Whatever You Say I Am

by Anthony Bozza

  In 1997, Maxim, the American version of a British tabloid for men, opened its doors and in one year tripled its number of readers with a combination of soft-core porn and adolescent sex-obsessed humor. The magazine captured the mood of young American men who, in the face of women flaunting their femininity, were proud to consume the cultural opposite: male boorishness. Maxim’s runaway success inspired a slew of copycat, British-based or -flavored titles. FHM and Gear coach young men in the pursuit of the opposite sex through “proper” lifestyle and cultural choices, while justifying the objectification of women with a celebration of adolescent humor. According to statistics, men’s magazines of this variety attract male readers who are in their midtwenties and earn incomes of $60,000 or higher, generally in the corporate world. This is the boys-behaving-badly school of men’s magazines. In the hip-hop press, regular columns such as XXL’s “Eye Candy” or those in the magazine King feature pictorials of beautiful women next to reviews of the freshest materialistic expressions of hip-hop success: custom cars, expensive clothes and jewelry, liquor, and the latest technology. Magazine newsstand sales are always a good indication of what an impulse-purchase public wants to see, which, from fashion to music to general-interest magazines, is clearly as much female skin as possible. Pornography, too, seems to have lost its taboo, as documentaries, national magazine features, books, and even a cable-TV reality series, Family Business (Showtime, 2003), expose the workings of an industry with viable careers for young women and men, an industry in which the women earn more than the men for enacting male-driven fantasies. Younger women, less affected by feminism than by the tolerance of antifeminist sentiment, joyously engage in blatant objectification, from the “Girls Gone Wild” series to the resurgence of breast-flashing at rock shows—hardly the rage in the more socially conscious and more intellectual heyday of the nineties alternative-rock sensitive male.

  The pre-litigation family tree: Debbie Nelson-Mathers-Briggs, her son Marshall, and her grandaughter Hailie Jade Scott, June 1999.

  The embrace and celebration of women as sex objects in mainstream media did not fully express, however, male anger and power in the face of female equality. Nowhere was it more apparent than in the change in popular rock music starting around 1997. In the absence—by death, breakup, or breakdown—of alternative-rock talents such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam, a host of watered-down copycats and dull, introspective substitutes such as Bush, Matchbox 20, and Creed held sway until a new wave of hard-rock jocks drowned them out. Bands such as Limp Bizkit, Korn, and the Deftones ushered in an aggressive, testosterone-addled soundtrack of frustrated male nihilism. It was self-loathing in the guise of directionless, unilateral destruction, driven by, to cull from Fred Durst’s vocabulary, a love of “the nookie” and the need to “break stuff” when you’re “just having one of those days.” Sexuality in the Korn–Limp Bizkit view was male-dominated service sex, best summed up by the line “I don’t know your fucking name / So what? Let’s fuck,” from Korn’s “A.D.I.D.A.S.,” an ode not to the clothing company but to the schoolboy acronym for “All Day I Dream About Sex.”

  The apex of male aggression and ritualized domination of women was reached in the music world in a new incarnation of Woodstock, the hippie generation’s greatest communal achievement. At the 1999 festival, love wasn’t free, it was forcefully seized. Held on a former military base, one hundred miles away from the original site, Woodstock ’99 featured Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and many other acts. In a poorly organized, painfully overpriced event in the blistering July heat, young men sexually harassed hundreds of females, according to the reports filed (let alone those unfiled), and four rapes were reported, one of which occurred when a female fan who was crowd-surfing over the audience was pulled down and gang-raped while Limp Bizkit played. In the days following the festival, more victims came forward, many claiming they were raped in the campgrounds, others in the mosh pit, and one woman claimed that a state trooper whom she approached for help after an assault demanded that she first show him her breasts. Hundreds of stories eventually surfaced, from assaults and rapes in Porta-Johns to the encouragement by police officers for women to remove their tops for photos, some of which were posted, briefly, on a government-run law-enforcement website. But few allegations could be proven and were given little exposure in the mainstream media. Limp Bizkit front-man Fred Durst, who had encouraged the crowd into a frenzy during his set, later apologized in light of pending prosecution for the charge that he incited a riot. The three-day festival ended in flames, as crowds burned trash and pulled down light rigging. In the media follow-up to the events at Woodstock ’99, more ink would be spilled over property damage, the capitalistic greed of the concert’s vendors, the promoters’ ineptitude, and the irony of peace, love, and rioting than on discussion or investigation of the incidents of sexual assault.

  Eminem certainly profited from the angry male, antifemale mood of American music fans in 1999. Though he was initially lumped in with one-dimensional testosterone-rockers such as Limp Bizkit and Korn (again signalling a bias that white rap must really be rock), Eminem proved to be a more complex entity, one who is far more talented and insightful than those one-trick ponies. Eminem rode the macho wave, for sure, but not only was it much more common to his genre, he also superseded it with a deeper, multifaceted portrayal of the male psyche in a more compelling and communicable form than the abused-animal vocals of Korn, the knuckleheaded rebellion of Limp Bizkit, or the trailer-park pimp-strut of Kid Rock. Eminem’s macho bravado is often as ironic as it is idiotic, belying an intelligence utterly absent from the stance of the white agro-rock acts. In addition, Eminem’s self-dissection, within or without the Slim Shady persona, conveniently distances the man from his statements, and proves yet again that there are brains behind the bravado.

  Whereas bands such as Korn and the crop of new metal bands that have sprung up in their wake express their rage and childhood hurt more through sound and veiled lyrics, Eminem relates his story in details that at the least allow the listener to decide if he is or is not a misogynist. “I used to really hate Eminem, for two reasons,” says author and journalist Farai Chideya. “One is that he’s a total misogynist and two is that he’s gotten a free ride for a lot of things from the press. Now I’ve taken a step back from my initial reaction to him. I do think he’s an incredible artist who has developed a unique style. And I still think he’s a misogynist who gets a free ride from the press.”

  Eminem’s ubiquitous love for his daughter and efforts to be a good father flesh out his persona, and complicate the issue by enabling the public to very easily access through his lyrics a more rounded portrait of a hardcore rapper. In the fundamental message of his art, Eminem sketches himself from all sides: as an angry white man, as the product of a damaged home and a dysfunctional romance, and as a doting, protective, sensitive father. There is enough humanity in Eminem’s work to balance his harshest statements, to lend credence to the belief that it is only a pose. His detractors would say, of course, that the same sensitivity is also a pose.

  “I loved people like Dr. Dre and Snoop and they had a whole school of lyrics where bitches ain’t nothing but ‘hos and tricks,’” says Sia Michel, editor in chief of Spin magazine, the first woman to helm a national rock publication. “That school of lyrics had been going since the late eighties, even with 2 Live Crew. So by the time Eminem came around, to a certain point, you were desensitized towards it if you had been listening to hip-hop for a while. What I think happens with women is that you listen to the lyrics and you look at the person as a whole and try to decide for yourself if the person is really, really sexist or not. I think with Eminem, women look at him and say, ‘OK, he raps about Kim rotting in pieces but he’s an adoring father to a little girl.’ He had what to most people would look like a pretty bad childhood and that evokes sympathy in women, that sort of, whatever, feeling about taking care of them a
nd mothering them. And I think he works that very strongly on women as well. He makes anyone think that if he loves his daughter that much, he can’t really be that bad, which is what a lot of young women think.”

  Further to that point, Richard Goldstein feels that Eminem’s praise in the mainstream media in 2003 was not analyzed along gender lines and thus represents a dangerous evolution in the resurgence of male domination in American culture.

  “The primary subject of Eminem’s music until recently was the restoration of male authority and macho,” Goldstein says. “When he did his famous performance at the MTV Awards and he marched down the aisle with a regiment of men who looked exactly like him, he sort of seized the stage and the crowd was on its feet, roaring. It was this image of a phalanx of males marching, in uniform, seizing the center of attention—it was a very powerful image of male restoration. That is the idea in Eminem’s music that people don’t see that is very frightening to me. I’m not saying he’s responsible for violence against women or that there’s a problem with enjoying his music. The problem is enjoying it without examining it. Once we stop discussing what it means, this stuff will begin to assert itself as a social value. It seeps in, and because it’s so popular and profitable, many other people do the same thing and eventually it’s a ruthless message with this ideology in it. And that is what is damaging to women. I’m not saying that people hear his music and will go out and kill women, though I do know a woman who was raped by a guy who was reciting Eminem lyrics. It does happen, there are enforcers for every ideology, a certain number of people who will hear stuff and act it out. But you can’t regulate culture on the basis that somebody will actually perform a fantasy, otherwise there would be no erotica. But I do regard Eminem as a pornographic artist—his ideology is similar to porn in many ways. I would never say that he isn’t talented, he certainly is, but the reason why he is where he is is not his talent—it is his ideology. His ideology made him stick out from the pack. He was a white boy dissing women and gay people, though it is primarily about women. From a social perspective this is really dangerous because when a generation grows up under these values they become sexualized and normal, and people really do begin to live their lives by them. You will find women picking guys like this, getting into relationships with damaged guys. The real character Eminem portrays is very damaged. A simple question to ask is why has the greatest artist of his generation never written a love song to an adult woman?”

  I’m reminiscing on your tenderness: Eminem and Kim Scott at their non-denominational wedding ceremony in St. Joseph, Missouri, on June 14, 1999.

  Eminem is like a million others. For better or worse, he embodies modern male machismo and a new paradigm of the young American male. He is opinionated, uncompromising in his values, devoted to his daughter, untrusting of women and any authority but his own, and above all very, very angry. But his younger fans, as well as his older ones, do not see Eminem’s view of the world or his influence as the role model he purports not to be as problematic, or even worth mentioning, judging by the unwavering positive public opinion. Male dominance in popular music has a long history, from rap to blues to rock and roll, and contemporary permutations of it have grown more raw with time. It is seen, it seems, as ritualistic, primal, and central to some music, just as the mating dance is to some male animals. In the context of Eminem’s genre, male dominance and competition is certainly a cornerstone of hip-hop, in which the primary goal is to emasculate your enemy.

  As a result, homosexuality is a top-tier insult in rap. In the same light, if women and feminine characteristics are seen as weakness, then men displaying the same are equally weak. In lyrics, rappers order foes to “suck their dicks,” call them “bitches,” and tell peers they feel are copying their style to “stay off their dicks.” In this hierarchy, the least-feminine man rises to the top as the alpha male. That might be why Eminem has never written a love song: In a game in which he’s already under the microscope, he can’t afford to reveal sentimental feelings (i.e., a weakness for the “lesser” sex). Of course the answer could be as simple as the fact that Eminem’s longest romantic attachment has been complicated, to say the least. Eminem does reveal his weakness, constantly—it is at the heart of some of his best work. As he said in “Hailie’s Song” on The Eminem Show, “My insecurities could eat me alive.” He is an artist in touch with his Achilles’ heel, but he compensates for his sensitivity with the best defense: a good offense.

  “It’s been so important to harder rap and for black males to be as male as you can be for a lot of interesting reasons going back hundreds of years,” says Sia Michel. “Sometimes that means talking about bitches and other times it’s talking about fags and other times it’s talking about violent imagery and guns. Hard music in general has so often been misogynistic, whether it was metal or hard-core rap, that as a woman, if you want to listen to that music at all, you have to start picking through the code and trying to figure out what is truly offensive to you and what you think is anti-woman for some kind of cheap cosmetic reasons.”

  With exceptions such as LL Cool J and Common or Jay-Z’s “Bonnie and Clyde ’03,” love in rap today is most often synonymous with sex as an expression of submission or power. As Ja Rule has emblazoned on his chest, “Pain is love”: The existence of feeling is damaging. There is no innocence in hip-hop, as there is little left in American youth today. The sexual promiscuity of teens and preteens in all economic spheres is proof positive of that. It is a time when twelve-year-old girls and boys are contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and when in Boston in December 2002, neither police nor school officials had a legal or administrative precedent for disciplining a fifteen-year-old girl who was caught fellating a sixteen-year-old boy on her school bus while three of his friends cheered her on. The very adult imagery of hip-hop and pop music are adopted by teens and preteens at progressively earlier ages.

  “The question to me is not is Eminem good or bad,” says Farai Chideya. “It is, what is his place in society? Here’s this guy with this very adult content and it’s not friendly to girls but I’ve seen him on many teen magazines targeting girls. Would a black rapper who was on some pimp trip end up on the cover of a girls’ magazine? I don’t think so. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing. It’s great that people are acknowledging Eminem’s artistry, but celebrity in America puts people in privileged positions where they’re lauded in ways that don’t even make sense. It’s one thing for me as a thirtythree-year-old woman to listen to his album, it’s another for a twelve-year-old girl to listen to it. It’s hard because kids are much more worldly than anybody wants to admit, but at the same time, when I’ve had conversations with girls, mostly black girls, about these issues, they’ll say ‘He’s not calling me a bitch, he’s talking about those other bitches.’ When you talk about hip-hop lyrics, you never want to think you are the one that’s getting called out, but the reality is that when somebody is talking about women, you’re all getting called out. You’re a bitch, I’m a ho, my mom’s a bitch. There’s a consciousness gap in the way people process these lyrics.”

  Kim came by to say hi: Eminem and his inflatable wife on stage in Seattle, Washington, June 23, 2000.

  Eminem has said from the start that his music is for adults. He plays only clean versions of his music around his daughter and does not grant interviews to the teen press. Those magazines that feature him on their covers do so without his consent. Regardless, younger fans who are coming of age in an era of harsh entertainment and male-dominant music, unless they care to research the past, have no other norm; that worldview is what they dance to. While other generations worry about the implications of this imagery, males and females alike shrug it off as another aggressive expression. It would seem that an antifeminist age is certainly upon us when anti-Kim Mathers websites and endless anti-Kim messages are posted on the Internet by Eminem’s young female fans.

  “Gay liberation and women’s liberation threatened the hierarchy of male
dominance,” Richard Goldstein says. “There is a hierarchy that figures like Eminem stand for, which is heterosexual males, with white males at the top. It still really is, for all the ideology of racial harmony, a hierarchy based on race. It is a hierarchy based on maleness, so the person with the least femininity rises to the top. When Eminem says he is indifferent to women and hates them and ejects any sign of femininity from his personality and projects everything he hates about himself onto women, that is a macho value, which makes him an alpha male. They have to be homophobic because any man identified with the feminine must be on the bottom; otherwise, the hierarchy is threatened. When gay liberation and women’s liberation threatened those roles, you had a state of terror among men and women. What happens when the order isn’t there? What happens to desire? What is heterosexuality like without the hierarchy? These are major questions.”

  If a greater equality between men and women has caused a backlash in gender perception, Eminem has become the poster child for female-backlash fans, whether they are old enough to remember the sixties feminists, have just finished reading Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, or don’t remember a time when girls weren’t shown on MTV in bikini tops in sunny climes, seated on the shoulders of boys they’ve just met. Eminem has fans in suburbia with children of their own, who should in no way support songs about spousal homicide, mother hating, and free use of the word bitch. But Eminem embodies the handsome bad-boy fantasy that women love, the one that—despite the equality and capability they have to fend for themselves—they desire, whether it is for protection, for the eroticism of being dominated, or to have a focus for an object of maternal nurturing. The generation of young women who are now in their teens may have been attracted to nice guys in boy bands when they were younger, but the complexities of adolescence are the terrain Eminem speaks to. Boy bands don’t. Celebrations of maleness are nothing without female cheerleaders, even those who are conscious of their subordinate role, from girls flashing their breasts at Guns n’ Roses concerts in the eighties to those grinding onstage with R. Kelly, even after his child pornography troubles. To women in our feminist-backlash culture, Eminem elicits empathy, eros, and respect. The interesting questions are how and why.