The portrayal of women in rap music and by artist is sadly degrading and embarrassing, especially for a lifelong rap and hip-hop fan like me. Women are constantly depicted as whores, a piece of meat, a prize, gold diggers that will do anything for money, something to be used over and over again like a dish rag and worthless. Now all of these view of women are on being played out in society.
The hip-hop culture today is notoriously known for its hyper sexual negative images of females that male artist portray to the public, but it's not only today. This image of women has been around since the 1970's. An example of this is when 80's hip-hop group "2 Live Crew" jumped into the scene with extremely sexual and explicit singles and videos, which was a very rare thing to do back in the days. Their videos would show women as the main focus, wearing super tight mini dresses and string bikinis that left nothing to the imagination. Their video "Me So Horny" is a perfect example.
*Warning - Video contains extremely explicit lyrics and visuals*
Since fashion and style is forever being recycled, many females today in the music industry like Rihanna, Lil Kim, Nicki Minaj and many video vixens are now dressing and posing provocatively like the women in the video above and this therefore influencing their young naive fans to portrait themselves in the same way. The use of drugs by females in the industry is most definitely glamorise. Again artist like Rihanna who photographs herself on a regular basis on Instagram smoking marijuana.
I've notice that a lot of young girls are now dressing more provocatively and starting to experiment with drugs stronger than marijuana. Young girls today are convinced that drugs, trashy clothing, a skinny body, but a big booty, bad behaviour and women hating (which is depicted in lyrics) is the definition of beauty and power. This new trend of behavior is causing the hip-hop culture to shape an unrealistic and negative image of women, therefore creating a devastating effect on the identity and cultural standards of an ideal woman. Sadly in today's society, sex = money = power... apparently that's all that matters.
Little girls of the world, don't feed into the hype. Be who you are, because that... is more beautiful!
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