Beyonce Wows Viewers With Billboard Awards Performance

But her feminist anthem? Not so much.

By Julianne Hing May 23, 2011

Beyonce’s got a new song out, "Run the World (Girls)," and she wowed the audience at the Billboard Awards last night with an electric performance of it. After it was all over her mother Tina Knowles presented her with the Billboard Millennium Award and Beyonce gave a very sweet and typically classy acceptance speech.

But while the general consensus is that Beyonce’s skill as a performer is unparalleled, even her most devoted fans are heatedly undecided about the song’s musical merits (when they can take a breath long enough from debates over Lady Gaga comparisons, that is). But others are warning women not to buy into the message behind Beyonce’s faux-empowerment anthem.

Via Feministing, NineteenPerfect breaks it down:

Her new song is called "Girls Who Run the World." I don’t think it’s right that she’s out there promulgating historical inaccuracies to impressionable young women, imparting the false belief that they run the world, thereby lulling them into a false sense of achievement and distracting them from doing the work it takes to actually run the world.

Which by the way, I don’t think female world domination is the goal. I think the end game should be a socially egalitarian society. Girls really run the world? First of all, women are universally dominated. There is not a society known where women as a group have decision making power as men as a group. This of course leads to a dissection of the song’s lyrics and some smart and angry feminist critique. Watch the rest here.

But hey, that CGI was still pretty cool, right?