I Watched Katy Perry's Woman's World Video So You Don't Have To

And I regret it

Remember that song ‘Grenade’ by Bruno Mars where he talked about catching a grenade for the woman he loved even though he could have just like, side-stepped it and got them both to safety? Anyway, now I understand the sentiment, because I watched Katy Perry’s new music video for Woman’s World, the first single off her new album ‘143’ and that’s kinda like catching a grenade, but I did it all for y’all, in the name of investigatory journalism. Here are my findings.

In a piece for Dazed, Alim Kheraj writes:

During Perry’s imperial phase, this 2012-era white liberal feminism might have passed. In the context of 2024, though, it feels reductive. “Woman’s World” sounds like it was designed by a committee in a boardroom at Capitol Records whose sole objective was a sync on RuPaul’s Drag Race and generating comments of “you ate” from white gays living in West Hollywood. It is female empowerment filtered through the lens of a Ryan Murphy show.

It even opens with a decidedly boring and obvious rebranding of women doing’s “men’s jobs” with them dressed up as construction workers, spray painting the MEN WORKING sign in feminist pink spray paint. It feels like a bit from SNL.

And while I love a self-reference, especially to such an iconic body of work, 14 years later, it just seems vapid, and boring, like girl can you come up with something ELSE!?

Which brings me to this moment—the random gay kiss of two white, wrked uot gay men in a woman’s world, Kheraj was very much right when with WeHo White Gay line, because girl what does this have to do with anything?

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And furthermore, there is a moment when she breaks out of the old, Teenage Dream aesthetic, and forges a path in the “new” woman’s world where her motorized legs lose charge and she has to refuel — like girl, what are we doing here? If you wanna be edgy just put it up your butt!!!

But one of the most glaring issues I had was how bad the editing was. Though the video is only 2:55 (there is no dance break, no exciting moment of cinematography) the editing is egregious. I mean a whole frame of her being superimposed onto a glass-breaking scene but the entire top of her head is cut off? Girl.

This all just feels a little—sad. IDK. At least we’ll always have Harleys in Hawaii