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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” .

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