Bugsy’s VR Musical Experience Calls Out Gender-Based Hypocrisy
Bugsy’s latest music video shows how creative, unsettling, and feminine VR can be. Warning: strong language ahead.
Bugsy, an up-and-coming pop musician with a unique sound, has partnered with Making360, a VR service and platform that creates an immersive experience for brands and artists to create a new VR music boy for her single, “Fuckboy.”
“Fuckboy” opens with Bugsy and a chorus of women appearing and singing all around the user from an idyllic extraterrestrial atmosphere. As one pans the screen around, Bugsy can be seen crouching down into view singing directly to the user — it is uneasy especially in contrast to the environment.
Then, Bugsy’s tone shifts from soothing to commanding as the viewer is transported to a warehouse. It becomes clear Bugsy wanted the viewer to be uneasy from the start.
From there, the rest of the music video takes place from the perspective of one of Bugsy’s captives. As she condemns him for being a “fuckboy,” but also criticizes all of his kind.
The song claims to “stand as a defensive towards catcalling and an awakening for women to band together and attack insincerities brought on by misogyny head on.”
The song isn’t about women versus men, as Bugsy and her dancers exemplify a complicated identity of masculinity and femininity blended. But rather about attacking the patriarchal system that says it is okay for men to catcall women and wear their pants sagging, but isn’t okay for women to do the same.
Bugsy’s dance crew is a diverse mix of femmes, of all ages and races. This is especially prominent in a time when female presence and identity in VR is challenged.
A strict warning to all the f***boys out there / Image Credit: MakingXR / Bugsy
Currently, the medium is a male-dominated field and women in social VR can experience harassment and overt sexualization. And while things are improving, women still struggle to be prominent content creators in VR.
“When we are talking about VR and gaming environments in general, there is still a lack of diverse representation,” says New York-based immersive media collective Pussy Krew, to Dazed Digital. “Expressing your unique beauty and identity in VR is still a radical move, especially in the mainstream tech environment. The VR spaces are still occupied and controlled by cis white male individuals, but it’s good to see fellow independent artists, technologies and designers challenging these spaces and creating new VR worlds that can serve us and represent our kind of beauty.”
https://vrscout.com/news/bugsys-vr-musical-fuck-boy/
