Tag: misogynoir

How Megan Thee Stallion, Flo Milli, and Saweetie Dominated 2020

Originally published for Teen Vogue on August 18, 2020.

On March 6, Megan Thee Stallion released Suga, her third extended play project packed with nine bass-heavy tracks about rough sex, making money, and self-love. Anchored by the standout tracks “Savage” and “Captain Hook,” Megan delivered a tongue-in-cheek ode to unrepentant sexual pleasure while switching between rhyme schemes fast enough to give you whiplash.

What would follow was a year filled with women rapping about sexual agency and ensuring that they remain on the foreground of the conversation around hip-hop culture. City Girls, Saweetie, Flo Milli, Doja Cat, and Mulatto all released new music within a four-month span in 2020 as well. Megan’s two major hit songs: “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé and “WAP” with Cardi B broke records. When taking account of 2020’s music distinctiveness, it should be heralded as a year when female rappers took laps around their contemporaries, one hit song after another.

Make no mistake: The power construct in music is still heavily informed by the cishet male gatekeepers of the hip-hop industry. As a genre that historically has served as a magnifying glass for the surrounding environment, patriarchy — and misogynoir in turn — has always received a platform.

But artists like Megan and Cardi B are leveraging their varied skills with a forceful reconstruction of the lascivious Jezebel stereotype that has long been affixed to Black women — removing the shame and immorality from sexual desire and highlighting the transactional power that has always existed. There is a wide range of women’s skill and talent to choose from who are centering their own pleasure and autonomy in a genre that has used the strip club as a litmus test for marketing viability of new songs for the better part of the current millennium.

Doja Cat quickly rose from her novelty single “Moo” off her debut album Amala into a bonafide international star, with singles such as “Juicy,” “Rules,” and “CyberSex,” exploring body positivity, sexual pleasure, and female agency — landing her a coveted feature from Nicki Minaj on the remix Billboard charting single “Say So” in May. Rapper Saweetie, for her part, has navigated the sweet spot of harnessing early 2000s nostalgia while still centering her agency in the song, flipping Petey Pablo’s classic crunk hit “Freek-A-Leek,” “My Type,” and more recently “Tap In.”

Simultaneously, Alabama rapper Flo Milli has quickly risen to relevance, being welcomed into the new vanguard of rappers — with co-signs from The City Girls and Missy Elliott — with her irreverent new project, aptly titled Ho, Why is You Here. Leaning into a brash, bratty timbre with lines that thrust you right into her unrepentant aesthetic, the 20-year-old’s music is as enjoyable as it is clever. “In the Party” and “Beef Flomix” respectively, and have become such cult hits that they can have been found as backing tracks in “fancams” within stan culture; her standout single “Weak” transposes the homonymous SWV track, repurposing it into a dismissive anthem about the failings of men. Her album follows suit accordingly, as each track grows more insolent and cocksure than the last.

The women’s posse is making a comeback too: the Thot Box (Remix) is a collective of up and coming women emcees (Chinese Kitty, Dream Doll, Young MA, Dreezy, and Mulatto) flexing their muscles in response to misogynoir. Cardi B, for her part, has alluded to working on a Ladies’ Night inspired song for her upcoming album.

But how does this moment in rap fit into the greater canon of women’s place in hip-hop history?

The conversation around female artists having agency and sermonizing the power of their sexuality is nothing new. At just 20 years old, a young Kimberly Jones stood alongside her childhood friends Notorious B.I.G. and other label mates in Junior M.A.F.I.A. In a taut 4’11 package, the video for the single “Get Money” off of the group’s debut album, Conspiracy, panned over to a brown-skinned Lil’ Kim, reclining in a salon chair donning a fur, gold chain, and a strapless red dress, while she delivers line after line of erotic haymakers, flexing her sexual power and agency under a mind-blowing flow. Not long after, Lil’ Kim’s career shot into the next gear, with her own debut album, Hardcore, serving as a cultural anchor and template for a new era of women in rap.

As Kim said in the Netflix series Hip-Hop Evolution, “I was supposed to be the girl that was cute and made the guys look good, but I liked being vulgar and explicit sometimes because it made me feel free.”

This disruption was not without significant backlash — as the infamous quote goes, “well-behaved women rarely make history.” Coming out of the era dominated by of MC Lyte and Queen Latifah and the graphic language reserved for the Biggies and the Jay-Zs of the world, many viewed Kim’s content as oversexed, lewd, and anti-feminist, as opposed to a complement to the content that the other women were producing, similarly to how the Rapsodys and Nonames of the contemporary era are positioned.

Fast forward to present day and the raunchiness that shocked the charts with Lil’ Kim’s Hardcore, Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na, Missy and Trina’s “One Minute Man,” or Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” is still just as subversive — but far less uncommon. A whole new class of young women are rising to the occasion of inverting the norms of male objectification for their benefit in their music. As scholar and authority of hip-hop feminism, Joan Morgan writes in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, “most women possess an almost intuitive understanding of the role sex, money, and power play in our intimate relationships — and we accommodate accordingly.”

In the 90s, Lil’ Kim redefined the “alpha” role in hip hop music — and in contemporary times, we see an ascendance of that same perspective, to an overwhelmingly positive reception by the artists’ receptive fanbases, which is a welcome change of circumstances from decades ago. That re-centering of erotic power through women going bar for bar with each other or standing on their own, far from eradicates the industry-standard hip-hop misogyny that still runs rampant, but it allows for having a choice in your relationship with intimacy in hip-hop and power dynamics that is far more expansive than just the cishet male’s perspective.

Posted on by Shamira 0

THE INSULT AND INTIMIDATION OF BLACK WOMEN IS AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

Originally posted on VerySmartBrothas.

In an ideal world, we would spend the next few hundred words articulating the significance of a Black woman achieving rapid career acceleration in the entertainment industry after decades of hard work. Leslie Jones’s addition to SNL, an institution Whiter than tampon commercial underwear, is a major accomplishment. As is her being cast in the Ghostbusters reboot.

Instead, we are forced to lament what continues to be the striking reality for Black women in the age of social media. That with increased visibility comes increased vitriol. And that we exist in a society that feels entitled to dictate the narrow confines of where Black women are allowed to flourish versus the spaces that we should not encroach.

This isn’t a tale limited to Leslie; the Rio Olympics had us revisiting the targeted insults lobbied at Gabby Douglas, a young woman who has also been open about how the ill-spirited commentary affected her. Talk to any Black woman of any level of notoriety or platform in social media and you’ll be regaled with tale after tale of unprompted gender-based and race-based (and sometimes both at the same time) hate speech from keyboard trolls the world over. Ultimately, the plight of online harassment, on Twitter especially, has been an oft-discussed problem that seems to have received minimal traction from the company on a grand scale.

One could argue that yes, this happens to many women regardless of race. But the layering of race is too critical to ignore here as just a minor component. Jones’s costars Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Kate McKinnon certainly haven’t been compared to a deceased silverback gorilla. Or referred to as “big-lipped coons.” Or been the target or a publicly coordinated attack by a Breitbart writer. Or any of the other vitriolic slurs that targeted not just Leslie’s gender, but her race, as well as her aesthetic existing on the outliers of what is viewed as traditionally beautiful for Hollywood elite. Jones has been forced to bear the brunt of the attacks herself, with limited public support (if any) from her costars, a circumstance, which, by her own admission, she is used to. An unfortunate reality for a Black woman with a certain level of exposure.

This all came to a head, when hackers infiltrated Leslie’s personal website with her sensitive personal information, not only doxing her, but leaking nude photos from her iCloud and uploading a video of the deceased gorilla Harambe.

The last time this happened on a major scale — with the victims being Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, amongst others — the public outcry was so deafening that the FBI got involved. I’m still awaiting for any of these two conditions to arise in the light of these circumstances. At the time of writing, her costars have yet to comment publicly in support of Leslie’s continuously unwarranted plight. (Editor’s note: The FBI is involved now.)

Instead, what I have witnessed is a plethora of jokes at Leslie’s expense with regards to leaking her nudes; as if a woman who doesn’t fit the perceived mainstream standards of desirability should be less entitled to outrage at her violation of privacy than the Jennifer Lawrences and Scarlett Johannsons of the world. The impetus behind leaking, after all, isn’t just to share the bits and kibbles of America’s most beautiful; its to inflict shame and embarrassment upon women for exercising the right to celebrate their body at their discretion. And the additional layer of comparing Leslie’s physical aesthetic to that of an animal — a comparison with historically racist implications — is intended to add further insult to her public exposure, inviting criticisms to the concept of her or anyone else celebrating her form as an exercise in mockery and humiliation.

It shouldn’t be expected of Leslie to just persevere and rise above this. While it is admirable that she has so far transformed the spurts of written violence into moments of awareness and advocacy, that isn’t a weight that she should have to carry alone, and the absence of certain voices to uplift her in these trials and tribulations is also deafening. We shouldn’t be expecting Leslie to push through this adversity, we should be demanding civility and gatekeeping from the arbiters of the ecosystem that was intended to be built for healthy public engagement and not hate speech. Cyberbullying against Black Women shouldn’t be our expected burden to bear; we are people, not battering rams, entitled to justice, civility and a base-level respect that should be afforded to any human at all levels of celebrity. As social media continues to expand and transform, it is paramount that we collectively hold accountable the gatekeepers of the applications we keep viable via our engagement, and demand that the protection of Black women from targeted attacks be prioritized in the ongoing battles of cyberbullying and internet harassment.

Posted on by Shamira 0