Pimpin' ain't easy: hip-hop's relationship to young women is complicated, varied and helping to shape a new Black gender politics.

WHEN HIP-HOP IMPRESARIO RUSSELL SIMMONS appeared at Hamilton College for an evening lecture on "Hip-Hop, Culture, and Politics" in April 2004, no one could have anticipated the fallout. Simmons, whose net worth hovers around $400 million, had been invited to lecture for his work as the chairman of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN). The year 2004 was a critical election year for many who were tired of the mendacity and chicanery of the Bush administration. Some were also openly smarting from the voter fraud and widespread Black disenfranchisement in Florida 2002. Simmons's HSAN had voter registration among hip-hop generationers as their mission, as well as challenging the [New York state] Rockefeller Drug laws as unethical, racially biased, and harshly punitive.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

His lecture morphed into a Q & A session, as he made a last-minute decision to stray from the contractual script towards a "just kickin' it" dialogue. As with comedian Dave Chappelle's bodacious, street-creed-upholding character in the skit, "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong," Simmons's attempt at "keeping it real" fell flat.

Riled by the television show BET Uncut and specifically the rapper Nelly's controversial video "Tip Drill," female students swapped volleys with Simmons. At one point, he suggested that the students just "turn off their television sets," an increasingly used line by corporate representatives when directly confronted by critics of such programming. Simmons's use had the effect of identifying him more with his lucrative financial interests than with his audience. The students though were more concerned about the 80 million television sets that were tuned into BET, and the unpleasant gender politics and sexual provocations that continually flowed from them.

One of the Hamilton students, a young woman, was especially agitated. While she was clearly misguided in her assertion that there were no networks devoted to promoting white culture, she nonetheless zeroed in on hip-hop culture's contradictory relationship with women and boldly declared that these videos impinged upon her sense of womanhood. As she fled the auditorium, Simmons delivered the "keep it street" coup de grace. He attempted to evoke empathy for the hard-knock life of so many male rappers. He suggested that after acquiring the requisite material trappings of success--cars, houses, jewelry, and "all the pussy" they wanted--many rappers were still quite unfulfilled. With the president and dean of the college and a gaggle of professors in the audience, Simmons exemplified for many the role that hip-hop has carved out for young women. They were either "hot pussy for sale" or they were "pussy for the taking."

But of course, hip-hop's relationship to young women is much more complicated and varied than that. In fact, hip-hop's commercial success is heavily dependent upon young Black women. Overexposed young Black female flesh, "pimpin," "playin," "sexin," "checkin" in videos, television, film, rap lyrics, fashion, and on the Internet, is indispensable to the mass-media engineered appeal of hip-hop culture that helps to shape a new Black gender politics.

Despite its dominance in CD sales and cultural influence, for some--like cultural critic Stanley Crouch--hip-hop music and culture loiters in the profane and ridiculous. Crouch's verbal beat-down of hip-hop, in a January 23, 2005 piece in the Daily, manages to saddle up to Black women in their ensuing battle over images and lyrics in hip-hop. The not always chummy Crouch, particularly in his editorializing on Black women and American sexual politics, writes in praise of Essence: "The magazine is the first powerful presence in the Black media with the courage to examine the cultural pollution that is too often excused because of the wealth ... The elevation of pimps and pimp attitudes creates a sadomasochistic relationship with female fans. They support a popular idiom that consistently showers them with contempt."

Crouch touches upon the very ethos that has gradually consumed the most popular expressions of hip-hop's gender politics: a most debasing duet of female adulation and sacrifice in the face of misogyny and misanthropy.

Hip-hop, like every other socio-cultural and political phenomenon, has its quasi-saints and wholesale sinners. Some artists are just trying to make a buck; others can barely be called artists at all. Nevertheless, in the course of less than a generation, hip-hop has risen from schoolyard battle sessions to an astounding cultural force. Hip-hop artists speak to, and for, a generation very often described as alienated and disaffected, an example of which was Kanye West's blasting George Bush during the ongoing saga of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans with those now famous seven unscripted words: "George Bush doesn't care about Black people."

The list of social ills and sexual contradictions confronting the hip-hop and Millenium generations boggles the mind. Varyingly defined as those born between 1965 and 1984 or more broadly, as the post-Civil Rights, post-segregation generation, the hip-hop generation in particular is attempting to explore and affirm their sexuality in an era rife with pornography, the mainstreaming of strip clubs, and sexual situations in everything from blue jeans ads to prime-time television; they are also simultaneously running up against chronic unemployment, mind-numbing poverty, affirmative action backlash, police brutality, the growth of the prison-industrial complex, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the continued war on drugs, and increasing suicide rates, violence, and despair. It is no wonder that irreverence, that old standby of youth, and "girls (and boys) gone (sexually) wild" appear to be the hallmarks of hip-hop.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Dissent and critique have long been a cornerstone of hip-hop, though it is clear that the collective political agenda of this generation is still a nascent one. Materialistic and hypercommodified, any political ideals put forth risk cooptation as fashionable. As hip-hop culture comes to be increasingly marketed globally and identified as mainstream, its more progressive political ambitions, like those signified by the 2004 and 2006 National Hip-Hop Conventions, will continue to face serious challenges.

Marc Anthony Neal captures the political "ironies" faced by progressive hip-hop generation artists such as Talib Kweli, The Black-Eyed Peas, Sista Souljah, [and] Common: "[T]his generation ... speaks to the ironies of hip-hop itself--an art form that seeks to neither delegitimize nor undermine the logics of late-stage capitalism, but rather to reorient those logics to serve the interests of its constituents. It's not a perfect science." No, it isn't. For as the late black feminist poet Audre Lorde cautioned [that it is not possible to use] the 'master's tools to dismantle the master's house," consumer capitalism is in large part responsible for the huge race and class disparities about which hip-hop artists, progressive and not, wax poetic.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America and the market research firm NPD Group, hip-hop CD sales were $1.7 billion in 2002 and $1 billion in 2003, while hip-hop's popularity as a musical genre garnered 13.8 percent of the market. Today, hip-hop is increasingly allied with the $10 billion dollar-a-year adult entertainment industry through the glorification of strip clubs in hip-hop-oriented movies, videos, and music. Artists like Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Mystikal and N.E.R.D. have even released pornographic videos, and in some cases compact discs are accompanied by X-rated DVDs and songs not featured on the CDs. Hip-hop's association with the sexually explicit has led to the 2002 and 2005 VH-1 sponsored documentaries Hip-Hop and Hot Sex and Hip-Hop Videos and Sexploitation on the Set. When Snoop Dogg gave up hosting the Euro-focused Girls Gone Wild videos to launch a 1-900 number and Snoop's Doggystyle--winner of an Adult Entertainment Award--he explained his reason in that "keep it real" logic that has come to define this new black gender politics: "No black girls, no Spanish girls--all white girls. And that ain't cool, because white girls ain't the only ho's that get wild."

As much as the sexploitation of young black women is necessary to the "keep it real" mantra of hip-hop artists, corporate bottom lines, and marketing strategies, we must acknowledge our own role in this troubling relationship. We are enthralled by hip-hop culture, and we conspicuously (and happily) consume its primary products--music, fashion, and values. As Joan Morgan poignantly asserts, "women love hip-hop--as sexist as it is--'cuz all that in-yo-face testosterone makes our nipples hard."

The complexities of young Black women's engagement with hip-hop culture raise difficult questions. Sexual violence, sexism, "beat downs," sexual dishonesty, anti-lesbianism, and the legacy of color prejudice all hammer away at self-esteem. Most young Black women experience at least one of these challenges. These issues existed before the hip-hop global take-over, but the very public celebration and commercial trafficking in such images and behaviors have made them appear normal, acceptable, and entertaining. Young Black women do in fact represent a core audience of hip-hop consumers, as studies by the Center for AIDS Research at Emory University and Motivational Educational Entertainment reveal.

Though much of America remains oblivious, there are many that have tried to move the dialogue on hip-hop culture and gender forward. This includes widely read progressive feminist critics and activists like bell hooks, Johnetta Cole, Kierna Mayo, Rosa Clemente, Martha Diaz, Lisa Fager, Maya Rockeymore, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Tricia Rose, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Raquel Rivera, Joan Morgan, Scheherazade and Salamishah Tillet, and filmmaker Aishah Simmons. Essence magazine's "Take Back the Music" campaign, spearheaded by Michaela Angela Davis, Cynthia Gordy, and Akiba Solomon, is but one example of engaged work from within the belly of the beast. We have seen town hall meetings around the country, including at Spelman College for Women and "Rap Sessions" on Gender. Political organizations, such as the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and the Congressional Black Caucus, have gotten involved, and yes, even activists like Dr. C. Delores Tucker have all tried, regardless of how poorly their efforts have been received. But in this melee, we must not forget the voices of young Black women themselves. Though as a country we often don't listen to them, rest assured, these women have plenty to say on matters that vitally concern them. A group of young women at Sarah Lawrence College attempted to launch a national protest from Howard to Stanford Universities against rap music's misogyny. Spelman College undergraduates, led by Moya Bailey, met the scourge of the Black media when they protested rapper Nelly's visit to their campus after the airing of "Tip Drill." But more often then not, their objections, like those of so many other young Black women, are muffled by the music.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Because hip-hop culture is generally filtered through a lens of heterosexuality and posturing around masculinity, same-sex-loving women have been generally coopted into the male fantasy of a menage a trois on the order of Ludacris's "Splash Waterfalls" video from the Chicken-N-Beer album. In "Splash Waterfalls," female sexual arousal and coupling is arbitrated electronically by a virile male presence (Ludacris on computer screen).

Viewed through the prism of the hypermasculine culture of hip-hop, lesbians and lesbianism are in some respects the final frontier of conquest. The prevailing mentality is that all lesbians need is a "good stiff one" to set them on a "straight" (or at the very least, bisexual) course.

Failing cooptation, the words "lesbian," "butch," and "dyke" are usually hurled as epithets at women who do not respond to male sexual charisma, as in Lloyd Banks's "If shorty ain't feelin me shorty must like girls ... If the bitch don't like me the bitch must don't like men" ["Groupie Luv"]. Here, women are cast as either groupies or lesbians. And while some female rappers who have achieved mainstream success like Lil Kim make clear that. "I ain't gay, this ain't no lesbo flow" ("Get Money"), others like Trina, Kim's Southern "get money" counterpart, teases that she's "quick to deep-throat the dick/And let another straight lick the clit" ("Nann-Nigga"), lyrics suggestive of a bisexual menage a trois or a heterosexual threesome with Trina on both receiving ends.

The lesbian figure is used as a transgendered trope in hip-hop culture. As the archetypal straw women, she is simultaneously a foil to male sexual endeavors (as rapper Trick Daddy asserted, "It just don't seem right for a woman not to want dick."), a measurement of what is deemed culturally unfeminine, a testament, if "set straight," of the limitlessness of charismatic masculinity; she is also a cock-tease for sybaritic heterosexual sex.

Flesh and blood Black lesbians live, as do we all, much more complicated and fuller lives than depicted in rhyming couplets. And despite hip-hop's heterosexism and homophobia. Black lesbians have carved a space for themselves within the culture. Athletes from Cheryl Swoopes to Cynthia Cooper; artists, including DJ Pam of The Coup, Miss Money, [and] Medusa; and filmmakers Yvonne Welbon, Doria Roberts, Aishah Simmons, Sidra Smith, [and] Tiona McClodden; [and] festivals like Queerstock and the now-defunct woman and gay-positive Black Lily Tour ... have always been a part of hip-hop's various enterprises and intersections.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is professor of African-American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University.

Reprinted from Pimps Up, Ho' Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, by permission of New York University Press.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]