For those whose ears didn’t immediately perk up at the mention of Flo Rida’s name, you’d probably recognize his song/laundry list of sexy items of female apparel: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, you know the whole club was looking at her… them baggy sweatpants and them reeboks with the straps, she turned around and gave that big booty a slap. She hit the floor, next thing you know, shorty got low low low low low low low.” In case you didn’t know, it’s a major hit. If you didn’t recognize that one, perhaps you’d know the catchy, “Oh hot damn, this is my jam. Keep ya partyin’ till the am. Y’all don’t understand. Make me throw my hands up in the ayer, ay, ay, ayer, ayer.” That was two years ago Flo Rida rocked our gym. Obnoxious, materialistic, objectifying women, but innocuous for the most part.
Last year, though, brought us a surprise performance by New Boyz, a group who will, I predict, only be known while they are actually still new—my guess: this two-hit-wonder group has the shelf-life of its current fans’ pubescent hormones. New Boyz is made up of two super-fine seventeen year old boys known as Legacy and Ben-J. You cannot imagine the thrill in Ashley’s voice as she excitedly told me about getting to touch Legacy’s abs during the concert in the gym. The music video for “Tie Me Down” is actually pretty charming, featuring Legacy and Ben-J clad in fresh baseball caps, cardigans, and kicks. With backpacks strapped on, they look just like any of my students. They wear skinny jeans hanging off their narrow butts, and they look pretty darn cute, as in I could imagine them seated in desks in front of me stumbling through lines of Shakespeare and groaning about the homework posted on the board.
The title of New Boyz’ big hit, “Tie Me Down,” is actually somewhat misleading, since really the boys sing in the chorus about how, “She ain’t gon’ tie me down.” Alright, fair enough. It seems like a good thing for teenagers to hang out with lots of friends and keep their options open. But, curious to know more, I looked up the lyrics, and what I found horrified me. The rap portion of the song, which must have been incomprehensible auditorily to my principal, contains such choice lines as,
“Yea you cute. So what?/ But lets get it through your head,/Yea we make love, sex, weed all in the bed,/…/ Now you stuck like a stain and I cant believe that,/…/ There’s too much girls and I ain’t lettin go,/ Cause my life is great,/ And you ain’t nothing but a ho,/…/ Ay yea you know I’m a man,/ And I have no feelings.”
Is this some kind of joke? It almost seemed too bad to be true.
Now call me an old fogey if you will, but I don’t think I am. Well, only partially anyway. I would say that I am not a fogey but a feminist. I object to the disrespect of women in this song, but also I object to the portrayal of masculinity. Perhaps I take myself and life too seriously. However, I saw Sarah and Lisa bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the concert. I saw the photos and doodlings of New Boyz on Brianna’s binder, and I fielded countless questions from these teenyboppers about who in my opinion was hotter, Legacy or Ben-J. Needless to say, I pleaded the fifth. These rappers are under-age minors, after all.
My students are a weird mix of innocence and experience. Strict Catholics, many of them certainly believe in “saving” themselves for marriage. However, one day I discovered an empty, discarded Trojan condoms box lying in the center of my classroom. I was horrified to realize that, thinking it was merely a candy wrapper, I had allowed it to lie there for most of the day. In class discussions of Romeo and Juliet, at least half of my students argued that love at first sight is indeed real. Their rationale? You see it in movies all the time! I quickly learned that the worst supervision duty at my school is the dances, because the main responsibility is to patrol for freak dancers, trolling the dance floor with a flashlight to break up such lewd and lascivious behavior. Seems incongruent, given our leadership-sponsored performances by Flo Rida and New Boyz, right?
In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that with the rise of raunch culture and the porn industry, images of women have again been co-opted in the interests of men and making money. Women, rising in their careers and the workplace have had to play by the rules, becoming one of the boys in terms of chauvinism and giving the
boys what they want and expect in terms of image. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that women’s lib has come so far that we don’t even need such a concept anymore. We’re living in a post-feminist world, in which women are so sexually “liberated” that we’re free to flash our tits on Girls Gone Wild and dress as skankily as “we” (i.e., the male world) desire, all in the name of sexual self-expression. Yet, as Levy points out, in the midst of all this “liberation” many women still may not be freely expressing their own selves, but really playing into the artificial, unrealistic, even dangerous ideals we’ve been steadily spoon fed by the media. Free, informed choice doesn’t necessarily exist. So, to be a cool chick, one that is most desirable, my female students must now make themselves sexually available and emotionally unattached, as recommended by New Boyz, and drape themselves in the right brands, becoming walking billboards and victims of consumer culture, as exalted in Flo Rida’s song, “Low.” These are the values that we, as a school, are actively supporting when we sponsor concerts by such inane, commercialized performers. South City, I think we can do better than all this. There must be some positive, socially-conscious hip hop groups we could endeavor to bring to our school via Wild 94.9’s spirit competition this year. Any input?
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