I’m not usually one to bash TikTok trends; they’re creative, fun, and a good bonding experience for users from different backgrounds. But a while ago, the “car trend” emerged on my For You Page which at first puzzled me, and then, after I understood it, seemed nothing short of disturbing.
The trend involves the TikTok user (incidentally, mostly young women) dancing to the song Let’s Groove by Earth, Wind & Fire, while a list is superimposed on the video, in the manner of a description for a second-hand car: “Miles” “Previous owners” “Bumper stickers” “Model”… As it turns out, this is a self-introduction involving one’s body count, number of previous relationships, number of tattoos, race/nationality/zodiac sign… respectively.
I’m not usually one to bash TikTok trends, because it can seem like reading too much into something that’s meant to be frivolous, “ironic”, or “just for laughs”. But describing people – especially women – as cars, is rather strongly reminiscent of a time when our sex were quite unironically compared to cars; a time which hasn’t passed long enough – if it has passed at all – to safely assume that this blatant objectification isn’t a cause for alarm.
Voicing these concerns on such a popular and youthful platform as TikTok, puts one at the risk of being called a buzzkill, or a “feminist thought police”. Haven’t we talked about feminism enough? Isn’t our generation “woke” already? And if we all understand that sexual objectification is wrong, why can’t women reclaim their sexual power by making a few jokes about it?
Still, I’d like to put on my feminist thought police hat, and take you through why we might not be ready for this sort of “reclamation”, and why this trend (among many others) cannot simply be passed off as a cheeky joke that we’re all enlightened enough to not take seriously.
What is reclamation?
Reclamation is also known as re-appropriation or re-signification: using a negative word in a positive way, so as to deny the derogatory power of the word, and to proudly “own” a previously stigmatised identity. It’s done mostly in terms of language, but the point being to reshape a social environment.
Reclaiming a word can be incredibly empowering for people who were once victims of discrimination. When a group takes a derogatory term and labels themselves with it, they’re seen as more powerful, which takes away (at least some of) the stigma attached to that label. For example, the word queer was used as a homophobic slur in the 1950s, but since the late 1980s, it has been adopted by the LGBT community as a neutral or positive self identity, and also used in popular media such as Queer Eye. The reclamation of racial slurs serves not only as empowerment, but also a reminder of the horrific injustice that some racial groups have gone through.
Reclamation and feminism
Witch
Feminist movements have seen reclamation of derogatory words used exclusively against women, like witch. The history of the word is filled with violence and murder: in the years spanning 1450 to 1750, witch-hunts and witch trials of women who were simply suspected to be “evil”, resulted in around 40,000 to 100,000 deaths as estimated by scholars. The witch accusation was not merely a pejorative label; it was a fatal one.
In the late 1800s, feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage publicly condemned such trials as targeting competent, intellectual women. Over time, more sympathetic and even amiable representations of the witch have appeared in media, including books and films. Today, witch and witchcraft are both used neutrally or positively, especially with the recent New Age movement. The term also carries with it a certain note of resistance and subversion — a way for disenfranchised women to defy oppressive social norms.
Slut
Along with a myriad of other terms used to shame and demean women (e.g. bitch), slut emerged in the 15th century, initially referring to “an untidy woman” but quickly evolving to take on a highly derogative meaning of immorality. Slut-shaming, in particular, is mainly aimed at women who dress “provocatively”, sometimes even used as a way to blame victims of sexual assault. This led to the start of SlutWalk in 2011, a march in Canada which protested against slut-shaming and victim-blaming. Thousands of women took to the streets, in T-shirts or bikinis, and the movement quickly sparked in the US, as well as around the world.
There have also been similar efforts to reclaim insults like slut: after ex-US President Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton “nasty woman” in the 2016 elections, women on Twitter proudly took back the word by declaring themselves “nasty woman”.
What are we ready to claim?
Controversies around reclamation
As we may observe, not everyone treats re-appropriation as an enlightening and empowering gesture. Some still avoid or frown upon the word slut; some may continue to use witch as an insult. Even for supposedly successful reclamations such as queer and bitch, their negative connotations have not been fully erased. Members of the reclaiming group have different opinions on the seriousness of the words, and whether these reclaimed concepts can be used by people outside their communities.
Postfeminism
In my opinion, the emergence of postfeminist trends has greatly complicated the process and results of reclamation. Postfeminism, to put it simply, is a backlash against feminist movements, characterised by thoughts such as “we’ve already attained equality”. Thus, the support for feminism saw a societal decline as people began viewing feminists negatively.
One of the traps of postfeminism is that, because feminism is already the norm, everything a woman does now is of her own free choice. For example, while women are still compared to stringent beauty standards by society, and are expected to use the same kinds of products to maintain their looks, such products are advertised as “self-care”, “girl power”, or “looking good for yourself”.
Sociologist Rosalind Gill, in her very informative 2007 paper about postfeminism in the media, describes this phenomenon accurately —
“The notion that women just ‘please themselves’… presents women as entirely free agents, and cannot account for why, if women are just pleasing themselves, and following their own autonomously generated desires, the resulting valued ‘look’ is so similar — hairless body, slim waist, firm buttocks, etc.”
— And, might I add, the self-objectifying act of willingly comparing ourselves to cars.
Women and cars – is objectification “reclaimable”?
We’ve talked a lot about reclamation, its importance and its controversies; coming back to where we started, though, why might we find the car trend on TikTok not okay?
As we now know, reclamation is a slow and complex process, with varying degrees of success. The most successfully reclaimed words are those with a long problematic history, as well as consistent solid efforts to challenge the problematic narrative. But the sexual objectification of women is not really history; it is still ongoing, sometimes stealthily, other times quite obviously. Moreover, postfeminist thinking (that “we already have equality”) has led to a new kind of trouble: the celebration of women’s sexualisation or objectification of themselves, under the guise of “self-pleasure” and “free choice”.
So, rather than a nuanced effort to “reclaim” female sexuality, I think the car trend is — straightforwardly and unironically — just plain old objectification. If my arguments haven’t been able to convince you, a look through some of the comments under the TikToks might reveal the chilling reality: girls worrying that they have no “previous owner”; boys declaring that they “prefer new ones”; in a more unsettling case, a young man added himself to a woman’s car trend video, pretended to examine her butt, and wrote down, “Fixable with high mileage.” (If you forgot, mileage means body count.)
The TikTok audience, as of now, is a rather young one. It’s unlikely that the car trend started off with the malicious intention of subjecting women to the male gaze, or undoing the progress of feminism. But it’s precisely because TikTok users are so young, that exposure to trends like this, without enough knowledge of the meaning and consequences of objectification, can be rather damaging to our culture.
Memories of more “unfeminist” times in our society are still vivid, and the diversity and freedom of social media mean that destructive ideas can also proliferate. Disguised as a harmless joke, the car trend on TikTok reflects our society’s silent acceptance of what feminists have tried to resist for decades. It isn’t some reclamation of female sexuality; but even if it was, it would’ve been too soon, and targeted at the wrong people.