in which some exceptionally creative videos portraying women have been pre-
sented. These are indeed a minority of the women shown in 11 percent of music
videos, yet they are possibly much more memorable shown against the back-
ground of the likes of Whitesnake, Billy Idol, Sammy Hagar, Robert Palmer,
George Michael, or Guns 'n' Roses. ⁸¹

Is the struggle to overcome gender stereotypes being won by women? Wide-
spread lip service to formal equality of the sexes does not suggest understanding
of the more complex realities of women's lives, of their essential inequality and
lack of real social autonomy imposed, in one area of life, by underdevelopment
of the most elementary and basic public programs of medical, prenatal, and child
care and, at another symbolic level, with their functions as objects and fantasized
images of male longings for "shelter from the storm." At the level of social
power and influence in the controlling bureaucracies of society, only the most
modest progress has been evident. If the music business remains a patriarchal
structure run almost exclusively by white males, so does the whole society.

Musically, the situation could be characterized as attainment of a partial kind
of affirmative action for sexual commodification. Popular music at its worst (the
image content of most music videos) usually functions to perpetuate all the old
gender stereotypes, with a few spaces for ambiguous (not feminist) alternatives.
In some of its better examples, R. E.M. "For the One I Love" or several of
Tracy Chapman songs, including the popular "Fast Car," it would seem to
seek to go beyond mere equality of sexual objectification and, as with the best
popular cultural artifacts, to embody enough ambiguity to permit freely nego-
tiated interpretation and response, "letting us be both subject and object of the
singers' needs (regardless of our or their gender)." ⁸² Beyond that, to demand
the revisioning of women's place in popular music is to demand the kinds of
fundamental changes in culture and consciousness, as well as programatic trans-
formations of social life, that will permit real social autonomy for all classes
and ages of women. Perhaps only then will the construction of more realistic
representations of women and men be evident, though that can never be the only
function of a people's popular culture, which in its central qualities must also
embody frequently conservative, but often futurist, elements of unspoken and
utopian longings.

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