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Volume 71, Issue 76,
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Opinion Feminine doesn't mean feminist Kalaiah Vaughn
Over the past few years, my attitude toward the hip-hop music industry has oscillated between disappointment, hope and utter disgust. After reading the February 2006 issue of VIBE magazine, I was definitely disgusted. To be frank, I was angry. The incensed feeling arrived when VIBE, "the official hip-hop magazine," referred to Remy Ma, a shallow female rapper, as a feminist. According to the article's author, Aliya S. King, Remy is the "ultimate feminist: brash, unapologetic, smart, and unyielding." I beg to differ. There are a plethora of reasons Remy Ma is far from being a feminist. To begin with, any woman who refers to herself as the N-word or the B-word lacks the self-respect required to be a feminist. According to Remy, the B-word is "just a (expletive deleted) word." A real feminist, however, would know the power of womanhood cannot be reduced, or even compared, to a four-legged, flea-infested, feces-eating animal. The fact that she chooses to align herself with a dog illustrates her deficit of self-respect. Even more so, her laissez-faire attitude spills over onto her theories regarding appropriate professions for women. When explaining why she feels that the degradation of women in hip-hop is overrated she said, "I'd rather see these chicks in a video getting a nice check at the end of the day than being butt-naked in a strip club counting singles all night." Her perception is saddening, not because she agrees with the misogynistic images presented in many hip-hop videos, but that she feels money justifies the action. A real feminist would know a $750 check at the end of a video shoot is unacceptable, because her sexuality would not be for sale, nor would her self-respect. Given the gratuitous raunchiness of many hip-hop videos, the only differences between videos and strip clubs is that videos do not show nipples and genitalia and their audience numbers in the millions. But, at the end of most video shoots, the girls who actually get paid are selling their self-worth to men who are not only sexually gratified during the shoot, but who validate their manhood by having women beg for scraps of validation like puppies under the table. Remy begs for her validation in a more covert way--by trying to prove that she is one of the guys. Because of this, she rejects the human vulnerability that makes each of us special. You won't hear Remy rapping about love, although she longs to be in a loving relationship. These feelings go unheard because Remy is so engrossed in being masculine in order to compete with male rappers that she chooses to define her power as a woman by appearing needless. One thing real women know is that pretending to be needless is a silly "Superwoman" myth. A woman's strength cannot be determined by needlessness, but by admitting that she has needs -- financial, spiritual, professional, social and sexual--and being proactive about meeting those needs without compromising her self-respect. VIBE's decision to compromise what is a feminist bothers me because everything that sounds feminine is not feminist. Feminists are women like Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Aretha Franklin, the late Jacquelyn Kennedy, Mary M. Bethune, the founders of Spelman College and Angela Davis. If the editors want their impressionable, young female readership to think that a feminist is a cursing, classless, video-dancing, drug-dealing woman, may God help us all. Vaughn, an opinion columnist for The Daily Cougar,
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