Subvert the Dominant Pimpiarchy

óptimo artigo sobre o papel das mulheres no tradicional Hip-Hop da MTV

By Rachel Bell (versão completa em http://www.feministezine.com/feminist/fashion/Subverting-the-Pimp.html)

"Being a pimp is the epitome of cooldom. If you want to be somebody in this white world, to be the main man and have serious street cred, you've got to be a pimp. Or at least call yourself a pimp. This is the message from MTV. It's the message from hip-hop culture. It's a message that's been around for a while, but I'm pissed now because the media are letting it seep into our casual vocabulary without question.
"Nelly: Pop star, pimp or gangsta?" asks VIBE magazine this month. The wannabe gangsta rapper whose ubiquitous hit Country Grammar (Hot) sealed his status as a pop (super)star certainly likes to come across all bad boy and pimpy. His video for Tip Drill features scores of strippers lap-dancing for Nelly and his chums. We’ve seen this before but what made this video particularly charming is the chorus line, "It must be your ass cause it ain't your face'' and Nelly swiping his credit card down a dancer's arse crack. Nice.
According to VIBE, Nelly argues that the women in Tip Drill were paid workers who willingly participated in the video. I should hope so Nelly.
Many prostitutes are willing, paid participants but this does not make colluding in the degradation of women right. The male tendency to shift all responsibility onto the women involved speaks volumes about these men's attitudes to women.

To confirm his supreme pimpiness to the kids, Nelly got his own soft drink and called it Pimp Juice. He says that PIMP stands for Positive Intellectual Motivated Person. Hmm, let me think about whether I'll buy that? The thing is Nelly, I'm really not getting that intellectual vibe from your contribution to art. Please explain it to me.
A representative for Pimp Juice explained to VIBE that 'The meaning of Pimp has changed. To most people on the streets, if you say pimp, they wouldn't say it is someone who pimps out women. It's more like mojo, or your 'it' factor.' Ok, let's see. Nelly's videos tell us that he loves to lord it over scores of gyrating, stripping women. In his latest collaboration with Justin Timberlake, Work It, he and the 'teen sexgod' set themselves up as a pair of Hugh Heffners. They give Hugh the nod of respect by donning Hugh-alike silk robes, flank him on thrones in his playboy mansion while the camera hones in on tits, arses and the stripping playbunnies gyrating strangely on the snooker table. Nelly, your 'it' factor is wholly about being a pimp, a playboy and now, it appears, a bit of an old perv in a dressing gown.

If a twelve year old boy looks up to hip-hop 'artist' 50 Cent (who brags about being a pimp on Top of the Pops), drinks Nelly's Pimp Juice to get Nelly's 'it' factor, sees Ice T's video, How To Pimp Girls advertised on the street, if his only role models are artists such as Snoop Dogg and Ja Rule who tell him it's cool to disrespect women, if he watches rap videos that portray his sister, mother, girlfriend, future wife and future daughter as nothing more than gyrating body parts, what values will he develop?

If music videos are full of women who look and behave like porn stars, if every young famous female who is photographed has her mouth open ready to give head, if advertising continues to use young women's bodies to sell ANYTHING, if 'cool' celebs say porn is cool, then boys and girls evolving identities will be under pressure. Bombarded with these stereotypes of men and women, what messages are they absorbing? It will take a young mind of some strength not to conform.

Despite what Nelly's representative says, in the real world, on the streets of any city, 'pimp' still means what it says in the dictionary. But as the fantasy world of MTV and hip hop culture co-exists with the real world it also means many other things, too. In hip hop, and more recently pop culture, 'pimp' has become synonymous with 'bling'. In DBC Pierre's cult novel, Vernon God Little, the 15-year-old anti-hero Vernon pimps out his school friend, Ella. He knows only too well that, "pimps are already an accepted thing these days, check any TV-movie. Lovable even, some of them, with their leopard skin Cadillacs, and their purple Stetsons. Their bitches and all." (p134)

Nelly is the father of a little girl, who according to VIBE magazine is a 'baby-doll cute daughter'. I wonder what his aspirations are for her. I wonder what he would think if she decided to become a dancer and got her bottom 'swiped' by a man calling himself a pimp? So long as she was a 'paid worker who willingly participated' would he be well up for it?

Hundreds of thousands of girls and women, many just children as young as 13, are being forced into prostitution by traffickers every year. The US State Department believes the figure to be between 600,000 to 800,000 people. Demand is high all over Western Europe and men are raping trafficked children here in Britain.

Threats to kill their families, brutal beatings and rape keep them enslaved for years on end. Some of them are in legal and therefore 'acceptable' brothels in Amsterdam, most in criminal syndicates all over the world. Last year, The Guardian reported the harrowing story of a trafficked Albanian teenager who was forced into prostitution in Britain. For around three months she was made to work in a grimy Paddington brothel, enduring up to 16 hours of sex each day. "One night I had 26 customers," she recalled. "After work," the story depressingly revealed, "the pimps would rape her one by one, tie her down and use her naked belly to snort cocaine." I read this and felt a deep, deep hatred for the men who dare to treat another, more vulnerable human being in this way. I felt a deep fear for the future of all girls and women.
Last month, the Observer magazine's special report on human trafficking told more stories of children kidnapped from the villages of Albania and Moldova. Now another girl's hell has come to haunt me, too. She was an orphan who was abandoned by her boyfriend when she became pregnant. With the promise of work, she agreed to go to Moscow. There she was enslaved and forced to work beneath a railway bridge, for which her traffickers paid local police. Some 'clients' kept her for several days and brought their friends. One man kept her for three or four days in a basement and invited 20 men. When she objected, the pregnant girl was called a 'bitch'.

Do I make my point? "