Evaluating The Representation Of Women In Sam Smith And Kim Petras’ Unholy

Unholy, Smith's latest lead single from his 2023 album Gloria was released on the 22nd of September this year.  The single is in collaboration with German artist Kim Petras. Smith and Petras have become the first trans and nonbinary artists to have topped the billboards in a collaborative effort. 

The single gained commercial success even before its release owing to the song being teased by Smith and Petras on TikTok in August. Immediately after its release, it made it to the top 3 on Billboards and has currently topped the charts in the UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. It made it to the top 20 in Italy, Norway, France, Belgium, Sweden, Indonesia, and Petras’s home, Germany. 

Unholy Song Review

Deliciously debaucherous, ">Unholy is currently every youth’s favourite and is bound to make your feet liven up at the beats. However, before we hit the dance floor, let us understand what we’re dancing to. 

The Unholy Story Setting 

The music video begins with a Husband dropping off his Wife at an event and excusing his absence from it. The wife finds a condom labelled ‘The Body Shop’ in her Husband’s jacket that he wrapped her in before leaving. 

The audience then follows the Husband to the said Body Shop and where we are introduced to Smith as the innocent bystander who takes us through the Husband’s activities there. 

Decoding the Unholy-ness 

The Body Shop is a strip club hidden in a garage that those with a heavy pocket can avail of. The Body Shop reserves the services of women for the express sexual pleasure of customers like the Husband in exchange for money. 

‘Mummy don’t know Daddy’s getting hot

At the Bodyshop

Doing something unholy.’ 

The husband has been fetishised as the Daddy and the wife as Mummy. But if one may, what is hot about Mummy not knowing? And why glorify activities that will shatter Mummy when she eventually gets to know? 

Consensual non-monogamy is one thing but there is nothing attractive about infidelity. Then why glorify the act by dedicating an entire song to it? 

Enter Pertas in the second verse which goes: 

‘Mm, daddy, daddy, if you want it, drop the addy (Yeah, yeah)

Give me love, give me Fendi, my Balenciaga daddy

You gon' need to bag it up 'cause I'm spendin' on Rodeo (Woo)

You can watch me back it up, I'll be gone in the A.M. (Yeah)

And he, he get me Prada, get me Miu Miu like Rihanna (Ah)

He always call me 'cause I never cause no drama

And when you want it, baby, I know I got you covered

And when you need it, baby, just jump under the covers (Yeah)’

Petras’s verse sheds any doubts about the song fetishising a Sugar Daddy. 

Different people are allowed to have different fetishes. However, the fetishising of ‘Daddy issues’ is insensitive to people who have father wounds in place. It is disheartening to note that absent/inconsiderate fathers have successfully traumatised their daughters so much so that there is a vocabulary dedicated to such suffering. Added to that dejected realisation is the numbing realisation for people doing healing work that their trauma is a turn-on in the bedroom for their sexual partners. 

Petras goes on to glorify the ‘gold-digging’ archetype women have been accused of, who need men to buy them things, a Sugar Daddy. 

If one takes a step back from the Unholy-ness here to time travel into the past, then one might come to the realisation that society presented women with marrying a rich man as a lucrative career option owing to an unsatisfactory number of career options it made available to women in those days. Time and again women have been blamed for obediently following this lucrative career option when they have never been the architect of it. Fast forward to the 21st century and ‘we run the world girls!’ or at least we try to when the dementors of patriarchy are sent back to Azkaban from time to time. 

This begs the question, what need do women have for a Sugar Daddy when they are in a position to gift themselves Miu Miu like Riri?

Doesn't the fetishisation of a Sugar Daddy then belittle the position that women have worked hard to earn for themselves over the years? 

Culpability can be assigned to Petras’s verse pitting an unavailable lover who causes no drama and is gone by the A.M against an available wife who makes emotional demands thereby causing drama and magically manifesting an unfaithful husband as a result. Pitting women against women is an archaic patriarchal practice that presents women as capricious, materialistic beings who fight for a man to satisfy their physiological needs. Furthermore, the very idea that one needs to be emotionally unavailable to be sexually desirable presents a shallow representation of sexual intimacy. 

Smith’s catchy second half of the chorus sings: 

‘He's sat back while she's droppin' it

She be poppin' it

Yeah, she put it down slowly

Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at

Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome so he can get that’

The video leaves women bereft of any agency other than sexual agency than exists only to appease the male gaze of ‘Daddy’. So she’s seen doing all of the work for his sexual pleasure while he sits back and enjoys himself. 

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The picture painted above echoes the anachronistic practice of men claiming sexual pleasure without making an effort to return that pleasure to their female partners. 

While he sits back and enjoys himself he conveniently plays the absentee father who cheats on his wife and gets lauded as a casanova for his charm in the song. 

Notwithstanding Smith and Petras playfully dedicating two whole minutes of dolling up infidelity culture and casual misogyny, the audience is yet to catch an elusive minute where the ‘lucky lucky girl’ rejects the damsel in distress narrative and takes charge of it. Perhaps the future holds some hope.