JULY 10 —  Rihanna’s controversial music video Bitch Better Have My Money (BBHMM) is a lot of things, but misogynistic is not one of them. The seven-minute video shows Rihanna kidnapping the wife of an accountant after he defrauds her. With the help of two female friends, the black pop singer strips the wealthy Caucasian woman naked, ties her up, and swings her upside down from a roof topless. A bottle is smashed over the blonde woman’s head and in one scene, she’s face down under the water in a swimming pool. But she’s left alive, stuffed in a trunk, while Rihanna takes a knife and approaches her husband (played by Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen), who is tied to a chair. The video doesn’t show the actual act of killing, but there are dark snapshots of a crime scene with blood-splattered surfaces. It ends with a scene of a naked Rihanna covered in blood, sitting in a trunk full of money as she smokes a cigarette. The Guardian reported Saturday that the song is based on Rihanna’s grievance against an accountant, Peter Gounis, whom she sued for purportedly giving her “unsound” financial advice that caused her to lose US$9 million (RM34.1 million) in 2009 alone. Rihanna reportedly won a multimillion settlement.  

Barbara Ellen, columnist for The Guardian, said BBHMM was misogynistic and criticised Rihanna for trying to show how female-on-female torture and murder was just as “sexy” as male-on-female versions (except that the accountant’s wife was last seen alive in BBHMM; only the accountant was murdered). “Does citing artistic licence excuse misogyny in a video? As a well-known victim of domestic violence, maybe — astonishingly — Rihanna doesn’t give a flying one about other females?” Ellen wrote.     BBHMM, however, should be looked at in context. It’s wrong to equate women torturing other women to misogyny or gender-based violence perpetrated by men against women. In the latter, men use their privilege and power to harm women, who already face gender inequality in a host of other issues like wages, work promotions, and politics. The term itself, “gender-based” violence, means violence inflicted on the basis of their gender (usually women). Women beating up women, on the other hand, is akin to a brawl between men. Critics of BBHMM also seem to be missing the point in all their anger over how the poor (rich) white woman was stripped naked and tormented — the undeserved killing of the male accountant. Sure, he cheated Rihanna’s character of millions, but that doesn’t merit a blood-soaked stabbing, does it?  A mere threat with a blade to get back her money would suffice. He didn’t have to die. We have become so inured to death and violence that we fail to call it out, even when the crime clearly doesn’t merit the punishment. BBHMM has been compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. In Kill Bill, though, the Bride has good reason to kill her enemies — they had tried to murder her and her unborn child and shot dead everyone else at her wedding rehearsal. Kill Bill is sleek, elegant and clever. The protagonist and villains fight on equal ground, not like how Rihanna kills a man who’s tied up and helpless. The feminists who are excessively concerned over how the accountant’s wife was treated in BBHMM should take note that female-on-female violence isn’t necessarily misogyny, like in Kill Bill, where the Bride (a white woman) kills three female assassins (black, Asian and Caucasian) before getting to her final target, Bill. Were the Bride’s killings motivated by misogyny? No. It was pure revenge that had nothing to do with gender; she’d tried to kill a male assassin too. Likewise, in BBHMM, Rihanna's character was trying to get the accountant to pay up by torturing his loved one — nothing personal against his wife's gender. Did the video have to show the white woman’s breasts? It really doesn’t matter. Nudity is used as a tool of humiliation because we associate women’s dignity and “modesty” with their bodies. Women stripping other women naked to punish them has happened in real life. Daily Mail reported last October an incident in China where a woman was stripped naked in public and beaten up by four women, one of whom had accused her of sleeping with her husband while the other three attackers were the aggrieved woman’s friends. If we don’t place a woman’s worth on her body and call her a slut based on some arbitrary judgment of her hemline, neckline, or the height of her heels, then we probably won’t see such instances of forced stripping. We’d just see women beating up women, like how men fight in the streets. In any case, the white woman in BBHMM isn’t the only naked female depicted. Rihanna’s nipples show clearly through her latex outfit when she’s about to kill the accountant and she’s totally naked in the final scene (though we can only see her tits). Female nudity can be humiliating, but it can be powerful too when used to display contempt for constraints against women’s behaviour. It’s the middle finger to all the crappy standards of how a woman’s body should look like or how it should be covered up. Rihanna’s nudity is great and empowering. But that’s the only good thing in BBHMM. It’s understandable if Rihanna were to create a video that shows a domestic violence or rape victim getting her revenge by torturing, or maybe even by killing her abuser. Killing an abusive man who might one day end up killing his victim is somewhat justifiable, but not some white collar criminal. Yes, an eye for an eye leaves the world blind, but sometimes, women endure so much crap that it’s therapeutic to see — even if it’s just in music, film or television — vengeance exacted against men who think nothing of assaulting or raping women, as they often get away with it in real life. That should have been Rihanna’s video. I would have liked to watch that.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.