But then again, this applies to all forms of entertainment. You can hide some truly disturbing shit if you just make everything around it sound cheerful enough. Here’s an odd example, but hear us out: Casper the Friendly Ghost. Doesn’t get any more wholesome than Casper, right? In fact, he’s so wholesome and playful that you forget that the whole story centers around a dead child. Oh, but he just wants to help people and be their friend! Yeah, that’s because he never got to do that when he was alive. That’s his unfinished business on Earth as the tortured spirit of, again, a dead child.
Harvey Films
Now, we could easily go through “Blurred Lines” lyric by lyric, but we’re not going to because A) there are copyright issues involved in that, and B) providing the lyrics in their entirety really doesn’t really change the context when it contains lines like “You the hottest bitch in this place” and “I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two,” plus the line “I know you want it” repeated 18 freaking times.
The accusations of the song promoting sexism, misogyny, toxic masculinity, and rape culture started popping up as soon as the song hit the airwaves. Those criticisms are completely valid. The lyrics are creepy as hell! It’s told from the point of view of a guy trying to hit on a girl at the club and how much he really wants to make this good girl turn bad. Here’s the problem with this fictional scenario: obviously, none of these lines are working on this girl, and the guy is not taking the hint. If this pick-up attempt was at all successful, the lyrics wouldn’t keep doubling down like that.
It can be easy to try to dismiss the lyrics to “Blurred Lines” just because it’s just a cheesy pop song that’s not meant to be taken seriously. These singers don’t actually think this way about women. It’s all a big joke … it’s a parody of this toxic behavior, right? Well, that’s when Poe’s Law comes into play; you can only craft a parody so well before it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. There are guys out there in the real world behaving like the guy in "Blurred Lines," and the song definitely wasn’t a wake-up call for them. It was practically an anthem.