It just got harder out here

Another day another so-called feminist putting back the movement 10 years.

Lily Allen making a comeback was not the worst news I'd heard all week. Sure, she's slightly annoying with her posturing lyrics and accent that conflict with her privileged lifestyle. Yawn. However, what I always did like about Lily Allen was that she wasn't afraid to be a little pudgy and to wear trainers and that she was successful despite her non-conformist attitude to the industry's idea of beauty. I admired her confidence, if not her music.

Once Lily started getting more media attention for her miscarriages than for her albums I began to feel increasingly bad for the fallen starlet. As women our worth is measured by the outside world by few, but tangible things: our beauty, or career choice and our ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy to term. Like it or not, this is a fact, and here Lily was failing, publicly at the one thing that we women are supposedly designed to do. I defy any woman, regardless of her attitude towards her own familial desires, to not feel a twinge of sadness and of inexplicable guilt upon hearing that a woman can't get pregnant. But Lily retreated from the public eye, opened a boutique and finally achieved her baby success. Not once, but twice. This was very happy news, not just for Lily and her fans, but for women everywhere.

Now that Lily is back in 2013 with her comeback single I was expecting more. I'm pleased that she aimed her new single at misogynistic idiots like my old buddy Robin Thicke, but she's gone about it in the wrong way. A woman who has been through what she has should know better. Writing lyrics about how she "don't need to shake my ass for you 'cause I've got a brain" while at the same time panning to the many scantily-clad twerking women in her video. She's created a hierarchical system within the confines of her own video. The women who are dancing around her aren't the same as her. Lily is saying she is better than them. Lily remains fully clothed (a la Thicke) and drops to the ground lazily as the other women drop and convulse and lick their fingers at Lily, because it is Lily who is writing their paychecks. They are performing for her, not with her. She is using them for her amusement, she is not part of their group. Lily pouring beer over the ass of one of her dancers while she laughs is just as offensive to me as if a man had done it. Objectification is objectification, it's not clever. And if you're a woman doing it to another woman, it's almost worse.

It's the same issue I had with Britney revisited. These women have the wrong idea. Show me your own body if you want to take a stand against objectification. Miley Cyrus may be a tit, but she's a tit willing to show us her own vag and not exploit someone else's.

I won't jump on the bandwagon and claim that Lily is racist. I don't see that. She just made a dumb assumption, as many others who haven't seen a music video post 2000 does. That only rap and R&B artists use women as props in videos and that only rap and R&B artists are black. But that's just not true and if anything it makes Lily look ignorant, but not racist. A woman who knows exactly how hard it is out there should have known better. She had a massive opportunity to produce thought-provoking, intelligent commentary about the industry which she has been a part of for a decade, but in order to sell records and cause controversy she took the easy option. What a shame.

As a final bone of contention the word "bitch" is repeated over 20 times in a video running just over 3 minutes. The result is that word being tossed around the screen like a grenade but no one running for cover. Who are these bitches that Lily insists are being hard done by? Well if her video is to be believed it is those who surround her. Those she motions to and laughs at, but not Lily herself. Just those she degrades with words, objects and costumes. I'd like to know how hard it ever was for Lily Allen out here, because something tells me that things just got a bit harder.