In a new video sketch for Saturday Night Live, the female members of the SNL cast are joined by host Ariana Grande to pay homage to feminism by penning the next female empowerment anthem.
Grande and the SNL female cast, namely Aidy Bryant, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Sasheer Zamata, want to create a tune “to fight [and] to right the wrongs of all of time” but end up realizing that this is a much more difficult task then they had initially expected.
Instead, the women create the feminist anti-anthem music video, “This Is Not A Feminist Song,” which includes clips of themselves frolicking around on the beach intermingled with footage of various women of diverse backgrounds. Clips of feminist icons, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Madeleine Albright, Maya Angelou, and Malala Yousafzai, are used as examples of who would have been included in the music video if it had been an actual feminist anthem.
Overall, this hilarious music video pokes fun at the idea of creating the perfect female empowerment song of all time. In “This Is Not A Feminist Song,” the women explain how difficult it is for pop stars to write a song that will accurately reflect the experiences of half the world’s population.
While it is true that no song can ever entirely capture the concept of what it means to be a woman, it does not mean that songs cannot be feminist by nature. In fact, by the end of “This Is Not A Feminist Song,” Grande says, “We’re just women singing a song — but doesn’t that make it a feminist song? I guess this was feminist all along.” What was originally thought to be an anti-anthem turned out to be a great explanation of the intricacies of intersectional feminism.
comments