This document summarizes a documentary about women in hip hop music videos. It discusses four statements - two that are post-feminist, viewing the sexualization of women as empowering, and two that are feminist, seeing it as objectifying and creating unrealistic expectations. Examples from interviews in the documentary are provided to support each statement.
2. Introduction After watching the hip hop honey’s documentary, we used our charts given to us and filled them in. This charts had statements which we had to deter whether they were post feminist or feminist, then we had to fill them in with examples from the documentary.
3. Women in hip hop videos are confident, liberated young women who are using their sexuality to exploit men and empower them selves by making money. The statement above is clearly post feminist. The text states that women are getting empowered and men are the ones being exploited. We see examples in the documentary which support this statement. The artist named “Xo man” states that women being in the video of a “crap song” would attract viewers and that’s why they put an emphasis on sexualised women in some of their videos. A female video girl states that she enjoys the compliments she gets and seeing the men become “ Dripping messes” as they look at her. She added, “ I have a brain of my own, don’t I ?” The women are clearly being empowered and credited for this and that’s what a post feminist would see from some of these videos.
4. The women in hip hop videos are sexually objectified and exploited, and this has a negative effect on the attitudes and behaviour of real young women. This statement above is clearly a feminist statement. They illustrate representations of hip hop women as de humanising and a bad influence on young women. Again in the documentary we do see some examples of this. One man stated that only a few women are getting paid, the rest are just there for the video. Another stated that some of the women aren’t really getting anywhere and there is no motive for them.
5. The sexualised representation of women in hip hop videos is an integral part of the genre and just a bit of fun – the videos are just fantasies and completely harmless. The statement above in my opinion is neither since they have no justification, they just state its fun and harmless.. Evidence of this being shown in the documentary can be seen from the video model Tasha Ray who claims its “just for fun and money” and states she doesn’t go “over the top.”
6. The way both women and men in hip hop videos are portrayed creates an unrealistic and possibly dangerous set of expectations in real young men. This statement is radical as it looks at how it will affect young men and that women in the videos are giving them an unrealistic representation. Evidence of this is the psychologists analysis of the Justin Timberlake video where women are dressed as waitresses and nurses. The psychologist compared it to “soft porn” and said the representation of women is “fragmented” and they are just “sexual objects.”