Okay, here is what is wrong with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. The actual topic of the song is objectifying women. It’s a song about how he can’t reconcile his impression of a woman as a “good girl” trope with the fact that she is interested in sex. It is a song specifically about the fact that he regards women as shallow stereotypes and feels confused when they switch from one to another.
The video matches the song perfectly, half naked women appear to be having fun enticing fully dressed men who don’t seem 100% sure what to do with themselves.
It’s the message.
I can even kind of enjoy it as a way of poking fun at people who could be so genuinely confused by the fact that women are humans but it creeps me out because Thicke really doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. So to be clear, I thought the nudity in Thicke’s video completely made sense* - it’s just that the sense that it made was to make the point, “Wow, women… what’s up with that?”
I realize this isn’t what you’ll hear from a lot of people, a lot of people who didn’t like Blurred Lines probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the song or the video or reading interviews with Robin Thicke about the song. But just because people don’t articulate all of that, it doesn’t mean that what was bothering them was the nudity itself, and it doesn’t mean that there is any comparison between this video and that one just because there are some naked women in it. There are people wearing rabbit masks in the video but I’m not going to start making comparisons to Donnie Darko.
With regard to this video, and why there were naked women in it, and whether it was subverting the idea of a cult at all, I really have only two things to say: 1) the cops were not swayed by sex, they were swayed by mystical third eyes opening on their foreheads, and 2) aliens. So I think this might be a case where reasonable people can disagree about the interpretation of art.
*Not that the presence of nudity is a special thing that needs to be made sense of compared to any other element
