As a woman, I am not offended by pussy. I am bored by it. Let’s be real, it ain’t hard to pop a pussy. That shit is not bragworthy.
There is a difference between women rapping openly about sex and women in rap becoming so dependent on sexual performance that it starts to feel like a requirement for mainstream success. Women should be able to rap about sex, desire, pleasure, power, cheating, heartbreak, motherhood, money, violence, politics, spirituality, stupidity, survival, or whatever else they want. My issue is not that women are talking about sex. My issue is that I am tired of hearing what feels like the same damn song dressed in different thongs.
At this point, I know more about some lady rappers’ alleged vaginal abilities than I know about their personalities. I know it’s wet and “good”; somebody’s son supposedly lost his mind after experiencing it, another man is spending money because of it, and another woman cannot compete with it. Blah, blah, blah. Congratulations, bitch. Do you have a second topic outside of your sexual attributes?
The frustrating part is that hip-hop has not always felt this narrow for women. Lauryn Hill did not sound like Missy Elliott. Missy did not sound like Eve. Eve did not sound like Lil’ Kim. Lil’ Kim did not sound like Queen Latifah. Queen Latifah did not sound like Da Brat. These women were not interchangeable, and that was part of what made that era so interesting. Lil’ Kim could be extremely sexual without her success creating an expectation that every successful woman in rap needed to become some variation of Lil’ Kim. There was space for raunchiness, consciousness, experimentation, street records, storytelling, humor, glamour, aggression, vulnerability, and whatever the hell Missy Elliott was doing because Missy was always in her own universe.
That variety is what I miss, and I know the pressure to become the next “bad bitch” is real because I have experienced a version of it myself. Before I was rapping, I was doing spoken word, and I have never played about what I do on a microphone. Eventually, I became frustrated with parts of the spoken word scene for the same reason. There was a period when it felt oversaturated with what I call “fuck-me poetry.” It was not every woman poet, and women had every right to write about sex, but after hearing poem after poem about popping pussy, sucking dick, being desired, and what somebody could do in bed, I started thinking, “Damn bitch, I am a visual person. I do not want to keep seeing your sex life in my head. There has got to be more to you than this.” Spoken word was supposed to make me see something, feel something, question something, or experience the world through another person’s eyes. Sexuality could absolutely be part of that, but when it became the whole damn presentation over and over again, I got bored there too.
I never led with my body because that was never the most interesting thing I had to offer. I wanted people inside my mind. I wanted to tell stories, wrestle with ideas, talk about what I had lived through, my beliefs, things that pissed me off, and what I questioned. I remember somebody once telling me that I sounded “too hard” and that I needed to be more of a sex kitten. I never forgot that shit because what they were really telling me was that what I naturally brought to the microphone was not enough. They wanted to Lil’ Kim me, but there was already a Lil’ Kim, and she was damn good at being Lil’ Kim. I had no interest in turning myself into a watered-down version of somebody else because another person thought my womanhood would be easier to market that way.
My energy on the mic has always been closer to what I imagine Assata Shakur or Zora Neale Hurston might sound like over a beat. I want something with weight to it. I want stories, ideas, and some shit worth thinking about. That does not mean every woman needs to approach music the way I do. It means hip-hop should have enough room for all of us without someone deciding we need to change ourselves to become marketable.
The music industry has always figured out how to take something profitable and run it directly into the ground. Record labels, executives, social media platforms, blogs, audiences, and algorithms all help determine what gets pushed into the mainstream. When one type of woman rapper performs well commercially, the industry does what it always does and starts looking for more versions of the same product. That creates a strange contradiction because we talk about women in rap having more freedom than ever, yet the version of womanhood most heavily marketed can still feel incredibly restrictive. You can be successful, but it helps if you are young, attractive, hypersexual, constantly visible, capable of creating viral moments, and willing to package your body alongside the music. That is not unlimited freedom. It is another box with better lighting.
This is not me asking for another Lauryn Hill because there will never be another Lauryn Hill, nor should there be. I want artists to sound like themselves. I want enough diversity among lady spitters that I cannot predict somebody’s entire image, subject matter, social media rollout, and first single before I have even listened to the album. Sexual expression can be creative. It can be funny, vulgar, rebellious, empowering, uncomfortable, political, or intentionally shocking. But raunch stops being provocative when everybody is doing some version of the same thing. Eventually it becomes formulaic. It becomes background noise. You can hear something that would have caused national outrage twenty years ago and barely react because another song saying something similar is probably coming on next. Raunchy and boring is a terrible combination, but somehow we got there.
Women have so much more material to pull from because women are living whole-ass lives. Women are raising children, surviving abuse, building businesses, losing people, falling in love, getting divorced, questioning religion, navigating racism, dealing with mental illness, grieving, healing, making terrible decisions, rebuilding their lives, and figuring out who the hell they are. I want more lady spitters who make me curious about their minds, not just their bodies. I want the weird, the funny, the political, the introspective, the vulgar, the experimental, all of that shit! I want a woman who can tell me a story so vividly that I feel like I’m seeing it through her eyes. I want somebody experimenting with production who sounds nothing like whoever is currently dominating the charts. Where is the woman who makes an entire project without me learning a single thing about how good her pussy supposedly is?
None of this requires removing sexual rappers from hip-hop. Keep them. Sex has always belonged in music, and women should have every right to be as filthy as men have been allowed to be for generations. I just want some gotdamn variety. Women in rap do not need to become less sexual. They need enough artistic space to be vulgar, intellectual, strange, masculine, feminine, spiritual, political, goofy, angry, soft, experimental, private, loud, sexually explicit, completely asexual, or anything else they decide to be. Because if everybody has to sell us the same thing to get through the door, that is not liberation. That is branding.