Female performers have been doing this for years - pushing the envelope about sexuality - and the minute a man does it, everybody freaks out.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've been to strip clubs where the dancers have these whole routines that they create just for the wow factor and to say, 'Look how strong and physically fit I am.' Most women couldn't do it, and it's not necessarily sexual. It's just a performance.
We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
We're feminists. We're doing something that only guys are expected to do and doin' it right! At our concerts we'll do one hard-core rap song and then do one where we'll be real sexy.
This is the way I look at sex scenes: I have basically been doing them for a living for years. Trying to seduce an audience is the basis of rock 'n roll, and if I may say so, I'm pretty good at it.
When I was producing on my own, I was doing it in order to - in a very patriarchal entertainment industry, let alone planet - very much hell-bent on trying to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it as a woman.
It's important for any artist - particularly female artists - to feel completely comfortable and to know what they're trying to do.
If I'm going to be honest about it, I think men get to do this sort of thing all the time. You look at countless performances by great male actors who get to play the whole gamut of human emotions. Women aren't regularly allowed to do that, and I don't know why people are so frightened by it.
I've done sexual stuff before - onstage, which is even more emotionally difficult. With a TV crew around, you are stopping and starting; it becomes really technical. It's not erotic at all.
I've always had mostly women come out to see me perform. That's the reason the guys show up; they know R. Kelly is going to draw the women. Most of the songs I'm singing are catering to women anyway.