The Bitch Ho Problem

A crowd of rowdy young men enter a mansion that’s staffed by an army of voluptuous, thonged and bikinied women. They shake and pop and gyrate, bend over and spread their charms, take it from behind and get busy with each other. The guys haul them around like sides of meat, pulling their legs apart and shoving their asses toward the camera. But it’s cool: the girls are smiling because these boys have plenty of cash, and that makes it all right. The bills shower down on female flesh, along with champagne—and whatever else might be flowing. The climax to this conjoining of sex and money? A grinning man swipes a credit card between a girl’s ripe buttocks.

That’s pretty tame porn, you might say, and you’d be right—but it’s not porn; at least it’s not marketed as such. It’s the video for rapper Nelly’s hit “Tip Drill,” which has been beamed into millions of U.S. households via cable’s BET network, along with other rap videos in the same vein. Networks like MTV and VH1 show them, too. The “Tip Drill” video leads the pack in raunchiness, but only narrowly, and its lyrics are mild compared to some.

It’s rude stuff, but there’s no denying its popularity. Slick, sexed-up, beat-driven party rap is the most lucrative segment of hip-hop, and hip-hop has CD sales of more than a billion dollars annually, accounting for about 14 percent of the overall music market. That means a large chunk of current youth culture features the wild ho and the pimp who does her, pays her and kicks her to the curb as stock characters. They’re the Punch and Judy of the 21st century.

There’s never been a lack of voices condemning “indecency” in pop music, and rap has taken its lumps on that score since the days when Tipper Gore launched the Parents’ Music Resource Center. Rap has always loved the “f” word and the “n” word and a lot of other words that drive Mom crazy. But the brutal treatment of women has become far more pronounced as rap has entered the big money ranks of the music industry, and that has led to critiques from all sides, even from its supporters. Leaving aside the question of why the marketplace is suddenly filled with hypersexual music, it’s worth asking what effect it has on the kids who consume it.

Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting explores one aspect of that question in her book, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. While the “Tip Drill” aesthetic may be an insult to all women, Sharpley-Whiting contends it has a particular effect on young black women, who are still largely invisible elsewhere in mainstream media. Because there are few other images of young black women to balance it, the way they are portrayed in the world of hip-hop music and fashion is especially potent. Sharpley-Whiting believes what she calls the “pervasive misogyny” of current rap represents a real threat to black women, both in terms of how they see themselves and in how the world sees them.

Speaking in her office at Vanderbilt, where she is a professor of French and director of the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies, Sharpley-Whiting is quick to say that she grew up listening to Public Enemy and still has a certain fondness for Snoop Dog and Tupac. “I love TheChronic,” she says. “I think Dr. Dre is a genius.” These are surprising words from a feminist scholar. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) is a classic gangsta rap recording, including tracks with titles like “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” But Sharpley-Whiting wants to make it clear that her book is not an anti-rap screed. “I don’t beat up on hip-hop culture,” she says. “There are some aspects of hip-hop that make me absolutely proud.”

And she wants it understood that hip-hop is more than rap music and videos. “It’s not just the music. It’s the style of dress, a certain swagger. There’s the linguistic aspect of it, there’s literature—there’s a whole range of things. Music tends to be at the forefront when we have these discussions about what hip-hop is or what it should be, but it’s bigger than that.”

In fact, there is a lively world of hip-hop art and literature, and there’s a contingent of “conscious rappers,” who produce music with thoughtful social commentary. Critics of raunchy rap invariably mention Common, who seems to be regarded as a combination of Pat Boone and Bruce Cockburn—virtue meets consciousness-raising. (To get an idea of what that means in the marketplace, go to Crave Online’s database of hip-hop videos and compare viewing stats: “Tip Drill,” as of this writing, has been played 50,844 times. Common’s gently sexy “Go” has had a total of three plays.)