Summer

Calvin Harris’s song “Summer” sounds like a song about a summer romance between two people. It is about a man reminiscing about good times that he spent with a woman. The music video, however, distorts this messages and adds a layer of objectifying women with male gaze.

The music video is full of scantily clad females being sultry in everything that they do. Shots include and woman in a bathtub, a woman lounging on a bed in her underwear, women in bikinis hanging out around a pool, even women at a car racetrack wearing booty shorts and heels. If someone is at a racetrack to work on cars and race, they are not going to be wearing heels. Even when doing an activity that is not sexy, the women in this video are turned into sexual objects.

This music video has no feminism in it. It objectifies women, giving off the message that their purpose is to wear revealing clothes and look sexy in everything that they do. This message comes from male gaze. Male gaze is what happens when women are put in media to look good for the male viewers. The women are usually objectified, underrepresented or even unrepresented, and misrepresented. While Calvin Harris’s music video does not underrepresent women, as there are many more women than men, it does objectify and misrepresent womankind.

Females are misrepresented through race. Almost every single woman in this music video is Caucasian. There is little to no racial diversity in this video, something that should be focused on in today’s society. It is important to represent and celebrate the diversity that there is in America today.

Women’s body shapes and sizes are also drastically misrepresented as all of the women are very thing, yet still curvy.

An example of this objectification that really stood out to me was a point in the music video when the camera shows a woman lying on a bed in fancy underwear. In this shot of her, however, the part of her body that you see is the tops of her thighs. In film, a close shot is meant to reveal emotion or to be a means of emphasis (Dick 53). This close shot shows no emotion because the viewer does not even see her face. This shot created emphasis. It emphasis the idea that women are only made up of the sexual parts of their body and use only those characteristics to be appealing to men. It also creates the message that women want male attention only on those parts of their body. Lydia Smith wrote an article about how these kinds of messages can be dangerous.

The camera operator also got some long shots, but those still showed scantily clad women. The music video jumps between many spaces, and one of these spaces is a car racetrack. Here there are many long shots of women in very short shorts with heels on their feet. This is unrealistic because most women do not go to car races to lounge around fancy cars and look attractive to men.

It is men, however, who created this music video. While there were women in the music video, the powerful jobs were held by men. The director is Emil Nava, and the producer is Calvin Harris himself.

This music video baffled me. It does not seem to relate to the kind of summer that Calvin Harris is singing about in his song. The video is full of male gave that does not accurately represent women the way they are in real life. There is one moment when it seems like the video is trying to empower women by having one of the females race a car at the racetrack. The other women gather around her a watch her drive off. The viewer, however, never actually seems them speak to each other, and during the clip of the race, the other car stays a few feet ahead of her. This music video is full of male view and objectification of women, something that did not relate to the lyrics of the song. I feel that there could have been a better video accompanying this song.