“Who has the biggest dick in the music industry?” Andy Cohen asks Nicki Minaj during his show Watch What Happens Live. The question seems to catch her off-guard, but she keeps her poise and answers that she has not seen anyone’s penis in the music industry. She also notes that she has seen the same penis for ten years. Minaj says that is all she will reveal about the subject. From the outside, it seems like just a silly interview question that should not be taken seriously. However, when analyzing the fact that the American tv show host Andy Cohen is a white male and Nicki Minaj is a black female the vulgarity of the question starts to seem very intentional. The rapper Nicki Minaj is known in the music industry for having a very voluptuous …show more content…
Saartjie Baartman’s exhibition is a prime example of this phenomenon . Saartjie was a young Khoikhoi woman from Southern Africa who was born in the late 18th century . The Khoikhoi people were given the nickname Hottentots by the Dutch who settled on their land. Saartjie Baartman was renamed “Sarah” or “Sara” when she was sold and relocated to London. Sarah had a naturally large bottom, full lips, flat nose, and soft jawline due to her African heritage. Her large butt, like Nicki Minaj, was the main feature the public paid attention to. She was first presented in London, where her exhibition garnered a lot of attention due to a court case that arose. They called her ‘The Hottentot Venus’ after the name the Dutch gave her people and the Roman goddess of love. The name alone demonstrated how they related her natural physicality to sexual desire and lust. One might assume that only men would attend the shows, but women came as well to be entertained and view the spectacle that they were told about. Then Saartjie was sold to a French man and put on show in …show more content…
Objectification is when a human being is treated as an object rather than a person. To commodify someone, on the other hand, is to regard the person as something that can bought or sold. Women are often objectified, but there is still a distinct difference between the objectification of women and mistreatment of black females. Treating someone as if they are an object is not the same as actually believing that the individual is an object and buying and selling the person as such. The manner of which African-American females were dealt with as slaves was past the normal objectification since they were dehumanized completely and stripped of their natural rights as human beings. The transferring of black females as goods is one of the main reasons that the sexualization of white females has been very different from the sexualization of black females in
It’s no question that Janet Jackson is one of the most iconic and influential artist of all time. She has sold over 100 million albums; her tours have had some the highest selling debuts of all time, not to mention the chart topping hits she has created over the past 30 years. Janet’s presence alone is iconic. She has left an unforgettable impression on the music industry as a whole. Her music has affected fans and music lovers all around the world. Her influence is simply not a question it is a salutation to a musical icon that has embedded her legacy into musical history.
Every individual cares about how they appear to others; their shape and in this informal, narrative essay titled Chicken-Hips, Canadian journalist and producer Catherine Pigott tells her story on her trip to Gambia and her body appearance. In this compelling essay the thesis is implicit and the implied thesis is about how women are judged differently on their appearance in different parts of the world, as various cultures and individuals have a different perception on what ideal beauty is. In this essay Pigott writes about her trip to Africa specifically Gambia and how upon arriving there she was judged to be too slim for a woman. She goes to write about how differently she would be judged back home by mentioning “in my county we deny ourselves
While beauty pageants, Barbie, and icons such as Marilyn Monroe present a more provocative and sexual image than standard 1950s sitcoms, such as Leave It to Beaver or I Love Lucy, they do still fit into a prescribed gender stereotype. Most significantly, do not challenge the overarching notion that women are to be feminine and aim to sexually please males (Meyerowitz 16). Rather, they present and support the culturally-defined understanding of the ideal woman, physically. 1950s beauty pageant contestants, Barbie, and Marilyn Monroe all embodied the ‘perfect women.’ These women, icons, and toys were voluptuous, but petite. They were small in frame, had larger breasts, full hips, and a tiny waist. Their hair was done in a very feminine style
In the book “Another Kind of Public Education,” Patricia Hill Collins discusses a concept that black men and women’s bodies are commodities. First we need to understand why she coins the term commodity to describe this concept. Commodity, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary is, “something that is bought and sold; something or someone that is useful or valued.” Therefore, when Collins uses the term commodity, she was not just writing about them “being bought and sold on a global market”, she was talking about social blackness and how it ties in with capitalism, consumerism, the prison industry, the mass incarceration rate of black men, the “lockdown” of black youth in popular culture, black culture, hypersexualization of African Americans,
The sexual abuse of african-american women, and african women began with slavery, and can be noted as the first shift in inequality and lack of control over one’s own body. The psychological, and physiological construct of control is deeply rooted in history. Slavery, for example, was the physical dehumanization of another human being who was thought to be inferior. Psychologically, the act of physical constraint must have internalized ideas of social dominance. Especially, when slave owners, overseers, and drivers would take advantage of their authority and of their powerful positions to rape enslaved women. After the emancipation of the slaves, white men were no longer in control, and this generated a fear of equality with african-american
Hip-Hop’s criticism of George W. Bush is a good example of hip-hop’s reflection of Black public opinion. The Republican candidate who already had a low approval rating of 57% amongst African-Americans received an even lower approval rating after his lackluster efforts to support Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Jones, 2003; Cillizza & Sullivan 2013).
Half of the Earth’s population has breasts; comparably few have diamond-studded Rolexes. Yet apparently it is all right for our entertainers to wag the inordinate affluence we lord over the rest of the planet but rude for them to expose, however briefly, one of the common features we share with everyone else.
...nd attractive. It creates a double consciousness that is difficult to reconcile. Carla Williams argues that “given the legacy of images created of black women… it is an especially complex task for contemporary black women to define their own image, one that necessarily both incorporates and subverts the stereotypes, myths, facts and fantasies that have preceded them. (Wallace-Sanders et.al, 196) The root of the problem lies within our society. While very culpable, mainstream music and advertisements are not the only promoters of female objectification; the key is unwinding the inner tensions between these two groups. There is a need for the promotion of female solidarity, regardless of their skin color. We need to rid society of the evil of racism—only then will conceptions surrounding African Americans parallel and be as positive as those surrounding white women.
Similarly, in Some Assembly Required: Black Barbie and the Fabrication of Nicki Minaj, the author reads the appropriation of Nicki Minaj’s Black Barbie image as an attempt to challenge the shared notion of white Barbie image and to make it hers—Black Barbie. This Black Barbie image promoted Nicki Minaj as “hyperfeminine and hyper-real representation of a dismembered black Barbie doll” (Whitney 141). Whitney examines whether such appropriation could eliminate the hegemonic narratives of Barbie or whether it “leaves room for liberatory, pluralistic, and feministic interpretations” (142) and questions the definition of feminine identity by insisting on the fluidity of femininity. Even though her image does not escape criticism as she was being
Hip Hop a grass movement started in 1974 in the South Bronx in New York City. Created to end gang violence, a voice for the underrepresented minority. Rap music is critical to understanding the hip hop generation’s gender crisis, a crisis between sexes that allows African American males to blatantly disrespect African American women for the sake of the culture. The consistent referencing of African American women as ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ and the hyper sexualization of their bodies is harmful to the African American community. These images instill that it is alright to represent black women in this nature, and harmful to the young girls who are intaking all these negative images. Harmful to both the perspective of young men and women Hip-Hop is like a pillar in the African American culture. It represents how each generation views themselves in this society and how they internalized these narratives. In this essay I will summarize the main arguments in Chapter 7 of Gender talk , discuss the creation and deconstruction on views
Gordon, Maya. "Media contributions to african american girls' focus on beauty and appearance: exploring the consequences of sexual objectification." Psychology of Women Quarterly 32.3 (2008): 245-256. ERIC. Web. 18 Sept. 2011.
Deborah White uses various examples of situations regarding these characterizations from other pieces of work such as “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, interviews, and other historical references. Through these examples, Deborah White is able to effectively relay, through historical context, how these women struggled with the assumption that all black female slaves were “Jezebels” until proven otherwise. Regarded as highly sexual women, those who were categorized as a “Jezebel” woman initially started because of African traditions prior to their enslavement and also excused “miscegenation, the sexual exploitation of black women, and the mulatto population”. Deborah White argues that these women faced a very unique situation because their sexual behavior could result in being treated better or worse, depending on the situation and the master; because population growth was inevitable, white men seemed to believe that this proved their “lewd and licentious behavior”. Also, the conditions in which these women lived “helped imprint the Jezebel image on the white mind” even though this environment was created by these men “which ensured female slave behavior fulfilled their expectations”. In contrast to the “Jezebel” figure, white men also created the “Mammy” figure who was a loyal servant to the white family as well as a surrogate mother for the both black and white children. This position for a black female slave helped “endorse the service of black women in Southern households” (61). Therefore, both of these characterizations were to justify the treatment of black
For centuries, the objectification of women has become the norm, forever portraying them as submissive and passive for the benefit of the male gaze. Eternally capsulated in a world, perfected, unanimously the viewer and viewed alike. Jenny Saville defies expectations in creating the female nude with herself as both a subject and painter. Taking on the roles given to women by men and making them her own, Saville elevates the status of women by making them their own judge of beauty. Kenneth Clark, a renowned art historian of his time, believed to create a form of art, the nude must be reformed and not directly recorded from life.
began, there were hardly any female rappers well known. She is a quite recent rapper but it did
Women in pictorial history have often been used as objects; figures that passively exist for visual consumption or as catalyst for male protagonists. Anne Hollander in her book Fabric of Vision takes the idea of women as objects to a new level in her chapter “Women as Dress”. Hollander presents the reader with an argument that beginning in the mid 19th century artists created women that ceased to exist outside of their elegantly dressed state. These women, Hollander argues, have no body, only dress. This concept, while persuasive, is lacking footing which I will attempt to provide in the following essay. In order to do this, the work of James Tissot (b. 1836 d. 1902) will further cement the idea of “women as dress” while the work of Berthe