Musician, feminist, and political activist Annie Lennox went on the record in an interview with Entertainment Tonight last week to clarify what she meant when she said that Beyonce was a “feminist lite” who took the word feminism “hostage” in an attempt to use female empowerment to propagate her own image.
Lennox said that she “adores Beyonce,” while noting that she “takes issue with the sexualization of young girls” and added that her ideal of a “feminist-heavy” individual is Eve Ensler who is the author of The Vagina Monologues:
crazy morning @eveensler #selfie #ewlive14 pic.twitter.com/g7hk5I2JEo
— andrea callanan (@andrea_callanan) October 12, 2014
Clarifying her comments about Beyonce’s August performance at the 2014 MTV Music Awards, which she characterized as being “tokenistic,” Lennox said that “I am not a prudish person, but I am disturbed by what I see” with the “prevalence” of this “sexualization.”
During her interview with ET, Lennox described how “empowered” she felt when shooting the music video with her then-musical counterpart David A. Stewart while the duo was part of the group Eurythmics:
We were standing shoulder to shoulder. And when I was wearing a man’s suit with him, it was like feeling an empowerment and a sense of gender equality. Really.
In a 2010 interview, Lennox stated that she thought men were a “huge disappointment” and insisted that her life would have been much “easier” if she was a lesbian:
It’s not like I think being gay could be an alternative, ‘cos it isn’t. I sometimes wish it would have been ‘cos it would have made life easier…I wouldn’t want to disallow the possibility of falling in love again, but I think that for 90, maybe even 95 percent, of women, men are a huge disappointment in relationship terms. [But] I’m not a man-hater, let me say that. I love men, love their company.
Lennox will be releasing a solo album on October 21 called Nostalgia.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.