Musician Pharrell Williams attempted to defend the “rapey” lyrics of singer Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” but instead may have just garnered more negative attention after he claimed it is impossible for a man to be a feminist.
His comments have been earning the mega-producer some serious backlash lately, and it seems like his latest interview is no different.
During an interview with the British public-service broadcaster Channel 4, the interviewer asked Williams about the controversial lyrics in Thicke’s smash hit “Blurred Lines,” which Williams was featured in.
“I don’t know where [a man] forcing himself and a woman’s right to say no was ever addressed in that song,” Williams told the interviewer, Krishnan Guru-Murthy. “Is it sexually suggestive when a car salesman says to a person who’s trying to buy a car, ‘I know you want it?’”
Guru-Murthy argued that the phrase itself is often used in a “sexual context.”
That’s when the “Happy” crooner argued that one phrase’s connotation shouldn’t dictate the way that phrase is always received.
“OK, cool,” he said. “But does that make it off-limits for me to use in a song, especially when the overarching context is that there are good women who also have bad thoughts? If a good woman can have sexual thoughts, is it wrong for a man to have a correct guess that a woman might want something?”
Williams expressed that he felt it wasn’t possible for a man to be a feminist.
“I’ve been asked am I a feminist,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that. I’m a man. It makes sense up until a certain point.”
He failed to elaborate more on why a man can’t be a feminist in his opinion, but he was quick to say that he does agree that women face serious injustices and inequalities and these problems “need to be addressed.”
Despite saying he isn’t a feminist, Williams went on to say that he wanted to see a woman run the country for a change.
“I’d love to see a woman run the country,” he added. “Historically this world has been run by a man, and what would a world be like if 75 percent of our world leaders and prime ministers were female? What would that world be like?”
Ironically, he added that we have no idea what a predominantly female world would be like because as a society we have been “too busy telling [women] what they can or can’t do with their bodies.”
