Degradation of Women in Hip Hop.

    Before I begin, I do not want to make a generalization by stating, "All songs in Hip Hop are degrading to women", but the Hip Hop songs that are played on YouTube, on the radio, on sound cloud, on iTunes, and on Pandora all have lyrics that degrades women.

  MAJORITY of songs in the previous generation did not depict women as sex objects. The old school believed in monogamous relationship. Because of this, the songs illustrated what it means to be in love, what it means to be loyal to your partner, and what it means to be enamored with the lady personality instead of her aesthetics.

    Now, it is completely inverse. Women are now "twerking", revealing more skin in music videos, and glorifying guys that mistreat them. In music videos, of course it is an image/ video the raper wants the media to perceive them. However, there is a psychological stand point about the treatment of women in Hip Hop.

    For example, if you constantly hear something or have the image ingrained in your brain, then you are going to have a long term memory of the image you seen. Now, if the image is a female wearing a bikini, dancing in a sexual manner, then it probably will not make a big difference if you do not see it or hear about it that much. On the other hand, if you watch these type of videos so many times, you are instantly going to start to view women in a different perspective. You are more inclined to believe they do not have any self respect if they are dancing in revealing clothes for money, and doing more degrading things a female does not deserve to do. Because of this, since every rapper desires acceptance, the rapper will follow the trend that everyone is liking so that he can get attention. In this generation, the newer generation of Hip Hop refer to women as "bitches". Now, a rapper will use words like "bitches" and "sluts" to fit in with the main stream type of music to promote his music. But, without even knowing it, these dirty name calling and mistreatment of women actually symbolizes degradement since females are not put on a pedestal. Instead, they are treated like sex objects that only gets value by how big their assets are over their personality. It is very hard to find songs talking about love flourishing in Hip Hop like it did in the past due to the fact that the newer generation are infatuated with the facade lifestyle the rappers created.

    In my opinion, the main song that created this degradation of women was: tip drill by the artist Nelly. The song contains filthy lyrics, women dancing provocatively in revealing clothes, and more degrading images that are disturbing to talk about I put the link to the video below, but warning, viewer description is advised since it is very explicit. 

    Because of songs and videos like this in Hip Hop, this affects the way how men treat women. If music videos are as common as the one above, then their perception of women are going to be analogous to the music they listen to since they see and hear it so much. Therefore, Hip Hop needs to be reformed. These type of lyrics and videos are unacceptable, but most importantly, damaging women's credibility as the intelligent hardworking female the 1700's try to vouch for.