Katy Perry: Woman’s World Review – What Regressive, Reheated Hell Is It?

HHey girls! I don’t know about you, but when I woke up this morning, I felt different. Changed. Possessed by some kind of ineffable life force. A long-suppressed inclination toward total world domination suddenly blossomed. It was a little scary, but I knew I could do anything I wanted with that feeling, like buy stuff or reveal the previously untapped complexities I’ve always kept hidden under a bushel (you tell me I could be sexy… And (satirical?) or succeed in business or even become some kind of seltzer/shoe/apple cider vinegar mogul. I felt like the strong, complex female lead in the movie of the strong, complex female lead in my own life. What was that intoxicating feeling? As I watched the new Katy Perry video while brushing my teeth—hey, I value dental wellness and beauty for me, I thought, wagging my index finger cheekily in the slightly smudged mirror—I realized what had happened. I had just had my teeth cleaned authorizedbaby!

Perry’s new single, Woman’s World, confirmed to me that yes, it is a woman’s world—and you are lucky to live in it. In her woman’s world, women are nuanced, winning, smart, sweet, pretty, spicy, fiery And brilliant. As the video shows, you could be a Rosie the Riveter (but, like, sexy) or a businesswoman or a big sexy bionic horse. Women can have it all! Thank goodness someone finally said it.

There was another strange feeling. Like being transported back in time, perhaps in some kind of cosmic chariot pulled by a creepy bionic horse-woman. Almost a decade ago, in August 2014, when Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music Awards in front of the word FEMINIST, written in big, pale pink letters, and the world had to resign itself to the idea that girls just wanted basic rights. Maybe even a few years ahead, to the time when Lady Gaga’s brash electro-pop emphasized the importance of being exactly who you are. (Incidentally, Gaga’s biggest hit of 2014 was Do What U Want, featuring R Kelly, another meandering reminder that we were so young.)

Woman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years: “the first contribution I’ve made since becoming a mother and feeling truly connected to my divine womanhood,” the 39-year-old pop star said in a statement. Her last album, Smile, released in 2020, was the first since her 2010 hit Teenage Dream not to reach number one in the UK or US. She then made stops in Las Vegas. The feeling, on the cusp of her seventh album, is of a 2010s pop star now very much in retreat – a feeling compounded by pre-release visuals that seemed openly inspired by the warped futurism of next-gen stars Arca and Charli XCX. At least the visuals suggested some sort of attempt to embrace pop’s present; then the credits for her new album 143 were revealed, featuring Perry’s former collaborator Dr Luke.

In 2014, Kesha sued Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) for sexual assault, sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and emotional abuse. Luke denied the allegations and countersued for defamation, alleging that Kesha, her mother, and her management fabricated the allegations to get out of a record deal with him. In 2016, a judge dismissed Kesha’s allegations. Kesha had also accused Luke of raping Perry, which Perry and Luke denied, and in 2020, a judge ruled that the comments were defamatory. In 2023, Luke and Kesha settled his defamation lawsuit.

Luke has never been convicted, though he is seen by many as a pop music pariah, and any artist – like Kim Petras – who works with him is subject to online comments from pop fans and will be called upon to defend their choice. When the 143 collaborators were announced, Kesha simply tweeted “lol” – widely assumed to be a reference to Luke’s involvement – ​​and was later photographed wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the same word. Actress Abigail Breslin also decried the news, and later said she received death threats for doing so. Much of the online commentary around Woman’s World highlights the disconnect between working with a producer who comes with such baggage and making a song about female strength.

The Woman’s World video suffers from a much milder case of mixed messages. It begins as a kind of attempted satire, with Perry dressed as Rosie the Riveter and the girls in workwear recreating the famous skyscraper-top lunch shot. They flamboyantly pretend to pee in urinals, which are quickly swept away (with much less glamour than in George Michael’s canonical Outside video) to reveal the stripped-down gang tossing wellness paraphernalia—including Perry winking as she tosses a can of her own brand of sparkling water—to dance in a circle waving sex toys at each other. Boobs are oiled and bedazzled in stars-and-stripes bikinis. Perry wields a bedazzled screwdriver. It may not be the biting commentary on how women are being sold the tools of their own dispossession that Perry presumably intended, but a preview of Makita’s 2025 power tool calendar.

Amid all this turbo cheesecake, there are some blatant takes on the gay position. “She’s a sister and a mother,” Perry sings, nodding to drag culture so hard you suspect she’d give herself a hernia if her abs weren’t as hard as armor. Later in the video, as the bionic horse Katy traverses some kind of apocalyptic scene—having been rebooted into a sexy equine cyborg after being crushed by an anvil—two men kiss in the windy whirlwind. This awkward expansion stumbles a bit later when Perry drives a monster truck with a glittering uterus hanging from it, an unintentionally apt symbol of all the essentialist, self-indulgent nonsense going on here.

To not look like one of these men (actually, I’ll take Perry’s insistence that it’s my divine right as a woman to be essentialist, okay!) but: this bullshit has six Sure, it’s terribly catchy, but it’s the Bic for her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (watch out for that!), a song that made me feel even stupider every time I listened to it.

Aside from sounding like reheated Gaga, it also brazenly resembles Chappell Roan’s Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, a self-aware, joyful, absurd take on songs exactly like this that also resonates with a screaming euphoria. Roan – along with Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX – are a model for what it means to be a pop star in 2024: they’re inventive, self-aware, silly, profound, some of the qualities Perry had at the height of her promise but seems to have lost forever. Charli’s Girl, So Confusing (and the subsequent remix with Lorde) was about the complexities of fighting for supremacy as a woman. Woman’s World is more Girl, So Confusing.

At the end of the video, Perry meets a teenage girl doing a TikTok dance in front of a light ring shaped like a ♀ symbol, which Perry steals and holds up as she flies away in a helicopter. “Who are “And you?” the girl asks, perhaps in some sort of knowing nod to Katy Perry’s absence from pop’s upper echelons in recent years. “I’m Katy Perry!” she shouts in slow motion. It sounds less like a roar of triumph than the resounding cry of someone falling into a great ravine.