At some point between all the buzz in the music blogosphere after the July release of her song Video Games and the now infamous SNL performance, Lana Del Ray became something of a feminist issue. According to many music critics, there is some evidence that Del Ray - who released an album in 2008 under her real name, Lizzy Grant, that was later pulled from the Internet - "bought her way to fame" and was repackaged by male producers into the ideal of a 1950s subservient woman in order to create Internet buzz around her and market her more easily to a male demographic (listening to a few of her songs leads me to believe that her music is actually marketed to teenage girls, but hey, what do I know? I am not music critic, just a layperson). If this was the intention of her management team and producers, it definitely worked in their favor, as there has been hype surrounding Del Ray for months and her album, which was released Tuesday, is currently #2 on the US Billboard Charts.

But why are music critics and blogs (like the problematic ladyblog Jezebel, who basically dedicated an entire post to making fun of the way Del Ray looks) deriding her as antifeminist?

Some are no doubt brisitling at Del Ray describing her image as, "Lolita lost in the ghetto", thereby attempting to compare and conflate herself to a fictional literary character often mischaracterized as sexually precocious, who was in fact raped by not one but TWO different fictional pedophiles. Why would Lana Del Ray want to align herself with infantilization, disempowerment, and loss of agency? Others would would argue it is Del Ray's problematic lyrics. Here are just a few examples:

From Put Me in a Movie:

Come on, you know you like little girls,

You can be my daddy

From Blue Jeans:

I will love you till the end of time

I would wait a million years

Promise you'll remember that you're mine

From This is What Makes Us Girls:

This is what makes us girls

We don't stick together 'cause we put our love first

Baby can't you see through the tears

Love you more than those bitches before

Say you'll remember, say you'll remember

Oh baby who

I will love you till the end of time

From Off to the Races:

My old man is a bad man

But I can't deny the way he holds my hand

And he grabs me, he has me by my heart

[...]

Light of my life, fire of my loins

Be a good baby, do what I want

Light of my life, fire of my loins

Gimme them gold coins

Gimme them coins

From Video Games:

It's you, it's you, it's all for you

Everything I do

I tell you you all the time

Heaven is a place on Earth with you

Tell me all the things you want to do

These lyrics paint the image of an insecure woman obsessed with the way she appears under the scrutiny of the male gaze.

However, some critics believe her odes to female passivity and victimhood are so over the top that they are actually a critique of that subservient role. Feminist singer Liz Phair wrote a defense of Lana Del Ray for The Wall Street Journal, in which she said the following:

Let me break it down for you: she’s writing herself into existence. She’s giving herself a part to play because, God knows, no one else will and she wants to matter in this life. As far as I can tell, it’s working. I went straight to iTunes and bought her new release “Born To Die” in toto (how often do I do that??) because it was more than a collection of songs or a performance, it was a phenomenon. Maybe all the more so because she’s not overwhelmingly talented. The minute I hear the whisperings of “how dare she,” I’m interested. I don’t have to like it, it doesn’t have to be worthy.

Lana Del Rey seems to be bothering everybody because she allegedly “remade” herself from a folk singing, girl-next-door type into an electro-urban kitty cat on the prowl (of course I like her), and they feel she is inauthentic. I would argue that the uncomfortable feelings she elicits are simply the by-product of watching a woman wanting and taking like a man.

This defense by Liz Phair was, of course, shocking to some music critics, but Phair is not the only feminist who has spoken out in support of Del Ray. In an article on popular feminist blog, Tiger Beatdown Flavia Dzodan made an impassioned plea to feminists to give Del Ray a chance, as she speaks for women and girls who wish the male gaze found them attractive:

How is Del Rey an anti feminist conception of a woman? She is accused of having bought her way to fame (an act of personal agency if I ever saw one), while at the same time, accused of only existing as an object of desire. Yes and? Some women spend a life time wishing to be desired. Hoping to be noticed, wishing the male gaze, a male gaze would find them attractive. Some women, like I did, will never conform to these Eurocentric notions of beauty and desirability. I still, to this day, struggle with it, even though I am in a long term relationship. Wanting to be seen as an object of affection, hell, turning a dude you like on, wishing he would see you as inherently sexy, hot, and yes, perhaps as a sexy “play thing” is not anti feminist. Just like theater and film require the suspension of disbelief, sometimes, feminists can also suspend the theory of objectification for sexual purposes. Is someone who objectifies herself willingly a victim, in any case? Cis men talking about Lana Del Rey as “anti feminist” make me laugh.

So, SRSD, what do you think? Is the music of Lana Del Ray antifeminist, or is there something more complicated than that going on here?