Rose McGowan’s new music video, “RM 486,” is a Totally Safe For Work piece of feminist art. Back in June, McGowan reveled in her new freedom that arrived in the form of being fired from her agency for her tweet about a sexist Adam Sandler movie script “The awesome thing about being an artist? You can’t be fired from your own mind. #freedom.” McGowan is taking her mind and her freedom and making the brutally honest art that she wants to make.
The title, “RM486,” is a reference to the abortion pill RU486 and the current push by certain assholes to defund Planned Parenthood. Referring to said assholes, McGowan told Rolling Stone “Ugh. I just want to take their faces and smash them into the ground.” This sentiment also sums up her feelings about Hollywood.
In “RM 486,” McGowan plays seven different “characters” that are all, according her interview with Rolling Stone, avatars of herself at different points in her life. Some, like the “goth” one with all the crosses, represent chapters that the public perceived she was in:
“It was kind of more of a commentary on that time when everyone thought I was staying at home and lighting puppy dogs on fire, and in reality I was buying Martha Stewart online. Jadeite glassware! So it’s more of just a commentary on society’s perception rather than my actually being that.”
Others, like the green-haired persona, are commentaries on the effects of sexism in the overwhelmingly male industry. She calls this characters the most agitated. She has fake lips taped over her real ones to represent being silenced by “her” male voice:
“It’s predominantly men whose scripts get done so it was mostly a male voice coming out of my mouth for fifteen years.”
The video has been tagged Not Safe For Work, one can assume due to McGowan’s bare breasts. This move entirely misses the point. McGowan told Nowness: “I believe in civil disruption. I also think it’s important for bodies to be represented in a non-sexual manner, especially women’s bodies.” McGowan wants to disrupt your workplace, in order to render nudity unworthy of being a disruption. If you watch the video, you see that there is nothing sexual about it. It is ethereal, alien, emotionally raw, confrontational yet inviting, but the one thing it is not is porn.
McGowan told Rolling Stone that the NSFW tag makes the video “kind of creepy.” What makes her video creepy isn’t the costumes, music, makeup or prosthetics, but the way that the industry and Internet have responded to it, and sexualized it in precisely the way that it opposes.
Watch the full video here:
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