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 The Chronic,” 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.)

Sharpley-Whiting’s book is the latest entry in a long and lively discourse about the cultural worth of hip-hop. Prominent black culturati—including critic Stanley Crouch and jazz great Wynton Marsalis—have made it their mission to slam hip-hop and rap for promoting pathology within the black community, and for playing to white prejudices. Marsalis calls rap “ghetto minstrelsy” and says that it debases its audience and its performers. At the same time, there’s an equally heavy-duty contingent—including leading academics Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson and Henry Louis Gates—who speak up for hip-hop as a genuine black cultural expression, and argue that rap music, in its lyrical agility and sexual frankness, has something in common with Chaucer and Shakespeare. Many academics, including Sharpley-Whiting’s Vanderbilt colleague Kathryn Gines, have incorporated hip-hop into their classrooms and their scholarly work.

When asked where she comes down in this debate, Sharpley-Whiting says, “I recognize it as an aspect of African American culture.... It makes me quite proud when I think about the ability of black people to be so creative in the cauldron of U.S. racism—that they’ve been able to survive, and that they’ve been able to be so creative and create things that have a global currency in a way that is undeniable.... I take pride in that aspect of hip-hop.”

As for the “minstrelsy” accusation—i.e., that hip-hop’s large white following is somehow motivated by pandering to racist stereotypes—Sharpley-Whiting sees more of a positive crossing of the color barrier. “What we’ve seen is that it’s become race-transcending. It really is American youth culture. Someone from North Nashville may have a hip-hop flavor that’s different from a student at Vanderbilt, [but] I still see the influence of hip-hop. I still see the influence of black culture.”

And yet, for all her admiration, Sharpley-Whiting is appalled by the gross sexism of today’s rappers. Somewhere on the road from the eloquent angst of rap pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to the mindless party beats of Crime Mob, hip-hop’s image of women became utterly demeaning. The voluptuous video ho, strutting, gyrating, offering herself as a commodity, is the female face of hip-hop today, although “face” may be the wrong anatomical term. There was a time when strong, pro-woman female rappers had real currency in the hip-hop world, but one look at the play list for Nashville’s hip-hop station 101.1 The Beat reveals that commercially successful women rappers are pretty scarce now. And performers like Lil’ Kim only put a feminine spin on the same crass notions of sex and beauty found in the men’s recordings.

In fact, Lil’ Kim, with her reported skin lightening and surgically narrowed nose, is a walking illustration of one of the biggest burdens hip-hop imagery places on black women—a “whitened” standard of beauty that features long, straight hair and fairer skin. It’s a cruel irony for young black women when a realm of pop culture that claims to embrace African American experience actually repeats an ancient rejection of beauty that’s too defiantly non-European—in other words, too black. Sharpley-Whiting describes some of the ways this “whiter is better” beauty ideal plays out, whether in the rejection of a young black candidate on America’s Next Top Model (a show that is extremely popular with African American viewers), or in the current fetish among some African American men for ethnically mixed Brazilian women as objects of sexual tourism and mail order brides.

It’s fair to say that most women feel subjected to impossible standards of beauty, and apart from their particular racial twist, hip-hop’s beauty issues closely mirror those in the media generally. But the booty issue is another matter. Rap’s portrayal of sexuality is far more explicit, and more cold-blooded, than what’s usually found in the mainstream culture. Party rap rarely refers to a woman as anything but a “bitch” or a “ho.” Only the ho has any value, and that’s solely as a sexual object who earns an equal measure of admiration and contempt for her sexual insatiability. Her sexuality is not an expression of her desire—it’s a commodity for sale to the high bidder, to the alpha male who claims sexual rights by virtue of his power, wealth and prowess.

Sharpley-Whiting looks at this heartless portrayal of sexuality from a number of angles. She provides sympathetic insight into what motivates the video vixens, writing that “many of these women are singers, professional models, dancers and aspiring actresses, earning their rent, tuition monies or commercial exposure for a day’s work on a shoot.” She devotes a chapter of the book to hip-hop’s groupie culture, examining its appeal to young women. But she also documents the sad result when they follow its sexual model: black teens “represent 65 percent of reported HIV/AIDS cases among youth, in spite of being only 15 percent of the U.S. population.”

Pimps Up, Ho’s Down attributes part of the problem to black strip clubs, which have become the main proving ground for new rap music. It’s cheaper to plunk down a 10 dollar cover and tip a DJ than it is to pay for radio ads, and if the dancers and men go for a song, it’s on its way to being a hit. “Strip clubs are to hip-hop what Zogby [polling] is to politics—an indicator of what moves the crowd.” Obviously, what goes over well in the atmosphere of a strip club is more likely to be raunchy than respectful, and to perpetuate the image of women as sexual property.

But why would women who aren’t denizens of the strip club world be happy consumers of its music? Sharpley-Whiting suggests history is at play. In racist cultures, African American women are seen as promiscuous, she says. Indeed, when rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players topped the headlines last year, black women students at Vanderbilt were quoted in the national media about recurring sexual harassment from white men on campus, who seemed to assume they were sexually available because they were black. In this persistent context, black women have sometimes reacted by moving to the opposite extreme—denying their own sexuality. And yet reactive sexual conservatism within the African American community has also weighed heavily on young black women. For some of them, the unrestrained sexuality of hip-hop, though it is deeply poisonous in its own way, can be a sort of antidote to repression. “Hip-hop says it’s okay to be sexual,” says Sharpley-Whiting. “Celebrate your black ‘womanness.’ ”

Sharpley-Whiting also suggests that there is a certain tolerance of sexual aggression—or at least silence about it—within the black community, again due to the legacy of racism. She uses Aishah Simmons’ outstanding 2006 film about African American women’s experience of rape, No! The Rape Documentary ( notherapedocumentary.org ), as a springboard to discuss why it’s difficult for black women to protest sexual hostility from black men. Just as black women have been stereotyped as promiscuous, black men have been labeled as sexually dangerous—false charges of raping white women were the common justification for lynchings. Combine that history with the general distrust and devaluation of black men in white-dominated society, and the result is tremendous pressure for black women to avoid burdening black men with further criticism, or giving prejudice more ammunition. This pressure contributes to a “code of silence” about sexual assault and harassment at every level; thus the tendency to turn a blind eye to the lewd images of hip-hop.

There’s no doubt that hip-hop’s image of women has currency within the larger culture, even at a privileged institution like Vanderbilt. Former Vandy student Ketura Brown, who is of African American and West Indian ancestry, recalls a conversation with a male student in which she jokingly said she hated rap. He replied, “It’s probably because you’re not like the girls in the video: you’re smart, maybe a little like them because you are light-skinned, but you don’t seem stupid. I can’t see you acting like that; you’ve got class.” She says, “I realized in that moment, assumptions—about my intelligence, class, education and expectations—were all being made and influenced by rap/hip-hop.” Brown was relieved to be seen as different from the women in a typical rap video, but she also couldn’t help wondering “whether or not he started with the assumption that I was like them and he had to be proven wrong.”

The rap music world is keenly aware that it is under attack for its sexism. Sharpley-Whiting herself says “it’s fashionable to critique hip-hop,” and there’s a host of organized efforts to improve it, from Essence magazine’s Take Back the Music campaign to the Rap Sessions tour that will visit Vanderbilt next week. The people within hip-hop’s profitable commercial mainstream don’t always get much of a voice in this debate. They tend to be dismissed as merely money-grubbing, but some of them do have thoughtful things to say on the issue.

Julia Beverly, founder and editor-in-chief of the hip-hop fan magazine Ozone, which is discussed at some length in Pimps Up, Ho’s Down, agrees there’s a problem but feels the blame is largely misplaced. “I’ve always been a critic of the men’s lyrics. I don’t think that anyone could argue it doesn’t affect us, but I think the way you’re raised has more effect. [Rap music] doesn’t change who somebody is.” She points out that she’s a young woman who’s been listening to the music and working in hip-hop circles as a journalist for years, and she’s never been lured into the drugs and sex scene. She argues for personal responsibility when it comes to sexuality. “There’s too much emphasis placed on the symptoms of the problem rather than the root of the problem. If you respect yourself and who you are as a person, you’re not going to be out there sleeping around.”

Speaking to the question of why rappers don’t produce more high-minded music, she says, “Some of the blame belongs on the public. If you listen to the complete album or catalog of an artist, there’s often a song in there dedicated to their mother or their wife that does show respect to women. The public doesn’t support it.” It’s the sex that sells, she notes, pointing out that Ozone got a big sales boost when it put out the controversial “groupie confessions” that Sharpley-Whiting discusses in her book. “If people want the rappers to put out more positive messages they have to support that.”

Rapper/actor David Banner produced the recording of the infamous “Tip Drill” and has clearly gotten tired of defending it. “’Tip Drill’ is adult entertainment—for adults,” he says in exasperation. He seconds Beverly’s complaint about critics who don’t put their money where their mouths are. Mentioning his spiritually focused “Cadillac on 22’s,” he says, “America didn’t flock to that. The people that are criticizing us are not buying our records.” He points out that artists are ultimately at the mercy of the music business. “Record companies find one type of music that sells, and they don’t do anything else.”

As for damaging effects of misogyny in hip-hop, he says, “America’s the most misogynistic place in the world. …If we want to talk about misogyny, let’s talk about the beer companies putting women in bikinis to sell their product. People are blaming America’s misogyny on young black men.” He argues that the violence and sexism of hip-hop are being judged by a hypocritical and racist standard. “Everything that America crucifies young black men for is what America was built on—slavery, murder, misogyny. This is America’s problem.”

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting doesn’t disagree. “The misogynistic aspects of hip-hop are pervasive in American culture,” she says. “The idea that women today would rather starve themselves than eat in order to conform to a certain idea around beauty is just as damaging for me when I see it as some guy in a rap song saying ‘bitch, ho.’ I find it just as troubling.” And she agrees with David Banner that black men are judged hypocritically, pointing out that their negative behavior is always treated as if it’s “the dirtiest of the dirty.” Indeed, the frankness of hip-hop is apparently too much for the wider, whiter culture even when it’s attached to an intellectual critique: the title of her book shut her out of book signings at suburban Nashville bookstores.

But her recognition of the failures of the larger society doesn’t mean she thinks hip-hop should be let off the hook. What she’s trying to promote with Pimps Up, Ho’s Down is a constructive criticism that encourages hip-hop to revive its creativity and authenticity, and stop pandering to what she calls the “lowest common denominator.” The “global currency” of hip-hop holds real cultural potential. Like jazz, it can be both a positive face of America and a truly international art form.

Battling the sexism of hip-hop is key to accomplishing that goal, as Sharpley-Whiting sees it, and she envisions that process as having benefits that go far beyond elevating popular music. For young women of color, as for their white counterparts, “feminism” is something of a dirty word, but the glaring misogyny that permeates hip-hop is awakening a new generation to gender issues in an immediate, personal way. They take a look at the endless gyrations on BET and begin to consider that maybe sexism is worth thinking about.

As Sharpley-Whiting puts it, “I think we’re at a moment when hip-hop can revivify feminism. I think hip-hop has made young women much more conscious about gender. They may stop short of calling themselves feminists, but they are exhibiting gender consciousness. Hip-hop can learn some things from feminism, feminism can learn some things from hip-hop … It’s a very interesting moment when those two are meeting.”