Tuesday, August 7, 2007

August 7, 2007

The ‘Ho’ification of black women by mainstream media

As a pop culture guru, I make it my job to look out for black women in the media.
Be it magazines, TV, movies, or music, I like to see my fellow black artistes doing their thing. Black women are so of the most creative and industrial women you will ever meet. We know how to you use our God given talents.

Lately, I have been disappointed by the images of us dominating the screens and pages of magazines. My biggest disappointment came from Essence Magazines and their website, Essence.com. This beat out having Kim Porter and Sean Combs on the cover as a symbol of modern day black love. What were they thinking? They might as well put Shar Jackson of the cover in May for a symbol of modern day black motherhood.

Why does a magazine geared toward empowering black women have an on-line feature about Karrine ‘Supahead’ Steffans and reviewing a book by black porn star, Heather Hunter? I understand these two women have books coming out, but do we really need to promote another ‘How to be a Ho and get Paid’ chronicle. I have never read Ms. Steffans’s book and never will. My point of view is celebrity gossip is okay, but it has its limits. These men have families, wives and children. Hold up before you give me the ‘they should’ve known better than to sleep with her’ speech. We as a society should know better than to play into this sick obsession that’s plaguing the black culture. The obsession with getting paid by any means necessary.

It doesn’t matter who we hurt or how many lives we destroy, as long as we get paid the heck with anybody else.

This why so many of our young women see nothing wrong with going to a video set and letting a bunch of little or no talent men degrade them. At least they’re getting paid, right? This is why the Flavor of Love girls actually believe going on a reality show and portraying a stereotypical, loud mouth and angry black woman is a ticket to stardom. Deelishis and NY both got to show the rest of their talents in the pages of Smooth magazine. An Oscar and a Grammy can’t too far behind.

When did it the ‘ho’ification of black women start? When did the media and the entertainment industry put such a low value on the value of black women? The worst recent examples of this are two popular music videos on MTV and BET. The most disturbing is ‘Wipe Me Down’ by Lil Boosie. They have the nerve to have a small black male child in the middle of that mess. Lawd, save us!! The other is the ‘Shawty’ by T Pain and Plies. According to these videos, all black women have a sexual price.

We’re mad at Don Imus for calling us hos. We should mad our black men and the rest of the media for treating us like them!

2 comments:

Natural Health For Us said...

What's up girl? You know I couldn't agree with you more. I think it is sickening and sad that black people degrade each other.

I can only speak about how I was brought up and I truly think that it started with music and videos.First, we listened to our own people talk "agressively" about beautiful black women through music, and then their action came into videos. Many wonder why the majority look down on us and lash out when they say things out of the way. But, what about our own calling us h**s and Bi***es.
I give it about 10 years from now and I truly think we will have no respect or value in life from the white people. What is it called when the whites have no respect and value for us? SLAVERY, and just remember the qoute, "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF"!!!!

The media such as BET and MTV put value on us and made us their "CASH COW" when they saw how rappers making money, buying 24k gold teeth,living in lavish homes with 18k gold and 2000 diamond encrusted on their chandeliers.

The media realized they can get make money on us being ignorant and embarassing one another..I guess one day they decided to say hey, let's downgrade our and or their black women like rappers and hip artist do and we will making millions within a year...

Everyone wants to be rich but what happened to being WEALTHY where our money can have more value and left for our future generations???

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for writing this, I totally agree with everything you said. We are on the bottom of the totem pole, if we don't do something about this BS, in 10 years time we are going to be less than nothing. It's sad.