Reflections on Made You Look

What am I looking at?

I confess an appreciation for Meghan Trainor (I know, I’m a 50 year-old dude. I make no apology). She’s been in the public eye since “All About That Bass” hit the singles charts almost ten years ago now, and her brand sits in a unique groove. She writes her own stuff, evoking a Grease-esque candy-pastel fantasyland where everything is a retro 50s diner, but in a cyberpunk movie. It’s poodle skirts and electronic bass, pigtails and bold glitter lipstick, and surprisingly vulnerable “I’m just a girl who needs love” lyrics laid over something resembling a doo-wop track, but TikTok-dancey. She sounds like the B-52s looked; If you told ChatGPT to remake an Annette Funicello Beach Party movie for zoomers, it would undoubtedly score the movie with Meghan Trainor tracks. As one who is intrigued by uniquely talented people being uniquely talented, I come back to Trainor every once in a while to just listen and smile. She does good work.

Her new(ish) single, “Made You Look,” drifted across my feeds the other day, and I popped open a YouTube window to check it out. It’s classic Trainor, a peppy melody with a simple mostly-chorus structure that she keeps fresh by virtue of her unique patois vocal and inimitable visual style. Part of that style rests on the fact that she is not a skinny pop tart. She is, frankly, built like a normal person; she looks thicker around the middle standing amidst the sinewy troupe of backup dancers common to music videos, but would be just fine in any ordinary setting. That makes her arresting to look at in a music video, because she doesn’t look like anyone placed around her. I can salute that. 

So I’m watching along, and the song is catchy, but the video is … disturbing. I want you to watch the video now. Watch the whole thing. There’s a good chance you’ll respond with something like “that was an okay song, BUT” and you’ll have one of several “but”s. Take 3 minutes and watch it. Seriously, watch the whole thing. Call it research. Pay attention. Maybe watch it twice in case something catches the edge of your vision. Do NOT stop it before the end. Watch it all the way through. I’ll wait. 

Now let’s talk about what you just saw. Because I have concerns. 

Here There be Drag-ons

The mincing drag/trans cast was jarring to see here. Trainor’s vibe is already a  near-caricature of femininity that is played for cutesy laughs (and she’s taken some heat for it before, notably around her song “Dear Future Husband”), so inserting drag performers into a video like this may have seemed like a natural fit to whoever scripted this video. But in practice it threw me. The exaggerated finger wagging, lip pursing, rump shaking, and head bobbing is classic drag, and waltzes into the background (and sometimes foreground) more or less at will all through the video. The presence of the drag (dare I say trans?) performers is NOT seamless inclusion. It is starkly noticeable, and threatens to shove Trainor (and all the biological women) off the screen entirely.  

Where the Girls Are

The video makers seem to intuit this, and appear to go out of their way to include a sequence with some obvious women in it. In this case, “normal” women at what might be some kind of salon (in which, I presume, some product placement is happening, but I’m not the target audience so I don’t know). Except even there, the drag dudes are flouncing all over the place and occupying most of the screen. Four women are featured in the salon. All four are big-time TikTokkers themselves, so I suppose they are here by way of cameo, and their respective armies of followers undoubtedly shrieked gleefully at their inclusion here, even for the few moments they are on screen. And power to ‘em for that. If you’ve got followers and whatnot, you go, girl. 

The problem is that the video seems to want them to go “over there” while other people dance. The four “featured” women all get pushed to the edges, remaining seated for the whole salon sequence. They shoulder-shimmy a little, and get to flip their hair and smile sassy smiles for the camera, but are spectators in the sequence, not participants. Frankly, they seem shoehorned in here, like they’re fighting to be seen. I actually side-eyed the video here, because it has an oily taste of tokenism (dare I say misogyny?) to it, and that flies in the face of what the song seems to want to be about. It’s just off somehow. 

The Social Media Bully

And then the end hits, and it all crystallizes into horror. Trainor and her dancers wrap up the last note, and a flamboyantly effete gay “producer” (frosted tips, feather boa, pink leggings) struts into frame talking down to Trainor even as he fawns over her about how awesome that performance was. Everyone consciously defers to him and he clearly knows he’s in charge. He babbles about how the video will be going on social media in just a few minutes, remarking that he’s adding “hashtag Made You Look, hashtag Ally (don’t ask about that one).”

< record scratch > 

Don’t ask about that one? Is Meghan Trainor not an enthusiastic alphabet ally? Why would she not be happy to hashtag it on social media all the livelong day? What are we to make of “don’t ask about that one?” It suggests she is being co-opted by people with agendas, which is not a good look for this producer character, who clearly has an agenda. 

But we only get a moment to notice, because the guy then semi-sneers to the cast “we’re gonna to do it one more time, for my account, and you’re gonna do it better.” And Trainor marshals her dancers to comply, murmuring uncertainly to herself “just do it, just do it,” before she takes a deep breath and pastes her big smile on for the camera. 

This isn’t a music video. It’s a hostage video. “Made You Look” is a fun peppy song, but this video is a nightmare of female DISempowerment. The women are made to smile and cheer for male cavorting, with no agency of their own. This is a glimpse into a clown world where women exist only to provide an outlet for men to affect femininity, covering their LARPing with the company of those to whom it truly belongs. We see here an encroaching erasure of women as a distinct type of human, perpetrated by jealous men cloaking themselves in the cosmetic trappings of something they can never truly be, while bamboozling the artist, her social media besties, and the entire viewing audience with a catchy neo-doo-wop track. It’s completely nuts.

And it’s really surprisingly brave to put it on display like this, which gives me pause. What were these video-makers thinking? This got workshopped, scripted, shot, edited, and released. Nobody involved ever asked “why does Meghan have fear in her eyes at the end”? Meghan Trainor is a multi-platinum recording artist. Nobody stopped to be troubled at the idea that she’s being bullied by a man into “doing it again, but better” for him personally? Nobody stopped to consider the implications? Is everybody involved okay with presenting gay/drag/trans characters shoving themselves into the proceedings here, and subtly indicating that the principal performer here may not be totally okay with that but is being cowed into compliance?

There are two plausible scenarios here. First, this could be meant to be encouraging. This is meant to honestly depict the fact that not all women are super comfortable having their space encroached on, but we don’t have to be totally comfortable with each other to be tolerant of one another. The population of female backup dancers, or swimmers or weightlifters or bicyclists (or heads of federal agencies) may not love the fact that biological males are shoving themselves into the ladies’ spotlights (and winning all the ladies’ trophies), but a little discomfort is natural while we all “just do it, just do it” and figure out how to live in our new progressive era. If this is true, it’s pretty tone deaf. And I’ll dare say it: misogynistic.

As off-putting as that is, though, I rather hope it’s the truth, because the other option is much worse: it moves past “the usual” misogyny to open contempt for womanhood. It’s not just accepting and embracing the fact that women aren’t fans of male intrusion, it’s rubbing it in. Ladies, your #timesup. Anybody can have what you have previously been able to keep to yourselves, and it is for you only to submit, paste on a smile, and “just do it, just do it” or else. Sadly, I suspect this is closer to the truth.    

This is all made worse by the fact that it’s happening around this song specifically. “Made You Look” is about how a girl can look great in designer clothes, but “even with nothing on,” even when her “morning hair’s a mess,” you feel compelled to look at her and she “makes your glasses steam” anyway. It specifically steams the glasses of the only apparently straight male character in the video—Trainor’s real-life husband, who guest stars as the chauffeur in the screenshot at the top of this post.

The implication is that you can’t help but adore the female narrator’s womanness even when she’s dressed way down (or undressed completely, which is a quietly bold statement of body acceptance all its own). For drag performers to hijack this song’s video is mind-boggling given that drag relies on outward trappings exclusively. Stripped of the cosmetic outer sheen (clothes, wigs, makeup), there’s nothing feminine to appreciate. There’s no core of womanhood for someone to love for its own sake. 

The creative decisions here are very troubling, but I want to know if I’m missing something. Get in my comments (or catch me on Notes!) and discuss.