60. The Pussycat Dolls feat. Busta Rhymes – Don't Cha (2005)

When you ask where the feminine sexual revolution that peaked at the beginning of the decade came from, it all goes back to the end of the eighties, the end of the decade that saw America returning to "family values", after the promiscuity of the sixties and seventies. The values were updated – women were no longer required to remain home and focus on rearing the children, but were allowed to develop a career of their own – but girls were still educated to abstain from sex until marriage. This, of course, created a dissonance: on the one hand, they were taught to be independent and aspire to a career (which entails late marriage), and on the other hand, they were supposed to wait with the sex. Naturally, there were many young women who chose to rebel and express their independence through liberated sexual attitude, and one of the places they could do so was in the rock concerts of glam-metal bands, which were a shameless celebration of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. Especially sex.

It goes without saying that the puritans were abhorred by what was going on in glam-metal, and preached to these girls that they are letting themselves be exploited. Admittedly, there was a lot of truth in that claim, but it had no chance of convincing the girls, because the "educational" assertions also had a lot of holes in them, and they did not jive with the intuitions of the youth. For instance, it was claimed that a woman who allows herself to become a subject of desire is exploited, because she is turned into a "sexual object". This contention ignores the fact that sex is a shared experience, in which part of the joy is being desired, and another part is enjoying the pleasure that your sexuality is giving to someone else. Those girls already knew that it is fun to be a subject of desire, but since the dominant culture repressed any discourse that treated women that way, they had to find this fun in places were it was taken to the opposite extreme, and in which they were exploited. Thus, an unhealthy situation evolved.

If you want to see a presentation of eighties family values, go no further than the TV sitcoms of the period, which all painted a picture of happy homes where everyone loves everyone else, all the children grow up to be successful, and every drama is happily resolved by the end of the episode, an end that carried an educational message. Until 1987, when the first sitcom to slash through this idyllic charade hit the little screen. Married With Children presented the dysfunctional unit of the Bundy family, in a comedy that slew all the sacred cows of conservative America and sishkebabed them. One of the components in this unit was daughter Kelly, a dumb bleached bimbo who screwed anything that moved, and was the antithesis to anything the conservatives described as the ideal all-American girl. This was the satirical dimension of the character, but actress Christina Applegate infused her with other dimensions, and turned her into a rock chick, expressing the mindset of her coevals. Unlike the dumb blondes of the past, who were always sweet and naïve, Kelly Bundy took shit from nobody. While the dominant culture regarded a sexually active girl as "putting out", Applegate presented her as "taking on".

In the nineties, this new female consciousness already started to settle in, and Applegate, now a big girl, took it one step further, and branched into the stripping business. Strippers were always considered cheap and whorish, women who turn themselves into "sexual objects", but Christina wanted to change things, and form a striptease act with more class. In 1995 she opened the burlesque act The Pussycat Dolls, which for the next decade would be in the forefront of the new sexual revolution. Young starlets who wanted to parade their hotness, both from the field of pop music (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani) and the field of cinema (Applegate, Carmen Electra, Jaime Pressly, Charlize Theron, Charlie's Angels) came to sing, dance and strip with the Dolls. Thus they became increasingly more famous, and naturally wanted to expand. In 2004, a band was formed on the basis of the concept (and including some of the cast members, but mainly new recruits), and set out to conquer the world.

And they made it, too, but when they first appeared, it was one of the signs that the revolution has ended. When a pop or movie starlet plays a stripper, it is naughty and titillating. When strippers become pop stars, it takes all the naughtiness out of the stripper image, and kills the thrill. This record, their first hit, was still good: starting out with bubbling funky music, Busta Rhymes sets things on a roll with his rap, and the girls ride on the momentum he gives them, bringing it on with a bitchy, slutty and taunting song. But they went nowhere since then. None of them has the personality to become a real star, and it all still seems like a burlesque show to me, with rather patchy music. This remains their only record that can be called a classic, and I suspect it will play in strip clubs for years to come.