You swore in your own lyrics that you’d be a better man! I thought. With every passing scene, though, I felt worse and worse for Goines’ character and angrier and angrier with Beyoncé’s. When I first watched the video, I initially thought, Ha! Serves him right, this is how men treat women all the time. The hypothetical title of the song proves to be true: Beyoncé only imagines what life would be like if she acted like “a boy” as her immature husband does. The end of the video reveals that in actuality, Beyoncé is the faithful wife while Goines is the cheating husband. Her husband, played by Eddie Goines, cooks breakfast that goes uneaten, rejects advances from female coworkers, and gifts Beyoncé expensive earrings which she wears to a party where she dances with her partner instead. The concept was a role reversal, in which Beyoncé played a married cop who flirts with her partner while on duty, turns off her phone to hang out with her friends without including her husband, and mocks her husband when he calls her on her flirtatious behavior by making it seem as if he’s overreacting. It was also shot in black and white, but where “Single Ladies” focused strictly on costumed choreography in front of a blank background, “If I Were a Boy” was filmed as a mini-movie and created a narrative to complement the lyrics. Jake Nava, who’d directed the “Single Ladies” music video, helmed the video for this single as well. At that time, I believed women to be the only victims of double standards, the only victims of cheaters in relationships.“If I were a boy,” Beyoncé croons, “…I’d kick it with who I wanted, and I’d never get confronted for it, ‘cause they’d stick up for me.” Righteous fury blazed in my girl power heart as I sang along. Having heard the song a number of times before seeing the video, my teen self accepted it as calling out male cheaters and jerks and whatever else. The song came out when I was in high school, and I was at a prime age to latch onto its message of the double standard between men and women. Yet double standards can’t only be viewed on the surface level, and “If I Were a Boy” tackled that, too-in its music video. While both are reactions to a failed relationship, one is an upbeat battle cry from a woman who rises above a jealous partner, while the other is a hurt reflection on being cheated on and how society views male cheaters (somewhere on the “boys will be boys” spectrum) versus female (expected to be faithful and committed). Fans and critics alike heralded it as a powerful performance, and it followed in the footsteps of “Single Ladies” as a feminist song. It bolstered the contrast between Beyoncé as herself and as Sasha Fierce, and displayed her range as an artist. “If I Were a Boy,” a post-breakup ballad, was Beyoncé’s follow-up single to 2008’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” the definitive girl power anthem of the late 00s (and, let’s face it, still one of the best).
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