Katy Perry is back with a ‘feminist’ anthem. It’s a train wreck (2024)

It’s rare that a piece of art comes along that is so monumentally bad it unites almost everyone in their hatred for it, and it’s even rarer for this to come from one of the world’s most accomplished and beloved pop stars. But with her new, much-anticipated single Woman’s World, Katy Perry has done it.

To borrow some strange and stilted words from the song itself, “She’s a winner. Champion. Superhuman. Number one.”

Since dropping on Friday, this supposed feminist empowerment anthem and music video have been torn apart by critics, with Pitchfork calling it “abysmal” and The Guardian’s Laura Snapes saying “[it] made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”.

The terrible reception has led Perry to respond directly, releasing a behind-the-scenes video on her social media in which she – dressed as a sexy Rosie the Riveter – explains why specific elements are “sarcastic” and “very on the nose”. But this has only fuelled the pushback with some of the most popular replies reading, “If you have to explain the joke, it’s not a good one” and simply “CRINGE”.

Is it really that bad?

Woman’s World has many things working against it. The song itself is plodding and predictable, with lyrics that sound ripped from a 2004 tampon commercial. The opening lines – “Sexy, confident / so intelligent / she is heaven sent” – were widely mocked on TikTok well before the song’s full release.

And the video is a garish and confusing spectacle that never seems quite sure of what it wants to say. Taking Perry’s explanation of the opening third of the clip, she is satirising the girlboss feminism of the 2010s. Dressed as feminist icon Rosie the Riveter, Perry recreates the famous Lunch atop a Skyscraper image with models in sexy tradie wear before hammily spruiking “whiskey for women”, sex toys, gua sha rollers and a can of her own non-alcoholic apéritif (released not in the 2010s, but just a few years ago).

She then gets smashed by a giant anvil – which she’s explained as “a reset for me and a reset for my idea of the feminine divine” – and awakens in a chaotic new world with giant bionic legs that have to be recharged by pressing a petrol pump into her exposed butt cheek.

American YouTuber Trisha Paytas then joins her as she applies make-up in a monster truck sporting a bedazzled uterus, before finding a young woman doing a TikTok dance while wearing a T-shirt reading “FEMININE DIVINE” (official merch for this release), stealing her ring light which is in the shape of the female symbol, jumping in a helicopter and screaming “I’M KATY PERRY” in reply.

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Is she criticising the young women of 2024 or trying to win them over through reinvention? Maybe the satire is just focused on the past. But is it really possible to satirise the poppy girlbossery of yore when your song is a puss*-hat pink empowerment anthem co-written with four men?

And that’s without even getting on to the fact that one of those men is Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, Perry’s long-term collaborator who was accused of raping and drugging fellow pop star Kesha. Gottwald has always denied the claim and the allegations led to a decade of legal action between the pair, which they settled last year. He was never criminally charged.

How Katy Perry fell out of the culture

It doesn’t help Perry that this song has dropped at a particularly exciting time in pop music. Younger female artists like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX have exploded on the charts recently with more dynamic tracks that interrogate and celebrate the idea of female power in a more fun and honest way.

In the boppy and knowingly silly Femininomenon, Roan issues a rallying cry for women to demand better sex (“get it hot like Papa John”). In Girl So Confusing, and the subsequent much-lauded remix with Lorde, Charli XCX reckons with her insecurities and inevitable comparisons with other women in the industry.

In fact, Charli XCX even had a successful feminist satire this year: the music video for 360 featured “hot internet girls” including Julia Fox and Rachel Sennott lampooning themselves and the culture that valorises them.

These tracks feel like they were made for women to enjoy rather than manufactured to sell the idea of women’s enjoyment.

That’s not to say that Perry can’t still make fun music (it used to be her speciality!) or that older women can’t get back in on the game (Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam was all over dance floors last year). But the reaction to Woman’s World – and her reaction in turn – shows that Perry is wildly out of step with the landscape.

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