This interesting article by Ann Powers at NPR.org examines the many covers of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”Most interesting is the implication that pop culture moments like this allow all sorts of individuals to play at homosexuality, making us all slightly more tolerant. Powers writes:
The first video parody of the song was the most commercially important — it featured Bieber, his gal Selena Gomez and other kid heartthrobs cavorting and lip-synching to the track. It spawned a multitude of answer videos just like it … These are fun, but don’t extend the “Call Me Maybe” story.
What turns the tickle into a bigger statement is the bunch of videos that take up the original video’s final plot point. One highly entertaining one that’s getting a lot of attention was created by West Hollywood man about town Woody Woodbeck and his friends, and puts the homoerotic subplot up front. But a surprising number of “Call Me Maybe” parodies feature guys who mostly read straight (in the sexual and more broadly cultural sense of the word) getting in touch with their inner femininity, and even queerness, by falling in love with Jepsen’s song.
As with other depictions of underrepresented groups, my question is whether images of apparently heterosexual males in these videos conforming to societal stereotypes about homosexuality and femininity push the boundaries of acceptable behavior or merely reinforce those boundaries by mocking them.
Memoirs of a SLACer 