Cultural Study Essay

Recently, the American rap and hip-hop community has received much criticism regarding the portrayal of women in their music videos. Females wearing little to nothing, dancing provocatively, and being referred to in derogatory terms has flooded mainstream and the most popular music videos in the industry. Women of almost every ethnicity have appeared in rap and hip-hop music videos conforming to this degrading depiction of women, but women of color are most often featured. A famous music video in 2006 from the rap and hip-hop community was the video for Kanye West’s, a very successful hip-hop and R&B artist, song “Gold Digger.” The music video went on to be nominated at the 2006 MTV Music Video Awards for the categories of Best Male Video and Best Hip-Hop Video. Directed by Hype Williams, a famous and very talented director in the hip-hop and rap industry featured stereotypical video girls with perfect bodies as “pin-up” girls dancing in front of multiple vintage magazine cover back drops. (The degradation to these women was featured at a much larger scale as they were reduced to pictures on a magazine cover, objects of desire to be seen and not heard.) The music video for “Gold Digger” reinforces American constructed social norms through objectification, sexism and racism of women.


Women in West’s music video are objectified a number of ways which directly reinforces the social standard of the ideal female figure. The most obvious objectification of women in the “Gold Digger” music video is the reduction of women to pictures on magazine covers. They are objects to be desired. Dehumanized through being represented as pictures, the women in the video are scantily clad wearing lingerie and posing in provocative positions. The women are featured with no sense of personality, and the only sense of character the audience is given about the women is the title of the magazine cover they are posing in front of. The first woman in the video is pictured in front of a magazine with the title, “Fast”, where she is crouched next to the word. Followed by women pictured next to the magazine titles of anything from, “Vixen” to “Hot Fun”, the women are no longer human, but pictures that go along with the words that they are featured next to. Because the women are featured next to words such as, “Vixen” and “Hot Fun,” which allude to sexual references the women are wearing little clothing and posses the American ideal body for a woman.


Women in hip-hop and rap music videos posses the ideal American body type for a female. They are athletic, slender and very good looking. The women are busty, posses an hour glass figure, and show their curves through revealing clothing. Women in this genre of video’s are most often featured as sexual objects and the center of the men in the videos desire. Music videos reinforce the socialized American norm for the perfect body. Sharlene Hesse-Biber’s article, Am I Thin Enough Yet?, discusses the pressures for women to conform to a certain body type, commercialization, and media representation of the perfect female form for profit. Hesse-Biber states, “Cultural messages on the rewards of thinness and the punishments of obesity are everywhere. Most women accept society’s standards of beauty as ‘the way things are….” (616 Rothenberg). Women in America are spoon fed images of what their bodies are supposed to be like through media channels such as television; I.e. music videos. The women depicted in these videos are young, beautiful and have desirable figures. Their reward is to be able to have a rock star lifestyle. They get to be featured next to some of the United States most successful men and look beautiful while doing it. There are no women that are featured in these videos that mirror the average American woman, so the social construction of this unattainable perfect body in music videos is reinscribed into women’s minds. The message is to look like the women in the videos thus you will be able to attain success as they have.


In Susan Bordo’s article, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, the topic of a perfect slender body in American pop culture and media is also touched upon. Bordo comments, “Among the more powerful and influential representations of women within western culture is that of the ‘slender body.’ This discourse has become a disciplinary cultural norm” (310 Barker). As Bordo states, these preconceived notions of what the attractive female form is, are in influential media representations in American culture and the rap and hip-hop music industry. This notion is very influential, especially, to young men and women. Women around the country look up to a celebrity lifestyle and try to mimic their own lives after what is depicted as glamorous. By only putting women in rap videos as the objects of man’s desire with no depth, American women get the impression that they should be sex symbols, and do whatever it takes to attain bodies like the women featured in mainstream media. Women loose a sense of self through attaining perfection of someone pictured in the media. A woman then has no identity because she is just trying to, again, mimic what she sees. The rap and hip-hop industries video’s objectifies women and further implants a sense of perfection for success in the minds of American women.


Not only does the music video for “Gold Digger” objectify women but it also promotes a sexist attitude towards women. The women in this video are featured as not having personalities, and simply there for visual appeal. The men in the video are obviously the focal point as they are the artists, but the women are not depicted as equals, but as subordinates. The most prominent depiction of subordination is that there are many women featured in the video as if the main character, Kanye West, has multiple love interests. He is not pictured with one woman, as the “gold digger” that he is confessing about in which case he actually does say in the lyrics that he does love her, but he is pictured with multiple women dancing proactively next to or right on him. The video promotes the idea of a woman being disposable to a man as when one beautiful woman leaves the picture, another beautiful woman comes in. The women in the video have not chosen to break the standard of video women just for looks, but have decided to conform to a dominant group’s ideal of what women should represent in music videos. This is a common trait of the subordinate in a relationship of permanent inequality. According to Jean Baker Miller’s article, Domination and Subordination, Miller states, “Subordinates are described in terms of, and encouraged to develop, personal psychological characteristics that are pleasing to the dominant group. These characteristics form a certain familiar cluster: submissiveness, passivity, docility, dependency, lack of initiative, inability to act, to decide, to think, and the like” (111 Rothenberg). In the video the women fulfill almost all of the stereotypes of the subordinate group above. One of the main stereotypes women in the video fill is a dependency on men. The whole content of the song is about women depending on men for money and doing whatever they can, even being a gold digger to get it. Women in the video conform to the societal stereotypes set forth by Americans to conform to the ideals of the dominant group, which in turn promotes sexist ideals against women. In Andre Lorde’s article Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Lorde states, “Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of the oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of use for who oppression is as American as apple pies have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for the illusion of protection.” (703 Rothenberg). Lorde describes assimilation to stereotypes of women as a tool for survival, something women have done to keep themselves protected and out of scrutiny from the dominant male group. Subordinate groups have to conform to the dominant groups ideals or be punished, and in this case, music video girls have to conform to the degrading depiction of women to make money. If a woman were to contest how they were being portrayed in a music video’s the artist or director could simply say, “your fired”, and there would be another woman waiting in the shadows to take her place. Conformity is the key in the sexist attitudes. The hip-hop industry's music videos promote sexist attitudes towards women through derogatory depictions of women and women simply conform.


Lastly, West’s music video promotes a racist attitude and reinforces societal stereotypes toward women of color. The women featured in the “Gold Digger” video are all of African or African-American decent. This depiction of only women of color makes it seem as though these are the only women that are capable of being “gold diggers”, or that they are the most prominent in doing so. In Chris Barker’s book, Cultural Studies, he states that there are definite problems in the portrayal of colored women in media, “the portrayal of women in the standard bitch/ho mode, so that few are defined apart from their relationships with men…women are frequently reduced to being only tough and/or sexy.” (271 Barker). This definitely rings true in the “Gold Digger” video. The women are depicted as ultra-sexy and in the standard bitch/ho mode. The women are depicted as bitches for taking advantage of men’s money through being gold diggers, and hoes for sleeping around to be financially stable. They are also seen as only in relation to their relationship with the men. Women’s relationship with men as “gold diggers” is seen as problematic. Women in the video prance around in skimpy lingerie which visually depicts them as ultra sexy. The use of lingerie also reinforces societal stereotypes of colored women as overtly sexual. In Patricia Hill Collins article, Black Sexual Politics, she states, “women of African decent have been associated with an animalistic, “wild” sexuality” (319 Taylor, Whitter and Rupp). One woman in the video is actually pictured with fire in her hand, and growls as if she is extremely wild. All the women in the video have obvious sex appeal as their wardrobe depicts which reinforces both the stereotypes described.


Rap and hip-hip music videos today have reinforced social norms of women in American society. The Kanye West video “Gold Digger” objectifies women and reinforces the American norm for the perfect female figure. The video promotes a sexist attitude and reinforces the relationship of permanent inequality between men and women, and the video is a tool to reinforce stereotypes of racist attitudes toward women of color. Not only do the women depicted in these videos need to make a conscious effort to choose wisely on what projects they will be involved in, but the entire industry needs to look more deeply into what effects derogatory and degrading representation of women in music videos has on the American female population.




Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. Minneapolis: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.


Rothenberg, Paula S., comp. Race, class, and gender in the United States an integrated study. New York: Worth, 2007.


Taylor, Verta, Nancy Whitter, and Leila J. Rupp, comps. Feminist Frontiers. 7th ed. McGraw-Hill, 2007.

Women Say Rap Videos Demean, not Define

This news article came from http://www.sptimes.com/


Black women have had it with misogynistic raps and lewd images. Treat us with respect, they say.


By RODNEY THRASHPublished June 14, 2005
Only in a rap video can somebody swipe a credit card down a woman's thong-clad backside. Black women are tired. Tired, they say, of being portrayed as everything but a woman. "If there was a line," Cori Murray says, videos such as Nelly's 2003 Tip Drill, with the card swipe, crossed it. "It's just really blatant. Just in your face." After years of letting rap videos define them as skin-revealing sexpots, black women have decided enough is enough. From a historically black women's college in Atlanta to the nation's largest black women's magazine, the generation that grew up listening to, dancing to and loving rap is now challenging it. An intervention, Murray calls it. At Atlanta's Spelman College last year, students protested Nelly's scheduled appearance at a campus bone-marrow drive, prompting a nationwide dialogue on rap and misogyny.
In April, a conference on feminism and hip-hop drew thousands to the University of Chicago. One of the most sweeping movements is Essence magazine's "Take Back the Music" campaign. The initiative started in January as a yearlong effort, but now editors say until they see more positive images of black women in rap, the magazine will write monthly articles, hold town-hall meetings and urge readers to participate in telephone, letter and e-mail campaigns to cable, radio and record company executives.
"We do not believe in censorship," says Murray, the magazine's arts and entertainment editor. "What we're asking for is different images, balance. There are black women in different lights, different body types and just different venues." The mainstream, however, may not know it.


"There's not a countermessage," says Tarshia Stanley, who teaches a course on images of women in the media at Spelman. "It would be fine if it were projected as a small part, but it's projected as all that we do, everything that we are."
Unlike the Spelman protest, the Essence campaign does not take aim at specific rappers. "For us," Murray says, "it is across the board." If that's the case, why then did black women excuse the hypersexualized women in rap songs and videos for so long? Stanley has a theory. "We're dealing with a generation who's been raised by this kind of music and raised by this kind of imagery," she says. "They know something is wrong. They maybe don't like it, but it takes a moment for them to get a critical consciousness, for them to articulate what's wrong and why it may be detrimental in our community." Murray can testify to that.
"I was one of those people" who said, " "Oh, it's the beat. They're not really talking about me,' " she says. Even as a key player in Essence's campaign, she still has a hard time criticizing rap. "It's my music," she says. "I just want to see it grow in a different way." Another reason for the delay? Black women did not want to sell out their black brothers - even if they sold them out. "We didn't want to spank their hands, especially publicly," Murray says. "As a community, we have this thing about airing our dirty laundry." But as rap became racier and offered more of a one-dimensional view of black women, "we realized we had to say something," Murray says. "Yes, it's going to hurt. Yes, we're putting these guys on blast. But you know what, we gotta do it because it's our lives. It's our souls. "It's hurting us too much." Murray has seen the impact the images have had on her niece, and the girl still wears diapers. Once, she says, the girl gyrated and cooed, "Dip it low, make your man say oh." The way the toddler moved and sang, like the women in the Dip It Low video, left Murray dumbfounded. "She's 2," she says. "If she's doing this now, I can't imagine what kind of songs are going to be out when she's 5 or 6."


A group of Atlanta's Emory University professors found rap videos had far greater implications for the more than 500 black teenage girls it followed from December 1996 to April 1999. According to the study, published in the March 2003 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, the girls who watched hours of videos were morett likely to have had sex, drink and use drugs than those who did not. "Exposure to rap music videos, which is explicit about sex and violence and rarely shows the potential long-term adverse effect of risky behaviors, may influence adolescents by modeling these unhealthy practices," the study's authors say. It is not just the impact on black girls that worries black women. It is black boys, especially those who "get raised by the television and by music," Stanley says. "Young men of color," she says, "get their idea of masculinity . . . from the media." "The videos are showing young men how to treat young women," Murray says. For all the damage rap videos may have done, Serena Kim, features editor of Vibe, a hip-hop magazine, says there is a flip side. "Hip-hop in effect popularized female beauty and size," she says. "You don't have to be a Barbie doll to be attractive. These videos show that women come in more curvaceous sizes." At a cost. Most hours of the day, you can flip to MTV, Fuse and Black Entertainment Television, and see men (fully clothed) with half-nude women in videos. BET, a channel that has been criticized for showing too much skin, even has a program devoted to adult-oriented rap videos.
Michael Lewellen, BET's senior vice president of corporate communications, says any movement that generates dialogue and forces people to think about the choices they make is a good thing.


But the Essence campaign, he says, "has given people a reason to point a finger to the entire hip-hop industry," his employer included. "And that should not be the case." "The most nominated artist for the Grammy Awards in 2005 was Kanye West and his lyrics aren't violent," Lewellen says. "We are talking about a small percentage of the artists whose content has fueled Essence and other campaigns going on right now." Moreover, he says, the "thing that's important to note about any rap music video is what you see and hear is nothing more than that individual artist's (interpretation) of his or her world. It's not meant to be a blanket descriptor of black culture. It's not meant to be indicative of the lives of all black people." Maybe so, but that is a naive assessment, Stanley says.
"It's not what you see one time," she says. "It's what you see 1,000 times. It begins to make inroads into your thought processes. It becomes life for (consumers) because they try to live out these things that they see and that they hear." Murray agrees. "It's a copout," she says. "Just because they're not saying your name doesn't mean they're not talking about you. They're talking about you collectively." If people have such a problem with the music, stop buying it, Lewellen says. "Let's remember the bottom-line factor: The industry responds to market conditions," he says. "As long as consumers are willing to buy the CDs, go to the concerts, listen to the songs of the more controversial artists, they will continue to make the kind of product that they will make. If the market conditions change, I guarantee you the the product will change."Do you really think Starbucks would charge $5 or $6 for a cup of coffee if consumers didn't pay for it? It's a similar analogy when it comes to music." According to Lewellen, BET UnCut, the show that broadcasts adult-oriented videos at 3 a.m., has had double-digit viewership increases in the past two years.
"Someone is watching that show at 3 o'clock in the morning," he says. "Otherwise, we wouldn't get the numbers that we get. "If there's a movement to get the attention of these artists, you . . . do that by not consuming their product and that's an individual choice." Murray acknowledges that some of the very people who are now attacking the music are fans of it."It's a conflict," she says. "But we also recognize that it's time to step up and say no to it. We were a little late getting to this party, but we're here now and believe us, we are gonna make some changes."


-- Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com

Lyrics

[Jamie Foxx]

She take my money, well I'm in need

Yeah she's a triflin' friend indeed

Oh she's a gold digger way over time

That digs on me

[Chorus:]

(She steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke Niggaz (She steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke Niggaz(I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head

[Verse 1:]

[Jamie Foxx's lyrics repeated across verse]
Cutie da bomb

Met her at a beauty salon

With a baby Louis Vuitton

Under her under arm

She said I can tell you rock

I can tell by ya charm

Far as girls you got a flock

I can tell by ya charm and ya armbut

I'm lookin' for the onehave you seen her?

My psychic told me she gonna have a ass like SerenaTrina, Jennifer Lopez, four kids

An' I gotta take all they bad ass to show-biz

Okay get ya kids but then they got they friends

I pulled up in the Benz, they all got up in

We all went to din and then I had to pay

If you fuckin' with this girl then you betta' be paid

You know why

Take too much to touch her

From what I heard she got a baby by Busta

My best friend say she used to fuck with Usher

I don't care what none of y'all say I still love her

[Chorus:]

(she steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke niggas (she steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke niggas (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head

[Verse 2:]

[Jamie Foxx's lyrics repeated across verse]

18 years, 18 yearsShe got one of yo' kids, got you for 18 years

I know somebody payin' child support for one of his kids

His baby momma's car crib is bigger than his

You will see him on TV, any given Sunday

Win the Superbowl and drive off in a Hyundai

She was supposed to buy ya shorty Tyco with ya money

She went to the doctor got lipo with ya money

She walkin' around lookin' like Michael with ya money

Shoulda' got that insured, GEICO for ya moneeey(your money)

If you ain't no punk holla' we want pre-nup

WE WANT PRE-NUP!, yeah

It's something that you need to have

'Cause when she leave yo' ass she gon' leave with half

18 years, 18 yearsAnd on her 18th birthday, he found out it wasn't his?

[Chorus:]

(she steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke niggas (she steal me money)

Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need)

But she ain't messin' wit no broke niggas (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave)

Get down girl, go 'head

Now I ain't sayin' you a gold digger, you got needs

You want a dude to smoke, but he can't buy weed

You go out to eat, can't pay, y'all can't leave

There's dishes in the back, he gotta roll up his sleeves

But while y'all washin', watch him

He gon' make it to a Benz out of that Datsun

He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes

(Jamie Foxx comes in)

This week he's moppin' floors, next week it's the fries

So, stick by his side

I know this dude's ballin, and yeah that's nice

And they gon' keep callin' and tryin'

But you stay right, girl

But when you get on, he leave yo' ass for a white girl

Get down girl, go 'head get down

Get down girl, go 'head get down

Get down girl, go 'head get down

Get down girl, go 'head(She take my money)

Let me hear that back

Music Video

Definiton of Gold Digger Sexist?

American society has constructed constructed many definitions for the term "gold digger." On UrbanDictionary.com the top rated definition for a gold digger is, "An abusive sexist slur used generally against young women in love with older male friends, lovers and husbands. While the expression is often associated with the concept of "women chasing men with money"...many young women dating middle class and poor older men find themselves being called "gold digger" as well indicating that it's a slur designed to pervert the beauty of older men much as the beauty of young adult women has been turned into a perversion throughout the years by society. This societal labeling system completes the "perverting" process of older man/young women couples. He is a dirty old man for falling in love with a young adult woman and she is a gold digger for falling in love with an older man. It's society's way of suggesting that older man/younger woman relationships are always predatory in nature. Two people preying on each other. He on her "vulnerability" and she on his money. Fortunately laws of society override this sexist attitude that has very questionable roots in origin and motives." According to TheFreeDictionary.com a gold digger is, "A woman who seeks money and expensive gifts from men." And according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary a gold digger is, "1 : one who digs for gold 2 : a person who uses charm to extract money or gifts from others." Although, the Merriam-Webster definition does not reserve the term exclusively for women, I can confidently say that American society has reserved this term for women only. The definition provided by Urban Dictionary is the most modern and well fit to what today's American society's construction of a gold digger. Any American woman would not want to be defined as a gold digger as it is seen as a derogatory term in American society, constructed to for only the female sex. This is yet another way of society created to keep the woman as a subordinate being in American society. There has to be something wrong with a woman marrying wealthy....right? They cannot be in the relationship for love, they have to be in it for money. This is the common thought when a younger woman is seen with an older man. Most of the time women are not seen as an equal to the man simply because they maybe be much younger. What is the female in the relationship is also extremly sucessfull, has her own carerr and makes her own money? This is never thought of because men are thought of as a dominant in American society. So, is the term sexist? I would defiantly say so.