By Pia Ocvirk When Rita Ora announced her new single “Girls” earlier this year, the song was initially intended as an anthem celebrating both bisexuality and female empowerment. However, when the song was released in May, it proved to be the complete opposite (Kheraj, 2018). Both the lyrics and the music video were yet another example of pop culture misrepresenting women, queer women in this case, while fueling the male gaze. While both the song and Rita Ora quickly received backlash, Ora is not the person to blame. The entire music industry has been fostering hypersexualization and objectification of female artists for decades. At midnight on August 1, 1981, MTV was born and music suddenly became a visual medium. Aware of the degree to which their sexuality was being evaluated in music videos, female artists started to create powerful hypersexualized personas in response to male domination (Donze, 2011). The 1980s saw the rise of multiple pop divas, many of whom owed part o...