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I love the J.Cole album

I do. But am I alone when I say “No Role Modelz” makes me feel uncomfortable? Too often I feel like “conscious men” or feminist men are still absolutely clueless about what misogyny and objectification mean. Now, I’m not calling Cole a feminist or a conscious man, I am saying that he is definitely a man with intelligence. He refers to himself as “a king,” “a god,” “a genius,” terms you would find to be synonymous with one of intelligence. And yet with such an incredible album where he takes us through the dichotomy of rich and poor; the struggles, urges, fears, and suppressions of black men—women are still bitches and hoes traversing the same thin line of saint or whore, or in “No Role Modelz” “LA Sista” or “LA Hoe”

Rap music is hard enough to listen to when you’re a black woman. You often are forced to deject yourself from your gender and your race in order to enjoy the songs—or perhaps it’s just me. But to my core, I love hip-hop; I love the art form, I love the stories, the word play, the rhythm. So of course I ran to get Cole’s album; he is a fantastic storyteller. But I am, again, having to step outside of my gender in order to listen to him and not wince when he refers to his girlfriend as, “my bitch,” or when a “reality bitch” is presumed to be illiterate—“hand her a script, the bitch probably couldn’t read along.”

Aunt Viv, Aaliyah, Sade, Nia Long, Lisa Bonet are fantasied as women worthy of respect and love while the “LA Hoe” is a “bird” who get’s “fuck[ed]” and “kick[ed]” out the door; “she deserved that, she a bird” Cole says. He’s making accusations and assumptions about women he doesn’t know based on what—the expression of their sexuality. What’s wrong with a woman being “shallow with the pussy,” it’s her’s isn’t it?

May God rest Aaliyah’s precious soul, but if there were stories about her being an overtly sexual woman—would she be in the bitch category? If Sade wanted to bare her naked body, would she be a hoe? Rappers and men continuously suck the humanity out of women. Women are referred to as garden tools and dogs; I’m not sure if there’s some subconscious male beastiality complex, but last time I checked a woman was a human being.

There seems to be this accepted notion that women must choose whether or not they are going to be a saint—a woman worthy of respect and the legitimacy of love–or a hoe–a woman who is regulated to the role of a whore who gets fucked, shamed, and ignored. And the choice must be made at a young age, for once you are tagged a hoe there is no ridding yourself of the label. You’ve suddenly become worthless because you were sexual or presumed to be easy because of how you looked, how you dressed, etc. There is no option for a woman to stake claim of her sexuality—she must always think of herself through the myopic lens of sexist patriarchy.

In these songs, men are begging for sex, but when a woman consents or expresses her own desires he shames her. Why is Cole a “god” but a woman a “hoe,” and why is the woman you love referred to as a bitch?

I love Cole’s music, I love the album, I acknowledge that he lightly critiques himself for calling “bitches, “bitches,” so heavily”—but if he can speak so intrinsically about the complexities of black men, is it so hard to allow women that same space?

It can’t be too preposterous to think that a woman does not simply exist for the sexual gratification and the emotional validation of the male. She is not an object to solidify a man’s manness. She is her own independent spirit with her set of flaws, struggles, and layers. A woman is human with sexual desires that she should be free to explore; she is free to fuck up and make mistakes without having to walk around with some scarlet A branded onto her.

This idea that a woman can only be a “LA Sista” or an “LA Hoe” is limiting, suffocating, and utterly sexist. While critiques of people selling their souls on television are definitely worth listening to, women cannot be placed into a box. I respect the appreciation of these great women from the 90s, but don’t do it at the oppression of other women, because who exactly should a woman’s role model be? I definitely understand the reference to representation of women in the media back then vs. now, but in both comparisons, the woman has been taken out of her human context and placed on two polarizing opposites of the male’s sexist patriarchal madonna-whore complex.

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songbirdddd-blog

10 years ago

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