Milk Toast

The big selling point of Pink's video for "Raise Your Glass" was supposed to be the image of her officiating at a same-sex wedding. Instead, the video's kind of a mess of mixed messages, and the one that comes through most clearly is actually one of animal-rights advocacy:



Pink has a tendency to do this: she likes to do mixed narratives with a party montage in which a theoretically representative sample of viewers stands in for her. This, I think, is one of her less successful efforts. I'm not necessarily on the same page with her when it comes to her PETA advocacy anyway, but I find the images of blindfolded women being milked to feed a calf coercive and off-putting rather than convincing (and I feel the same way about the briefer image of the matador's execution.

I honestly think I would have minded less, though, had the images of the wedding not been so brief and mailed-in, and had it not been sold so heavily as a piece of marriage equality advocacy. I'm all for pop culture figures as advocates and as champions of the gay community. But I also tend to think that if you're going to claim credit for political work, said work has to be effective. This isn't. I hope she'll do better in the future.