A Vindication on the Rights of Hotties
The summer of 2019 was an amazing time for Black women in rap. Megan Thee Stallion’s release of her mixtape, Fever, was wonderfully received and exponentially boosted her popularity and exposure. The City Girls’ party anthem, “Act Up,’’ was playing everywhere and has since surpassed 173 million streams on Spotify alone. Flo Milli’s single, “Beef FloMix’’ spread like wildfire on Twitter, repeatedly going viral. Each aforementioned artist, and countless other Black women rappers, are unique in their own respect but they all share a contribution to a memorable Hot Girl Summer. Coined and trademarked by Megan Thee Stallion, the premise of Hot Girl Summer is simply women having fun, feeling confident and enjoying themselves. What started as the Hot Girl Summer of 2019 became an uninterrupted Hot Girl movement, as Black women all over the country now use the term in ways that connote a liberation from work, banality, and men wasting their time.
Although many found Hot Girl Summer and its soundtrack to be fun and freeing, others found problem with it. Many male rappers used derogatory terms to describe the music and the women making it, dismissing their sound as nothing more than uninspired stripper rap and bimbo music. These events are not exclusive to the summer of 2019, but are still continuing today in the continued release of sexually explicit songs such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “W.A.P.” The music has raised questions across many circles, ranging from elementary school teachers to political pundits. Among the many questions asked are: How do women expect to gain respect and equality if they continue to rap unabashedly about things that should be “private?” While some continue to base their notions of women’s rights in the respectability that women would gain if they focused solely on attaining manly virtue (in this case, virtue strictly as it is defined and prescribed by the patriarchy,) others question how liberation can even be possible if women must still seek approval in order to be considered worthy of equality. In other words, while some see hot girl rap as counteractive to women’s liberation, it is actually a revolutionary act in and of itself.
Obvious or not, at the center of the debate surrounding Black women rappers is the idea of virtue. Most people would not disagree with the idea that rigid archetypes of virtue have restricted woman from exploring beyond their designated social bounds. Despite this, those against hot girl rap fail to understand how it is not the music itself that creates obstacles for women’s liberation, but reactions that reinforce the idea that the women’s role begins at being a reflection of the home and children, and ends at being a symbol of propriety. As Black women rappers’ success only grows, people have been exposed in their phony feminist sentiments of: “Of course, I think it’s fantastic to have women rap! Just not about that… or that… and not about that either.” This has led to several artist pick-mes who, rather than developing their own capacities for artistic expression and reason, have based their uniqueness and deserving of success in the shallow fact that they aren’t like the other girls who “just” rap about their bodies.
Many people who are against songs like “W.A.P,” denounce those women who rely on their attractiveness to gain respect, stating that they “ought to have the nobler aims of getting respect for their abilities and virtue. (A Vindication on the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft).” There is no reason why proponents of hot girl rap (myself included) would denounce the importance of a woman’s intellect in her emancipation. What adversaries to hot girl rap fail to understand is that a woman’s success cannot lie in the respectability she receives by conforming to patriarchal ideas of intelligence; relatedly, it cannot be founded in what others think of her. Pleasure (in money, sex, or whatever else Black women want to rap about) isn’t an obstacle to liberation, but something that needs to be embraced and expressed freely, regardless of the social roles a woman assumes, in order to make liberation possible.
While some view the genre of hot girl rap to be setting women back hundreds of years, by portraying them as a “sex” with little capacity for anything other than materialism and passion, it stands as a form of feminism that does not see passion and spirit as contrary to respect for the gender. In more recent years, rappers like Yung Miami and JT have been transforming the way women relate to rap by completely disregarding how they can gain respect in a male-dominated industry and focusing more on how their music can empower women to understand their worth and choose partners, careers and lifestyles according to it.
In their ability to empower women, rappers like Megan Thee Stallion and the City Girls have done something quite peculiar. On the one hand, they do denounce the notions of a woman’s virtue lying in her physical frailty and silence. In fact, they actively discount this by being explicitly expressive, not only in emphasizing their sex, but their worldly cosmopolitan lifestyles. Yet, one aspect of women’s virtue remains throughout these lyrics that while at first glance, seems to be an exercise in self-oppression, is actually quite brilliant. In many of these hot girl rap songs, artists also brag about how their sexual power is so great that they do not need to pay for anything. The power that they hold in being a woman is so alluring and tantalizing that men simply open their wallets for them. There is no doubt that moderate proponents may oppose this aspect of hot girl rap. There have been countless arguments made in feminist literature (with one of the most famous being A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft) that emphasize one’s attractiveness as a fleeting power that becomes attenuated with time. Although this is true, the solution that Wollstonecraft (and the many who keep her argument alive, today) proposes in women developing mental prowess arguably does less for women’s rights than City Girls’ songs like “Pussy Talk” or “Jobs.” There is no doubt that women’s education is extremely important, but telling women that their only defense against a system that values them as a prop is to become educated so that they are useful beyond their beauty by no means makes an attempt to change the system itself. Rather, it places the responsibility on women to be able to adapt to the different ways in which they can be viewed as useful by other men. Instead of asking how women might continue to gain respect from men even after their beauty fades, a more productive question would be how to dismantle the powers that have designated beauty as such a determinant factor in the respectability of women.
In rapping about the pride they hold in being able to get men to buy them things, the City Girls flip the old concepts of inherent virtue in attractiveness, and the traditional role of the man as the provider, on its head. Rather than these concepts being used to exclusively oppress women, they also work to restrict men who would like sexual and social access to them. In a song featured on their new album, City on Lock entitled, “Broke N****as,” JT raps, “If you really in the kitchen, pay a bitch tuition.” This is just one of the many examples in which hot girl rappers have used the very notions of masculine virtue created and upheld by men (i.e. providing for the woman) to deny access to the sexual and romantic relationships to which many men feel they are automatically entitled.
By understanding hot girl rap’s place in women’s liberation, one can see that women’s emancipation is not about resenting what women have become, but about expanding the possibilities of what they can be. Rather than begrudging the woman who takes pride in her beauty and sexual power, the definition of beauty should be left to be developed as uniquely for each woman as their own fingerprint, as long as that definition does not dehumanize anyone else. Whether that beauty lies in the sentiments of hot girl rap for one woman or in the muted romance of the novels of George Sand for another, true liberation lies in understanding that there will always be intersections and to each woman, her own.
To write after the poetic style of Emma Goldman in The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation:
“I must confess I see nothing beautiful in this new beauty,” which is as rigid and stiff as the rulers wrapped on the knuckles of schoolgirls before they even get a chance to form their own notions of feminine morality. Rather I would have hot girl rap, rather Megan Thee Stallion and the City Girls, rather a midnight chapel wedding lit by liquor and the lights of the Las Vegas strip, followed by father’s woe-is-me, mother’s disownment and the whispers of the neighborhood aunties as I walk past their American dream lawns and porches. Rather all of that “than correctiveness and propriety” measured by how many inches I must stand away from a man when I dance with him. Periodt.
