Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda Failure
This post received the 2016 New York Association of Black Journalists Award for Best Blog Commentary.
It wasn’t that long ago when male rappers were constantly lambasted by feminists for objectifying women of color in music videos. Too Short, Uncle Luke, Snoop Dogg, Nelly and 50 Cent are just a few of the artists who have been singled out over the years for portraying half-naked Black and Latino women as video vixens, whose only purpose was to gyrate their breasts and buttocks.
For years feminists addressed the misrepresentation of Black women in hip hop culture, which conveys the historic hyper-sexualized stereotype of Black women as sexually mischievous and devious. These images also served to fulfill a male sexual fantasy by portraying women as emotionless objects with unrealistic and unnatural looks.
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Fast forward to 2014, and mainstream pop culture celebrates the same sexual exploitation masked as sexual liberation now that women of color have switched sides and are doing the exploiting, too.
While there’s nothing wrong with women declaring personal and sexual agency through art, music and expression, the lines between women empowerment and exploitation remain ambiguous and can easily be interpreted as internalized exploitation.
A perfect example of this is rapper Nicki Minaj’s new Anaconda video, which showcases a host of women shaking their bodacious booties for a little over four and a half minutes. In the record breaking video, Nicki Minaj also shows off just how well she can twerk her larger-than-life booty, while other women bounced, wiggle and gyrate their butt cheeks around her. The raunchy video has been praised and watched over a 120 million times online. However, would it have received the same rave reviews if a male rapper like Drake, or a white pop star like Katy Perry made the same video?
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My guess is that there would be an uproar from critics who call the video misogynistic and degrading toward women. When men featured women’s bare-behinds in their videos, they are condemned for dehumanizing women to their mere sexualized body parts, but when other women feature women’s bare-behinds, it’s called empowerment, right?
What if a white rapper decided to portray women of color in the same manner that Nicki Minaj does in Anaconda: wouldn’t this video be denounced as sexist and racist? Just look at all the criticism that Miley Cyrus received for “cultural appropriation” when she brought big-booty Black women on stage to twerk with her at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. And look at all the criticism Taylor Swift has received for featuring Black women twerking in her new video “Shake it Off.”
What’s the difference when Nicki Minaj demeans Black women by objectifying their bodies and when Drake, lil Wayne, Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift does it?
Are the Black women less dehumanized simply because Nicki decided to shake her obviously arguably surgically-enhanced butt with them? Or is she simply feeding into modern day patriarchal formula for mainstream success in hip hop, which involves the degradation of women?
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Nicki is dominating the limited space that hip hop has granted female rappers, which is why she should take on the social responsibility for the way women are portrayed in hip hop. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with her asserting and inserting her sexuality in her music, but the Anaconda video is a poor exhibit of female objectification, and I take issue with the fact that she’s exploiting Black bodies the same way Miley Cyrus did at the VMA’s and the same way that scores of male rappers have been doing for years.
And to those who assert that the Anaconda video is an expression of Nicki Minaj owning her sense of sexuality, I ask, just where does the line between her sexual empowerment and the exploitation of other women lie? Women are still very much underrepresented in hip hop, and the majority of the time they’re displayed as nothing more than eye-candy. However, it seems that we don’t demand equality from both men and women artists.
This post was originally published at bit.ly on September 5, 2014. It received the 2016 New York Association of Black Journalists Award for Best Blog Commentary.
