ORIGINAL STORY:
On May 21, Lana Del Rey took to Instagram to slam critics who’ve accused the singer of glamorizing abuse…if only she hadn’t felt the need to tear down other female artists to do it—specifically women of color.
“Question for the culture,” singer-songwriter Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, more famously known as Lana Del Rey, began her lengthy post. “Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating, etc—can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money—or whatever I want—without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorizing abuse?
“I am fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world,” she continued, before clarifying that she’s “not not a feminist.”
“But there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me,” she wrote. “The kind of woman who says no but men hear yes—the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves, the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women.”
You can read the full Instagram statement below.
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Del Rey ended her post by promising two new books of poetry and an upcoming album.
Her position that she’s been unfairly criticized for her perspective on albums like Norman Fucking Rockwell is definitely worth dissecting, but here’s the problem—which doesn’t feel so dissimilar to the ongoing Alison Roman drama: Why did Del Rey feel the need to disproportionately reference black artists and women of color in her argument? Many on Twitter and in the Instagram comments had the same question.
