism, the platforming of marginalised voices, all of it is hollow if the person in question is, in fact, a female patriarch who treats people with relative cruelty. I want to believe that Lizzo is better than that. But it’s difficult. I actually keep checking her Instagram account to see if she’s said anything in her defence. I would hear her out. I haven’t found anything thus far.

There was a time, when I was a younger journalist, when I would feel annoyed with women who skirted the question of whether they were feminists. They would say things like they believed in equal rights for all genders but didn’t think of themselves as feminists. It annoyed me, their inability to commit to the ideology. Now I look at them differently. I almost appreciate their honesty in declaring their ignorance of feminist ideology and not committing on account of it. I still hold them guilty of wilful ignorance, since many of them were super-privileged upper-class women who enjoyed social mobility and had every chance to educate themselves. On the other hand, I think they were already aware that the feminist mandate might demand more moral accountability than they were willing to consider. That is the central message of Sara Ahmed’s book, Living a Feminist 

Life. That you should not preach what you do not practise. And if you practise feminism wholly, then your lived experience becomes an embodiment of these feminist beliefs and it pervades every aspect of your everyday living. There’s a huge part of me that wants to believe there must be another side to the allegations against Lizzo. But there’s the more jaded part of me that thinks she must be held accountable. I don’t know how this will play out, but the whole episode feels like a loss for feminist advocacy.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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