Sex, Lies and Videos
The images we see in today’s hip-hop videos are making our girls less than the sum of their parts. A noted cultural critic explains why we can no longer afford to be silent

By Joan Morgan (Essence June 2002)

It was the timbre of her voice that haunted me. It was soft and tinged with defeat, “I can’t watch rap videos anymore, “ said the former fan who spoke to me from the University opf Massachusetts audience I was addressing that day. “They make me feel bad about myself. Even when the images aren’t bordering on pornographic, the girls in them are always skinny, White, Asian or Latino—anything byt Black. Or if a dancer is Black, then she’s extremely light-skinned” She herself was pretty and thick with skin the color of milk chocolate.

This young woman’s alienation and frustration resonated through the crowd of college-age women. “If this is who is considered beautiful by our men, where does that leave me?” was a common remark. For the next hour or so, the discussion I was supposed to be facilitating on the role of women in hip-hop turned into a lengthy discourse on why so many die-hard female fans had finally given up.

It wasn’t as if I couldn’t empathize. Remaining a hip-hop loyalist these days is a formidable task with a questionable payoff. Rap music has journeyed frp, the South Bronx underground to Corporate America, as 70 per cent of hip-hop consumers are now White. For many artists, the shift in the market has meant adopting mainstream values, resulting in the proliferation of thin, White and light images of women. When you couple that with a visual aesthetic that relies heavily on T&A and crotch shots, suffice it to say the average rap video taps into just about every insecurity and erroneous belief about sensuality related to Black women. Especially troubling is the unavoidable message that shaking our half-naked asses in front of a man is the only way we have to secure male affection.
Fewer than five years ago, the discussion I had at the university would have been different. To be sure, sexism in hip-hop would have been part of it, but there also would’ve been lively debates over freedom of speech. Latifah’s Afrofemme regality versus punanny politics of Lil’Kim, and the deliciously guilty pleasure of discarding feminist principles for a few hours of booty-shaking hedonistic abandon. Now we could no longer get past the sense of degradation most young women feel while watching rap videos.
Several of them raised concerns about how those images affect younger girls. One expressed dismay at seeing her 5 year old niece (who watches videos with her twentysomething mom, mind you) provocatively winding to the ridiculously infectious hook of Nas’s “Oochie Wally” in whih a woman sings. “He really, really made me scream and shout.” Another shared her futile attempts to quell her pubescent 12 year old cousin’s fear that her emerging hips and breasts were making her “too fat” to wear designer gear that defines her ghetto-fabulous aspirations.
These stories echo the frustrations of so many other women I know. A principal at a New York public junior high school has to send her female students home repeatedly for “coming to school in the hooker wear they see in these videos.” She is concerned for their safety, and she’s afraid they’ll get picked up for soliciting. My friend Irene Prince, the mother of a 14 year old girl, laments: “The problem with rap is that the images of cool women they present are always degrading to girls. They get to be only one thing-toys for boys. I don’t want my daughter modeling herself after that.”
Certainly there is little question that the majority of Black girls are ill equipped to handled this onslaught of sexually degrading content. Although Black girls continue to have a more positive body image than many of their White counterparts. …Young women are developing eating disorders at a greater rate than previously, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health. And with the scantily clad video vixens informing their notion of aesthetic ideal, 90 percent of those affecte with eating disorders are adolescent and young adult females. Combine these facts with the reality that father figures are absent from so many of our homes, and it is easy to see why Black girls are likely to think that wearing little to nothing and competing with women for sexual attention is the only way to secure male interest.
But for all the attention the half-dressed hoochie may …see what rap videos don’t portray is that without financial independence, education, ambition, intelligence, spirituality and love, punanny alone ain’t all that powerful. In fact, it’s easily replaceable an inexhaustible in supply. As my girlfriend Irene said to me, “ In rap videos, there is no self. Girls become body parts and nothing more.”
As women, we cannot abdicate the responsibility to have our children. As female hip-hop fans, we can no longer afford to buy into the music’s most clichéd disclaimer-that rap’s content is intended for mature audiences. True, it is a parent’s role to monitor that his or her children are watching, but there’s also no denying that the current generation is essentially parenting itself. Sixty-two percent of our children are being raised without the benefit of both parents in the home, and many of them without the benefit of extended family. Indeed, in a great number of homes, television is the baby sitter. It really does take a village, y’all, and in the absence of parental figures, we gotta parent one another’s kids.
It’s time to set some standards. Instead of resigning ourselves to being at the mercy of the media, we have to recognize our power to have an impact on it. Individual acts of resistance-banning cable from our homes, refusing to buy CDs with misogynistic content-are simply not enough. In the late eighties, MTV was besieged with complaints that its videos were too full of content inappropriate for younger kids. Viewers collectively issued an effective ultimatum: “Clean it up, or we ban you from our homes.”
MTV responded accordingly by blurring any suggestions of nudity, gang insignias or drugs and refusing to play rap videos with hard-core content. Yet when media giant Viacom bought BET, it let the station air programming that it would never allow on MTV. Evidently it wasn’t acceptable to air near-pornographic images for the young, largely White audience of MTV, but it was fine to dump them on the young, largely Black BET audience And why is that? Because we aren’t complaining.
It’s up to us to identify these videos for what they are-adult content that shouldn’t be shown in prime time. If White America can determine what’s too toxic for their children, we can, too. Every parent, college student, female hip-hop fan and journalist who has spoken to me about the disturbing content of videos should also put his or her objections down in an E-mail or letter. Send if off to every station that plays these videos, and demand that they be put on after 9:00 p.m. If the response isn’t favorable, we should join forces with our peers, colleagues, community leaders and congregations to threaten a boycott of not only the station but also its advertisers. I bet we would see immediate changes then.. We would see, perhaps, a space where our girls can enjoy the music they love, without risking their self-esteem and souls in the process