Whose lovely lady lumps?

People say jazz is the only art form invented by Americans,
but they’re wrong. Rap is another truly American art form. I’ll never forget
the first time I heard Sugarhill Gang’s seminal work,
“Rapper’s Delight.” It took a high-school trip to Paris
to discover this American treasure. I was in a French kid’s apartment, and he
put on the new record while someone else rolled a huge, ice-cream-cone shaped
joint. I was transformed by the poetry, the bravado, and the beat. Okay, and
maybe a little by the contact high.

Back home I sought out rap and, later, hip-hop. When my kids
were little I played rap — old school, mostly — for them. We listened for
internal and slant rhymes. I pointed out the themes of boasting, rebellion, and
materialism. Feminists and responsible parents everywhere, fear not: I also
condemned the misogyny and coarse language.

Now they’re older, and they hang out in their rooms
listening to the radio. I’m not sure how this unsupervised hip-hop exposure
will affect them as they turn from boys to men. The violence.The sexism.The violent sexism.

Take a song like “My Humps,” by the Black Eyed Peas. My kids
like the Peas because they played the Democratic Convention — great musicians
and Democrats! The first time I heard
“My Humps” I was with my 9-year-old in the car. The ridiculous fanny-shaking
lyrics delighted me — I was sure the song was a delicious, over-the-top spoof
of other sexist hip-hop songs. Then I heard it through my son’s ears and
snapped the damn radio right the hell off.

If you’re unfamiliar with the song, allow me to sing a bit
for you:

The guy asks: “What you gon’ do with all that
junk?

All that junk inside
your trunk?”

And the chick, in a babyish squeal, sings: “I’m a get, get, get, get, you drunk,

Get you love drunk off
my hump.

My hump, my hump, my
hump, my hump, my hump,

My
hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps.”

First off, ewww.
Second of all, it’s one thing to tell a young son that it’s not okay for men to
treat women like sex toys, but when women do it themselves, what to say? And
when women do it in the guise of being feminists — taking control of their
bodies — as Ariel Levy, author of Raunch Culture points out, the twisted result is confusing at best and regressive at worst.

Someday my kids will view
women as sexual beings, potential partners. Maybe they do already, God help me.
That’s when they’ll learn that most males have some form of the Peas’ question,
“What you gon’ do with all that ass, all that ass up in your jeans?” on
their minds pretty much every second of every day. Forget hip-hop for a moment
— though if you’re anything like my husband, you’d probably like to forget it
forever — and think about the enigmatic Mona Lisa. Her mysterious gaze has
been tormenting men for 400 years.

Recently, a handful of researchers in Britain,
using mood-recognition software, asked Mona Lisa their polite, British version
of the Peas’ question. No, she didn’t reply, “I’m a make, make, make, make you scream/Make you scream, make you
scream.”

Instead, she revealed, according to the computer’s
calculations, that she felt 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent
fearful, and 2 percent angry. About what, we may never know.

It’s not just batty scientists who are trying to figure out
women. Bats are, too. The tiny mammals are in an evolutionary struggle between
having large testicles and small brains or big brains and small balls, a Syracuse
professor recently revealed. He studied ball/brain ratios in more than 300 bats
and learned that in species where female bats are promiscuous, larger balls —
and the extra sperm in them — provide an evolutionary advantage.

I deduce from this that male bats don’t spend a lot of time
asking the female bats what they’re gon’ do with all
that junk, all that junk inside that trunk. Nor do they construct elaborate
software models to figure out the mood of a 400-year-old painting. They just
blast away with their mighty sperm load and hope they win the evolution
lottery. And more power to them.

The challenge as a
parent is to raise children who neither talk like pimps nor spend hours in dark
labs measuring bat balls. Although I wish I could defuse the bristling hypersexuality of the media that surrounds them, I can’t.
And if I really did wish that, I probably shouldn’t have turned them on to rap
in the first place. But what I am trying to do here is not cloister them from
the world. I’m trying to help them sort through all the messages out there and
find the ones that fit their (read: my) core values.

Plus I know I can still rely on my ability as a parent to
beat the fun out of everything. So I will continue to analyze lyrics, emphasize
musical appropriation and homages, and disparage
misogyny in the hopes of keeping my kids’ heads screwed on straight.

My parents were great buzzkills.
Once, in Boston Common, when my brother and I were in the giggling-about-sex
stage, we saw two people having sex in the bushes. Naked people! In the bushes!
This was perhaps the greatest, ickiest, most exciting thing we’d ever seen. It
was a cosmic gift: when I told this story at school, I’d finally be popular.

My mother, sensing our prurience, stopped us 20 yards away
from the couple writhing under a gray blanket, and launched into the kind of
“making love is a beautiful act when two people who love and respect each other
blah, blah, blah” speech that only the Sexual Revolution could cook up. By the
end, we were completely creeped out. We never spoke
of it again.

This article appears in Dec 28, 2005 – Jan 3, 2006.