Rap Music and Women Essay

Being a female rap fan is generally joyous and good. I really mean that, because rap is the best kind of music, and listening to the kind of music that you find best is fun and uplifting regardless of your gender. Sure, rap will occasionally blindside its female listeners with a particularly ugly line or cringeworthy video, but generally the sexism in rap remains at a consistent and manageable level; a fact you’ll no doubt have made peace with if you like to enjoy rap while female—of course rap is frequently sexist: all of pop culture is frequently sexist, because sexism permeates our entire society. No, the cloud on the horizon for female rap fans isn’t a rap-shaped one, it’s a dude-shaped one; and one type in particular: dudes who like to explain to women how sexist rap is.

Dudes who like to explain to women how sexist rap is (we’ll term them “Explainers”) are well-meaning white knights who have a passing familiarity with rap music and an urge to ensure that female fans are made aware that the genre is “misogynistic” (a once-powerful buzzword that used to denote hatred of women, but which increasingly means nothing more than “a thing I, a man, find sexist on some level, from a safe distance”). Explainers often identify as “feminist men,” although sometimes they’re just the type of man who likes to stringently test (feminist) women. It’s a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with an Explainer if he opens with the following lines: “How can you listen to that stuff? It’s so misogynistic” or “How can you claim to be a feminist when you love rap so much?” or “"HELLO, I AM A MAN, AND I’M HERE TO SAVE YOU FROM THE MUSIC YOU LIKE.” Explainers are motivated by a belief that rap “gets away with” being sexist; they’re selfless protectors of womenfolk who simply can’t stomach the internalised misogyny of a woman jamming Cam’ron.

You may have detected that I’m snarking.