You may or may not have seen the new Mastodon video, The Motherload. The song itself is brilliant – the best one on the album by a mile, with a tune the size of Cthulhu’s balls – and the album has been a huge success, both commercially and critically. This video, however, is extremely confusing, particularly for those of us who regard ourselves as politically enlightened. Aside from the band miming gainfully along to their song, it features a startling and (almost) comically OTT quantity of large female bottoms and frenzied twerking, much as we might expect to see in one of those high budget hip-hop or pop videos. It is what those of us who lean to the left on such matters generally regard as “a bit sexist”. And I’m being generous to Mastodon here.

But no, Dom, I hear you cry, it’s not sexist. It’s funny! Look at those vibrating butt-cheeks! Brilliant. It’s probably ironic or something. Well, no. It’s still sexist. I don’t care how much irony you throw at this. It was sexist when it happened in past videos and it’s still sexist now. The fact that Mastodon are an ostensibly bright bunch and very much not from the heavy metal old school – where, back in the hallowed day, sexism was widely tolerated – is not a sufficient get-out clause by any stretch. Neither is this video excused from being tarred with the sexist brush because a proportion of women immersed in alternative culture have decided that it’s OK.

When Front magazine closed down a few months ago, there was a faintly hysterical online debate about its merits (or lack of them) and one of the things I kept reading was people defending the magazine’s principal diet of tattooed tits on the basis that providing pierced and Hitler-fringed teens with wank fodder was somehow not the same thing as what those awful, awful people at Nuts and Zoo did in their filthy rags. It was the same thing, obviously, but, you know, I was reliably informed that the girls’ personalities were given a chance to shine in Front … so, it’s different … or something. It wasn’t. I’d much rather people put their hands up and said: “Yeah, it’s sexist but I don’t give a shit!” rather than trying to make out that anyone who objects to this stuff is the enemy of fun and laughter or Millie Tant from Viz.

Just to make sure that it’s not just me being humourless, I had a quick look at the comments underneath the video on YouTube. Some generous soul was eloquently arguing that the video was “a satire”, ie that somehow this carnival of ululating chuffs was a searing mockery of sexism in popular culture. Anyone with half a brain knows that the vast majority of rap music that’s actually worth listening to seldom resorts to Benny Hill-esque visual tropes. Of course, if Mastodon – or the directors of the video, as seems more likely – are poking fun at hip-hop videos, then hooray for the brave white men lampooning the silly black women, right? I am now deafened by the sound of a giant can of worms being hacked open, so perhaps that’s a debate for another time. But following the outcry triggered by Lily Allen’s Hard out Here video, and Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, did anyone involved in this thing expect its content and tone to be overlooked? Was there any thought involved in the whole process? I genuinely don’t know and it’s making my brain hurt.

While there are enough genuinely horrifying things happening in the world at the moment, without me getting stressed about a metal band’s poor creative decisions and low-rent sense of humour, it does irritate me, because heavy music has spent the last few decades steadily edging away from an overriding culture of crass misogyny and making the whole scene a lot more welcoming and palatable to women in the process. Twenty years ago, women were a tiny minority at metal shows but things have changed dramatically in recent times and metal is all the better for it.

Of course, one stupid video isn’t going to halt that progress. But I can’t help thinking that the whole tawdry episode is a terrible shame. If we’ve arrived at a place in the evolution of our culture where blatant, idiotic and utterly pointless sexism can be airily dismissed as “a bit of a laugh”, then clearly we have much further to go than previously thought.