by Eurydice (c) 1995

Why HIP HOP is Sexier than Hell

Hip Hop is a culture-music, clothes, style, energy, philosophy, attitude, sexuality--that derives from the street and, at its best, stays true to the street.  Hip Hop is refreshing because, and when, it's authentic. Particularly in the current sociopolitical climate, choked by the tyranny of the moral police, Hip Hoppers enjoy a rare freedom by espousing a separate, unofficial, unapologetic, American ethos; and, by declaring themselves rebels, they are able to stay at the epicenter of the sexual argument that all our culture revolves around. Hip Hoppers don't censor sexual desire, like we've been programmed to do, putting it a distant second or third or tenth in our list of priorities. I think that's healthier and we should learn from it. The price Hip Hop pays for veering from the meekly trodden, pussy-whipped, politically correct path, is that it is accused of being misogynist, insensitive, selfish pigs. At the core of their sexual imaginations, most people are. I call it the age-old war dance of the sexes. Others call it seduction.

Hip Hoppers talk of treating women as objects. Guys love to do that. For most guys it's just big talk, showing off, fantasy used to build oneself up for some kinky overheated play. Sex that resembles a battle of wills is hotter. There are the extreme cases of men who hit it big and can afford to buy and sell women (which happens color-blindly in every culture because money is the greatest, spookiest equalizer). But most Hip Hoppers are henpecked by some mom or mate. Hip Hop is blamed for single moms, teen moms, multiple dads, and other shifts that are supposedly undoing America. (The idea that women are to be used, for recreation and reproduction, when there is no war, is Nietzsche's.) Hip Hop women in general are in control of their own sex lives and are deliberately provocative. They know what they want and how to get it, more often than men do. Most girls want to be in control, and still be treated like 'queens'. They don't want to be housewives and damsels in distress; they just like to act the part. 

I don't buy the stereotype that men give love to get sex, while women give sex to get love. Take a woman who has never come and make her come, and she'll be in love with you. The fact is that 60 percent of all men and 68 percent of women want more sex (Women on Sex 1994). If telling her 'Get down there and do your business' is your idea of bliss, do it. Chances are, it will turn her on. Conversely, tell her she looks like a goddess. Tell her to come for you. Tell her to call out your name. Edginess is the name of the dating game. If you understand how to do one thing and say another, to want one thing and chase after its opposite, you'll thrive in the dating ring. Hip Hoppers speak in graphic metaphors and memorable images to outdo the competition.

Only guys with low self-esteem like virgins; smart guys prefer girls who are experienced and know a lot in bed and are open to anything. Hip Hoppers don't want 'a dead body' that just 'lies there'. They want the girls who can do it 3-4 times in a row, give and take it all-give head, take a paddling, for example. The way to tell who those girls are is to talk a nasty game. Those who like Hip Hop talk are the best ones.

Women think brutes are sexy. Taboos are aphrodisiacs. Danger is sexy because we've learned to associate excitement with what's forbidden, because what's familiar is not sexy. At the same time, women often worry about sin, slut-hood, sexual initiative. "Humiliate me, so it's not I but you who brought me to the point of fucking," they seem to say. The staging of the sexual act--playacting, the French maid and the rich uncle from America, humiliation and public exposure--are men's sexual tasks: that's what Hip Hop does. Risk makes sex better.

            Black fraternities, as well as ghetto or prison gangs, usually espouse a code of physical bravery and bravado that includes risking one's life for the group. Bloodletting is common in young black life, as it was in every society when men had to pass through some ring of fire (as women do when they go through labor) in order to enter manhood and responsibility. War has traditionally been a social initiation for young men. Urban minorities live as if they were at war.

Wherever and whenever war is raging, people's sex lives get better. Despair and doomsday fears remind people of their bottom-line priorities. War translates into sexual freedom, more sex, and more births. So does Hip Hop's opposition to the mainstream. In urban struggle, sexual freedom is the poor man's rebellion. In our numb and satiated culture, sex is the experience that remains alive and unpredictable. Hip Hop brings that to the foreground.

Another battle Hip Hoppers are fighting is the war against the Dirty Words Police-against our fear of words. "Lexophobia" is a terrible turnoff and downer in sex because nasty talk is exciting. The reason that the word referring to the origin of all life is taboo, a curse, and degrading, is not that Hip Hop started using it a decade ago. It's because our culture is afraid of the sexual instinct ant tries to curb it in every way. But the only way to reclaim sexual freedom is to use the words, the dirtier the better, in public and private realms, not in order to offend but in order to exorcise, to move them out of the scatological and into the ontological level. In case you didn't know it, Samuel Beckett believed the most important word in the English language is 'fuck'-because it combines sex and rage. (What's the difference between Volvo and Vulva? That's the sort of question Hip Hop can answer.) In the Great Unending War of Mind Vs Body, Hip Hop shows us how we can reconcile our selves.

Language is how we excite and seduce one another. Words get us laid. Hip Hop music is a seduction tool-the modern equivalent of the Latin mariachis strumming their guitars under a pretty girl's window at night. Hip Hop is, in its loud-mouthed way, a serenade to the female of the species. It's a litany of one's successes, honors, and goods, a catchy advertisement of oneself, a potent mating call, like the wail the whales make in the Pacific when they are in season.

More than anything else, humans want to fuck. Lusting for nooky is the nonstop reality for most of us. In between orgasms, we eat, piss, sleep, and hunt or gather. Men want sex all the time. When they are young, they confuse sex with love or understanding. When they grow older, they want sex and someone who understands why they only want sex. Sex and respect are the most important things in a man's life. And the man who has money, has respect and sex available to him. Hip Hop's worldview is a throwback to the days before the current Sex Prohibition. It is purposefully politically incorrect, because political correctness is a leisure-class invention.

The Art of Pleasure and the Art of Life have fallen victims to the Celebration of Victimization. The marginalization of women's sexuality, espoused both by the New Right and the New Left, has spread out like an oil spill and contaminated our communication to the extent that we believe life can be captured in a TV blurb. The theory is that sex is about an uncanny abuse of power, usually at the expense of women, who are still assumed to be the weaker and less horny sex. This denies women their own free mating will. It encourages women to seek refuge from sex in the law, which protects women from predatory men and perpetuates women's positions as sexual victims. The assumption that every woman is in a position of sexual weakness and needs to be protected discredits equality and threatens our sexuality.

Pointing fingers ruins good sex (which is why I am not an Angry Woman). Life is too short and unpredictable to waste time assigning guilt to foes and friends and parents, on a never-ending stroll up and down a half-imagined memory lane, in a frustrating, meaningless struggle to deny our nature, when at the corner a sexy innocent islander may be waiting, hard as a rock. We don't want to live in a desensitized world where, on a daily basis, life is robbed of instant sensuality, where the human body is an apathetic, feared boundary. The best way to love ourselves is to stop thinking about ourselves. When you stay naive and mysterious, you have better orgasms.

            All sexual coercion is repulsive. Sex renders us all equally vulnerable. But not all sexual relationships can or should be equal. Sex is about odds. Ambiguity is inherent in human relationships; as are loss and hurt and personal conflict. The unexpected is the spice of life. The true moral conduct is generosity.

As a declaration and celebration and vindication of unrestrained lust, spoken with vehemence and conviction and repetition, Hip Hop teaches us how to seduce, revile, how to take it, and take it in. It is contagious in delicious ways--spanning a vast dimension of existence, namely the language of our bodies, through which women and men ask and answer questions about each other, suggest and manifest wonder, admiration, tenderness, violence, defiance, arousal, delight. Compared to other anemic music that bemoans broken hearts and broken guitars and presents everything, from sex to solitude, as a self-conscious chore, Hip Hop evokes spontaneity. Sex, it says, is about having a good time.