Being an icon, the rapper-singer-songwriter Lizzo once said, is not about how long you’ve had your platform. Instead it’s about “what you do with that platform”, as she told a cheering crowd at last year’s People’s Choice awards in the US, before inviting a string of female activists who she suggested were more deserving of recognition to join her on stage.
Few seemingly embodied inclusive feminism better than Lizzo, who built her brand on an uplifting, joyful, thrillingly body-positive form of female empowerment while glorying in her sexuality as a self-styled “big grrrl”. Of course it’s her bouncy, summery track Pink that plays over the opening scenes of the new Barbie film. Who better than Lizzo to sell the idea of a dreamworld ruled by women for women, where men are just Kens and benign rule by Barbies frees all their sisters to be whatever they want to be?
How depressing, then, that the very same Lizzo should now find herself accused – along with her production company and dance captain Shirlene Quigley – of creating the very opposite of a dreamworld for women behind closed doors. Three of her former tour dancers have filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles claiming they were “exposed to an overtly sexual atmosphere that permeated their workplace”, effectively amounting to sexual harassment. Quigley is accused of pushing her Christian views on the dancers, denigrating those who had premarital sex, and Lizzo of pressuring one of the dancers to intimately touch a nude performer in an Amsterdam club, a story that sounds as if it could have come straight from some 1990s horror story of City women forced into a leering boys’ trip to Stringfellows. The same dancer, Arianna Davis, also alleges she felt fat-shamed for her weight on a tour explicitly celebrating full-figured women.
On Thursday Lizzo hit back hard at what she called “sensationalised stories” from former employees who, she alleged, behaved unprofessionally on tour, writing on her Instagram account: “Usually I choose not to respond to false allegations but these are as unbelievable as they sound and too outrageous to not be addressed.” The vitriol poured over her on social media, meanwhile, suggests some are enjoying trashing a loud, proud, joyously big black woman for all the wrong reasons. But while the truth of these particular allegations will presumably now be settled only in court, there’s a cautionary tale here about female empowerment that transcends one artist.
The idea that any female boss could be as capable as a male one of making employees’ lives miserable, or even of sexual harassment, shouldn’t surprise us as much as it invariably does. Sisters are not always sisterly and nor are women somehow innately nice. (I still remember the former colleague shocked to be asked directly whether she planned to get pregnant any time soon, in a job interview conducted by a groundbreaking senior woman; I remember, too, the doughty feminist campaigner whose young female underlings seemed visibly terrified of her.) Sexual harassment by women, meanwhile, may be rare but it’s not nonexistent. At the height of #MeToo, when the Westminster whisper network started sharing stories about allegedly inappropriate behaviour by MPs, a sprinkling of female names was thrown in to an admittedly much larger pot of male ones who reportedly made junior staff feel uncomfortable.
For whatever reason, those particular whispers never saw the light of day. Perhaps men worried that if they reported it they’d be ridiculed, or told they should be able to handle a clumsy sexual overture or remark from a woman half their size. But anyone can be afraid of the professional consequences of rejecting the boss. Anyone can be made to feel humiliated, or anxious about coming in to work because of what they’ll have to pretend they are comfortable with. And women, of course, can also be sexually harassed by women.
Yet the possibility still rarely enters into our assumptions, even now. The current Commons women and equalities select committee inquiry into misogyny in the music industry has heard some shocking stories about life in a precarious freelance world where crew members feared they’d never work again if they complained about a big star’s behaviour. But what’s striking, reading through the evidence transcripts, is how many witnesses and MPs alike talked about tackling misogyny by hiring more female executives or signing more female artists. It is ingrained in us to see men as the problem and women as the answer, no doubt because so often that is how it pans out.
But anyone can behave badly given half a chance, especially in the kind of toxic, high-pressure environments where people with power are indulged in abusing it, so long as they’re getting results. Harassment is ultimately an abuse of power, and these days power doesn’t always lie where it did.
Countless women, me included, can point to female bosses who made their working lives easier. But plonking one woman on a golden pedestal fixes nothing by itself. It’s not enough for one Barbie to preside over a make-believe world of female empowerment, while in the real world the same old assumptions and commercial pressures create the conditions under which some women thrive and others mysteriously don’t. And there’s nothing particularly positive, either, about a sexuality that rides roughshod over other people’s boundaries. The only power that really counts, at work or in private life but perhaps especially in the kind of jobs that disingenuously blur the two, is the power to say no to something personally uncomfortable without having to live in fear of the consequences.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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