Tame Impala Video - Getting Ate Out Awakens Female Sexuality
Tame Impala, for those who don't know, is an Australian group that's been pretty popular the last few years. They have a song called "The Less I Know The Better" that has a pretty bad ass video. I had seen it a while back and really liked it, but when I saw it again a couple days ago, it felt like it had a clearness I hadn't seen in it before. I think the first time I watched it, it was just a lot. I mean there's a lot going on in this video. The second time I was more prepared for what was going to happen and it just sat with me differently.
All that said, I'm not so sure that the intention behind the video is really the intention I'm seeing. Chances are it's not, but I see something in it I really like, and I wanted to write something up quick about it. Plus, it's a fun video - and I appreciate that. I couldn't do an SSL Review because there isn't any actual depiction or discussion of female orgasm, female masturbation or the clit, so this is just a plain and simple talkin'-my-thoughts-out post.
It does have a young woman enjoying some mouth on her clit though.
I mean really enjoying it - not in some loud, showy, porny way - more like in a revelatory way, and that my friends is why we're here. Let me set the scene.
The video starts with a high school girl watching a high school guy in the gym. He's a basketball player and she's maybe a cheerleader of some sort. There's only ambient sound so far - no music. Then the camera moves through the inside of a locker, with vague animal ambient noise, and out into the locker room where the girl is setting on a locker room bench in the same t-shirt and skirt she just had on. Her feet are on the bench with her knees up. She's facing the camera as it's leaving the locker, and the boy is kneeling in front of her with his head between her thighs in that oh-so-special mouth-to-vulva situation. She's breathing quietly and intensely in a way that seems like she's very aroused and allowing it build organically. Her hands are as intense and slow, rubbing through his hair until we see her forefingers and thumbs come together in a heart shape on the back of his head (btw - I like to think the heart is not for him. It's for what she's feeling, but he never gets that).
Then there are a lot of quick cuts. One is guerrilla hands, similar in intensity and motion to her hands, moving on her butt. It's shot from behind her as she's in a sort of kneeling 'child's pose' (like in yoga). Another is her in the same position as in the locker room, but on the basketball court, and it's not his head between her legs but a basketball that she pulls in closer. Back in the locker room, still gripping the back of his head, she lets her head fall back, mouth open and lets out another slow breath that might very well make one believe she's very close to coming. It cuts to the boys face lifting up from between her legs, and he says a little dope-ishly and sincerely in a deep slow-mo voice, "I love you."
It cuts to the girl pulling her head up from how it had fallen back in pleasure and taking a sharp exhale as she looks directly at the camera. The music starts, and we see that this time she is in a wildly colorful cheerleader outfit. She begins to dance and we see other cheerleaders dancing around her with ribbons.
Okay, from there it gets weirder, so let me just quick tell you what that first part felt like to me. It felt like a sexual awakening. It felt like a young woman getting her pussy ate to orgasm for the first time, and realizing that she was a sexual being - that she had a wildness in her that colored her life.
But let me describe further:
At first the boy is happily watching the girl in her bright outfit, dancing around joyfully with the other cheerleaders, but then when she gets thrown into the air, a bunch of dark, animal hair falls from the sky into his hands, and he's bothered.
And that's when a guerrilla comes into the picture. We sees her eagerly and happily jump into a giant guerrilla hand. She and the other cheerleaders have bananas and guerrilla's hands around their waists when they're dancing. It dunks basketballs and does flips down the HS hall. They gleefully writhe against each other and hop around like monkeys do together. She lays luxuriously in a room of guerrilla fur. She swings a guerrilla fur blanket around her and it becomes the guerrilla twirling around with her in his arms triumphantly smiling and waving her hands in the air. She's having a downright joyful time with this guerrilla, and the whole time the boy is watching - mad and sad and jealous.
I mean, it's not completely straight forward. I wouldn't pick the details apart too much, but I felt like this was about a girl that found her sexual joy and wildness (it was the guerrilla ya'll! - that's mothafucking metaphor) and the boy just couldn't keep his shit together about it. Instead of being joyous too, he was hurt and threatened. At one point he goes to the toilet to puke and the puke is red paint, which along with a bunch of other paint colors, covers the statue of a woman in a highly sexualized pose (which maybe represents his feelings of wishing she were a quiet, unmoving sexual object for him and him alone...I don't know ya'll - just throwing it out there). Point is this is a trippy video and he can't deal with her autonomous sexual vibrancy. In fact at the end of the video, the boy angrily throws a basketball at the exuberant guerrilla (her sexuality) and knocks her/the guerilla back, putting a hole in the chest that a bunch of other rainbow basketballs fly out of. Now, I don't know what the rainbow basketballs mean, but I feel like that whole thing was the boy attacking and ultimately damaging the girl's sexual joy and autonomy.
This also might be just a weird, adolescent video (there were a lot of male-gaze, ass-focused shots in here) about Tame Impala's hurt feelings from some girl he got with in high school that hooked up with a dude named Trevor while he thought she should have been with him (The lyrics do have a girl cheating with a guy named Trevor and the Guerrilla's jersey does say Trevor on it).
I like to think it's about what I think it's about though, because I like that shit. I like that this was not a girl getting banged for the first time that got her sexuality sprung (because getting banged don't orgasms make, ya'll) - it was getting ate the hell out (because stimulation on the clit/vulva area does!). I like that she was joyful with her guerrilla/newfound sexuality, because that shit is godamn joyful. I like that the dumb boy looks like a shitbag for dumping on her awesomeness, and I appreciate showing how his inability to cope with her not-connected-to-him sexuality forces him to damage her in the end - because that real life. It happens to women too often - both inside intimate relationships and also to women as a whole in a male-focused sexual culture that doesn't make room for authentic female orgasm.
That's my story of this crazy-ass video, and I'm sticking to it. Watch the video below. Tell me I'm wrong.