Over sexualisation of black women in the music industry

[lboogy]

I know I'm going to sound like an old biddy but here goes. I'm fed up of black women being at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of sexuality. It's harmful to us.

The whole WAP thing was celebrated as women taking charge of their sexuality but I just saw it as a vulgar display that harms the the perception of black women.

I can't think of many black female singers these days that don't have to be half naked to get noticed. Everyone is cutting up and contouring their bodies.

I honestly despair for my daughter's future teenage years - which is a good 10 years away

I disagree there are plenty of black female singers who don't perform half-naked: Andra Day, Missy Elliott, Jhene Aiko, Jazmine Sullivan, Jennifer Hudson, Ella Mai, H.E.R. , Laura Mvula and Janelle Monae.

@NurseButtercup
Janelle Monae came instantly to mind when I read this thread. Thanks for reminding us of these other ladies who don't feel they need to flash the flesh to succeed. I do feel however that relatively they are a minority.

I think that the sexuality boundaries have to constantly be pushed and wonder where it will all end up

[quote maggiethecat]@NurseButtercup
Janelle Monae came instantly to mind when I read this thread. Thanks for reminding us of these other ladies who don't feel they need to flash the flesh to succeed. I do feel however that relatively they are a minority.

I think that the sexuality boundaries have to constantly be pushed and wonder where it will all end up [/quote]
Do they have to be pushed though? Cardi B and Meg doing scissor sisters on stage naked but for underwear is unnecessary IMO. What's the difference between that and porn?

And all those ladies are either long established artists before the days of bubble butts and bbls or simply don't have the looks to pull off the overt femmefetale schich

@lboogy
I think that some artists will feel the need to out-do, out-shock, out-whatever other artists in order to be successful. And that’s part of the problem.

But I agree, some of what I’m seeing is verging on porn.

OP I agree. All this female empowerment and celebrating female sexuality crap are just euphemisms for the same old exploitation.

I mean, you don’t see male rappers writhing about half naked do you?

And I know Cardi B chose to do it herself and is making money out of it, but it’s at the expense of other black women who have always been portrayed as hyper sexual by the media anyway.

So yes I totally agree OP.

And all those ladies are either long established artists before the days of bubble butts and bbls or simply don't have the looks to pull off the overt femmefetale schich

I disagree - the ladies that I've listed are equally as attractive and have CHOSEN to be fully clothed when they perform, since the beginning of their careers. I also can't think of an unattractive or average looking female artist. H.E.R. and Ellie Mae are same age as Cardi b and Megan thee Stallion.

But I agree, some of what I’m seeing is verging on porn.

But yet it's NOT porn. Once upon a time the performances that you're referring to, would primarily be carried out by the background dancers. I remember Lil Kim being explicit with her lyrics, but I can't recall her dancing matching her lyrics. I do remember Lil Kim and Madonna both shook up the music industry around the same time; Madonna released her sex album. I wonder what Madonna is up to these days??

All this female empowerment and celebrating female sexuality crap are just euphemisms for the same old exploitation.

Is it female exploitation if the female artists are the driving force behind the performànces?.

I mean, you don’t see male rappers writhing about half naked do you?

Let's not forget that patriarchy & misogyny rules in the music industry. However, LiL NasX is the only man that I can think of that is doing similar performance's. Now that he's opened that door, I suspect we be will start to see more men.

I'm actually on the fence about it all. I can see how the performances that are being debated, are revered as artistic expression & creativity. The dance performances are visual representations of the words they are singing. There are songs, with videos that are much more explicit in my opinion Rihanna "Pour It Up" and
Nikki Minaj "Only" with Drake & LiL Wayne.

I'm not dismissing what pp have said, just offering a different perspective.

@NurseButtercup
We could get into semantics about what is and isn’t porn, be it hardcore or softcore but I think most will agree that these performances are highly sexually suggestive.

They are not new and Madonna in her early career was shocking at the time.

I find the focus on these performance to be extreme and wonder about balance in this liberated self expression and creativity. If lyrics are predominantly sexual it’s likely that performance will follow - Lil Kim was an anomaly.

Also think about the pressures put on women to acquire the body image to push these performances - bigger butts and boobs etc. Is this really liberation?

I despair of young black girls’ consumption of this unhealthy, unbalanced diet if this is what they are bombarded with as being successful in the music industry.

I would like to speak as a woman who was impacted by these kinds of messages in my younger years.

My contemporaries are Beyonce, Ashanti, Alicia Keys, Britney Spears as I'm early 80s born. I think Lil Kim is a little older than me, not by much, but in the way that matters when one is a 17 year old girl listening to a 23 year old woman rapping about sex.

I think the lyrics impacted me. That kind of female empowerment was 'we don't need men', 'men aint shit without a car' 'no scrubs' etc. It was helpful at the time, I really thought I didn't need men and as such I avoided some pretty awful men and relationships with them. I think I missed out on some fun as well but hey ho. It wasn't all shiny and gold, but I felt it made me stronger. This kind of 'men? what men?' approach to life has its dividends, but in talking to some of my friends recently (approaching 40s or in early 40s) some have wondered whether this perspective on life contributed to them not settling down and having children, which many of them are quite desperate to do now, and soon will find it fairly challenging to do. It contributed to our backbone, but also I think, made us fairly inflexible at times. Not all of us adjusted to the world as it really is, which calls for so many compromises from women (this is not a feminist world, after all. If we all stick to our very feminist ways of life - if we have them, or whatever you might call feminism - we often find ourselves shut out from things that it is very human to want and to feel a need for). I'm writing this with three children around my knees, so bear with my warbling.

About the sexualisation. I don't really have a problem with it in its pure form. I'm Caribbean and I'm well aware that our histories or entertainment and music have historically been quite revealing. I loved listening to this podcast on the history of carnival www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08pnvhs .I've long known that Caribbean people were jumping up in the streets half naked for decades. It's also quite natural to want to see naked bodies and celebrate them.

I DO have a problem with how money corrupts all of this, as per usual. Money flows towards women skinning out and bearing their all. I doubt these artists would be performing in the way they are if the money were the same whether they did it or not. Nikki Minaj and Cardi B might be jumping up half naked in etc streets and doing their thing, but they old not perform the way that they are. And, we all know it is not black people controlling that flow of money, so there is certainly an element of manipulation and exploitation there. Female artists who don't do that don't make as much, end of. For a long long time I saw a LOT of Beyonce's body everywhere. I knew the pre-baby contours of her body very well, and I was never a huge fan, one could hardly escape it.

Unfortunately we just can't know how much these female artists want to do this, or how much they feel compelled to by whatever forces are at play there.

My children won't be able to avoid it, so I'm going to engage with them to have critical thoughts about it all. If they make being sexually attractive, appealing, performative central in their lives, they'll have problems unless they are being paid handsomely for it, which is unlikely. I won't teach them that an open approach to sex is bad, because its not, I want them to have happy sex lives (from the age of 25 onwards in a long term private relationship haaa haaa haaaaa).

I truly need to learn to be more concise! Sheesh!

@Sugarintheplum
"Money flows towards women skinning out and bearing their all"

Alicia Keys, Janelle Monae, Cynthia Erivo etc .. super talented but as Cardi says, it's about the schmoney.

I kinda like Lizzo. Where does she fit in?

I posted earlier about Andra Day being one of the female artists, who doesn't show off her body. I stand corrected, she's practically naked at the Oscars. But to be fair, I think she looks amazing. Also if I was her age and lost a lot of weight, plus no stretch marks I'd probably do the same.

I kinda like Lizzo. Where does she fit in?
She's on the body positivity bandwagon. Be happy and love yourself whatever size your body is and wear whatever you want. Massive tick for mental health and wellness. This is also a big money maker.

It would be interesting if a music journalist was to confront these issues in interviews with the singers who expose themselves. If there is a fear that they "have" in order to get recording deals etc, this is a meetoo moment.
Interesting that if "popular culture sees black women as easy, cheap and sexually voracious, it's usually always the black woman who is voted off in theses ghastly love island shows.
I will not make similar allusions about black men, "potency and size" as this is about black female artists, but there is a similarity.

I heard this week that billie eilish is now expressing another side of herself, and that this involves corsets and suspenders on the front page of a magazine (though I don't mean to centre white women in this thread).

So, yeah, it's pervasive.

again, I'm not against this at all, I just wonder about the forces at work behind it all.

This is my industry, I've worked with some artists mentioned on this thread...

id say the exact same forces are at work as in the wider world. Audiences are more responsive to sexy / controversial things, and in turn artists are also people
in the world, who have absorbed the same messages and values we all do, and so some of them generate sexier / controversial material, and it does well.

Also a lot of the women mentioned here are of an age to have grown up with internet pornography and it’s influence shapes that generation hugely. I’d say these trends in music are mirrored by Instagram / fashion, other creative fields (although film has in many ways de-sexualised in the main stream- partly as porn removes audience need).

Add to that an extremely male power structure, which rewards ‘the male gaze’, and a system where young women spend their first couple of years on a writing circuit that tends to be more suitable for the very confident / pushy / ambitious.

It’s also an industry that hugely favours those with pre-existing connections (BE comes from a showbiz family,) or huge personal family wealth. Since this skews white, black female artists visibility is often based on a creative talent who wants to explore more outrageous territory.

None of this is good- there are fewer ways to be successful for black artists. I’ve seen and heard a huge amount of evidence that the single hardest type of act to break in the UK is black male artists, and it’s almost impossible outside of a very narrow genre range. I’ve seen so many incredibly talented black male pop artists just completely fail to gain traction with audiences, some with huge industry support, sometimes in spite of a lack of it.

All black artists are being sold into a culture that is endemically and systematically racist, and industry and audience behaviours reflect this.

That all said- when I hear WAP, I hear an artist driven writing session that sounds like it was a BLAST- it sounds to me like women having a huge amount of fun together making something deliberately provocative, and the video reads the same way to me. They know it’s going to be a smash but it’s also coming from a genuine artistic sensibility of creators at the top of their game.

They aren’t making this because they have been told to or have no choice, they are hugely successful because this is the art they would always make, and it’s the kind of art that does well in time we live in.