There’s no shortage of things that bind them. The malignant characterisation of black women as oversexualised is a historic racist trope – and a persistent one that has seen those performers subject to far greater media derision than Del Rey will ever experience. It is hard to avoid the suggestion, from an artist who has heavily used black culture in her work, that these performers’ sexualised images are more damaging for feminism than her lyrics about violence and bad boys. It’s especially depressing that Del Rey targeted women of colour, in doing so undermining a legitimate argument about contemporary culture’s restrictive insistence on female #empowerment to the exclusion of messier experiences. It’s depressing to see a critically acclaimed musician exploit that dynamic, mobilising those artists’ noisy fanbases for publicity. Female pop stars regularly criticise the media pitting them against one another to sell magazines and drive clicks. “Anyways,” she wrote after several more paragraphs of bile further directed at the critics she says have accused her of glamorising abuse, “none of this has anything to do about much.” On the second page of her Instagram post of a text screenshot, she shrugged out the fact that she is releasing a new album and two books of poetry later this year. “Can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money, or whatever I want – without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorising abuse? Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Camila Cabello, Cardi B, Kehlani, Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé – almost all women of colour – “have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc”, Del Rey wrote. A fter reading it multiple times, I still can’t tell what point Lana Del Rey was trying to make by invoking her peers to kick off a freshly Instagrammed screed about how she feels villainised as an anti-feminist pariah.

Lana del rey sexy photo