Especially for Parents

News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
January 2005

Hip-Hop Misogyny: A Destructive Force

Congratulations to Essence magazine for this month's launching of their Take Back The Music campaign, described as "a yearlong in-depth examination" of media portrayals of women of color. Following the fine example of the students at Spelman College, who sparked national headlines with their protest of the rapper Nelly and his derogatory use of women in his music videos, Essence will be paying special attention to rap music and hip-hop culture.

Rap music has increasingly become the soundtrack to adolescent and preteen lives, its popularity cutting across economic, geographic and ethnic groups, its misogynistic messages and images shaping the psyches of children in every corner of our nation, even reaching out beyond our borders into the global marketplace.

Although new words have been used—hyper-sexualized and pornified, for example—in connection with portrayals of women in the world of rap music, the only thing that's really new about these negative images is that they are being aggressively promoted and exploited by those one would expect to protect public perception of women of color—men of color.

"I can't watch rap videos anymore. They make me feel bad about myself," said a University of Massachusetts student to Joan Morgan at a conference on the role of women in hip-hop, according to Morgan's article for the June 2002 issue of Essence. Certainly not surprising, given the degrading images and nasty words—bitch, 'ho (short for whore), trick, etc.—that are almost continuously used to describe females by men who proudly pronounce themselves pimps, thereby relegating women to the role of prostitute.

"The elevation of pimps and pimp attitudes creates a sadomasochistic relationship with female fans. They support a popular idiom that consistently showers them with contempt," wrote Stanley Crouch in his column published on January 3, 2005.

"Yeah, sistas are hurt…But the real crime isn't the name-calling, it's their failure to love us —to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas," wrote Morgan in her 1999 book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist.

"Especially troubling," wrote Morgan in her June 2002 Essence article, "is the unavoidable message that shaking our half-naked a---s in front of a man is the only way we have to secure male affection."

And, while adult women understandably feel hurt by these degrading images, there is another group—one that in another time would be protected from such images—that seems to be suffering damage from such pervasive negative expressions. Researchers have found evidence of young girls experiencing measurable damage from exposure to such derogatory materials.

In a study that was published in the March 2003 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, according to a March 6, 2003, article by Randy Dotinga, it was found "that black teen girls who view more rap videos are more likely to get in trouble with the law, take drugs and become infected with sexually transmitted diseases."

"We can see there is some link, some association," said study co-author Gina Wingood, an associate professor of behavioral sciences and health education at Emory University in Atlanta, according to Dotinga's report.

The study, which focused on sexually active black girls between 14 and 18 years of age in the Birmingham, Alabama, area, found that "only two factors other than rap music viewing boosted the rates of promiscuity, drug and alcohol use, and violence among the teens. Those factors were lack of employment and lack of parents who monitor teen activities."

In a Baltimore Sun article by Susan Reimer, published February 5, 2004 on ABS-CBNNEWS.com, a study conducted by Motivational Educational Entertainment Productions, funded by the California Endowment and the Ford Foundation and utilizing 2000 surveys and 40 focus groups in 10 cities, revealed some interesting findings concerning inner-city adolescent sexual behavior.

"The old-school thinking about relationships doesn't fit low-income urban youth," said Ivan Juzang, president of the research group, according to Reimer. "Sex is transactional. It is a tool to barter with." MEE Productions is a research company that, according to their web site, specializes in collecting data "about the many facets of urban culture and society" to facilitate what they refer to as "urban and ethnic marketing."

The MEE Productions report noted that "the teens also said that adult male-teen female relationships were so common that older men are cruising high-school parking lots and young girls are willingly hopping in their cars. The men know that sex with a young girl will be relatively cheaper than sex with a more demanding woman of their own age. And the girls know the men will pay with nicer purchases than their classmates can afford."

It is interesting to note within this context that, according to a New York Times report by Leslie Kaufman, published on September 15, 2004, drawing from the work of Margaret Loftus for the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York, many underage prostitutes "seem to be coming from neighborhoods where they have been recruited by expanding numbers of gangs" and "the pimps themselves are getting younger, drawn to some degree by the life sometimes glorified in rap culture."

Pam Weddington, who wrote the report for MEE Productions, was taken aback by the "devaluation of black females," not only in male-female interactions, but also within the interactions between girls, perhaps in part due to the no-holds-barred competition for male attention. "We don't respect each other. We don't trust each other. The sisterhood has evaporated," said Weddington, as reported by Reimer.

The MEE Productions report states that all parents, not just inner-city parents, should be concerned about these findings because "we cannot assume that baggy jeans are the only things that kids in the suburbs will decide to copy."

According to an April 2004 Ebony magazine article, urban youths "have always been shapers and changers of American popular culture," noting today's "electronic revolution and the emergence of an "electrosex" environment, powered by hip-hop and its offshoots."

"Not only in rap but also in film, fashion and love," continued the Ebony article, urban youths "are changing the name and shape of an addictive new climate that blends fashions, sports, music and sex, an addictive climate that powers the $164 billion youth market."

With rates of out-of-wedlock births reaching up to 70% in the African-American population and to approximately 33% among whites, the results of the lifestyles so often glorified by rap music and our sexually saturated media are made painfully clear in the number of children growing up in poverty and without fathers.

These numbers make Joan Morgan's statement about a half-naked rear end being the only way to "secure male affection", however temporary that may be, especially poignant when one considers how many young girls today grow up without ever having a positive, loving relationship with that first male, their father. As researchers have repeatedly shown, not having that early example of being loved by a male simply for who they are, as a good father does, to draw upon leaves young women especially vulnerable to the near constant barrage of words and images that tell them they have little value beyond sexual objects.

As Essence points out, "an entire generation of Black girls are being raised on these narrow images. And as the messages and images are broadcast globally, they have become the lens through which the world now sees us." Throughout the world, these distorted, misogynistic images put forth by rappers shape what the world thinks of African-American women and men. For youthful fans across the globe, these images shape what it means to be cool, to be American.

While I am indeed grateful that Essence, one of the leading African-American women's magazines in the nation, has chosen to take a firm stand on this issue, I can't help but wonder what took so long. But, now that this magazine has decided to bring this issue to the forefront for its readers, I am looking forward to seeing what some of America's strongest and most determined women can do to protect and uplift our youth as a whole.