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.