Who's the sex object now, Barbie?

I just watched Nicki Minaj's last video "Super Bass" and I noticed something interesting. Her backup dancers aren't stick-thin. And not just that, they aren't all what you might call "traditionally hot" for lack of a better term. You don't have to watch the video, just go below for pics...



The women in the video look so different from the usual backup dancers in videos, that something felt "off" about the video as soon as I started watching it. Part of it is that they're wearing wigs, but that just highlights that I think these women weren't chosen for their looks. Because while Minaj and some of the dancers (for example perhaps the one on the far right in the pic below) looks very pretty in the wig, some of the other women verge on the transsexual. And the comments on youtube reflect that ("Nicki's dancers are all men!")

Honestly, I thought at least one of them was a man myself, because that seemed like the sort of interesting thing Nicki Minaj would do! But as the internets made no note of it, I knew that couldn't be the case. The first time a high profile star hires a cross-dressed man to dance in their backup line, they're going to publicize that.

But no, these are Minaj's usual dancers--you can recognize them from other stage shows on youtube.

They're of course thin, but you can easily pick out Minaj's torso in this line-up.

 

I'm not the best observer of this, but a lot of these women might be darker than the average African-American backup video dancer. In any case there's a variety of skin tones, which I seriously doubt happened by accident.

They're also in Doc Martens, which makes this traditional "sexy dance pose" come off completely different than it usually would even with their short shorts and their push up bras.

I tried to find a random dance video to compare this with, out of what's popular right now. It was hard because Billboard's top spots are dominated by women right now, but here's Jason Derulo's recent "Don't Wanna Go Home". 

Gorgeous skinny light skinned woman.

 

Gorgeous skinny lighter skinned woman.

Gorgeous skinny white women.

(But don't get me wrong, the women are great dancers.)

The only "traditional" sex objects in the video are herself, and her male models.

All of this is made that much more interesting by the fact that Minaj calls herself and her fans and I assume her dancers: Barbies--a nickname she didn't pick, but that she eventually adopted. The only way in which Minaj looks like a Barbie is in her tiny waist and her boobs--the backup dancers even less so. 

There's some serious Barbie subversion going on here... and I like it.

 

 
Side note: Though Nicki wears some wicked high heels in her appearances, I've noticed that in these concerts--which I assume are longer--she and her dancers wear kitten heels or flats.
For example for one song she's in these:

While her dancers are in these:




But usually they're in flat boots.

Here's some more pictures of her dancers from various live performances. (Some are grainy cause they're screen shots I took from videos.)