A 17 year old Singapore shopper has created a social media storm after complaining a major fashion retailer’s in-store music encouraged rape and misogyny.
Forever 21 Singapore has apologised to the customer, Gabrielle Singh, the daughter of a popular Singapore actor, after she posted a long letter of complaint on Tumblr, widely linked to from Facebook pages. By Wednesday it had been liked or shared by more than 8500 people.
Singh said while shopping in the Somerset 313 store at 8pm one night with her mother and baby sister Forever 21 was playing rap music.
“Fine. I don’t mind rap. What I did mind was the lyrics, which declared “half you bitches like pussy too”… The songs got progressively more derogative: more condoning of abuse towards women, more explicit in descriptions of sexual endeavours…,” Singh wrote.
“So when your store decides to blast music that screams “you have a right to rape her” and “I won’t have sex with her unless she has big breasts” and “I’ll only love you if you suck my penis”, I have a problem with that.”
Singh said while rap wasn’t her thing, she understood it is a genre people listen to, “and if I stepped into a shop that had shaped its general brand image around fellatio and breasts, then I would understand the demand for this sort of music in that sort of shop”.
“(But) you are a store that 13-year-old girls frequent. You are a store that women can bring their children to. Your target audience is young girls and women… yet your store decided blasting horribly misogynistic, uncensored, woman-shaming, woman-blaming lyrics would be a perfectly acceptable thing to do.”
Singh said Wednesday, even before mainstream media latched onto the debate, she did not expect to garner as much response as she had. She originally posted her complaint to the store but posted it online because she thought other retailers needed to consider the issue as well.
Defending her posts she said store management needed to be serious about its brand image, which includes the music it plays in-store.
After posting to followers that Forever 21 had apologised Singh wrote: “I’m not a big company, only a little girl. But yez. This is good news.”
