I’m a feminist with a dirty secret. Publicly, I condemn sexism in all its forms, writing articles about Me Too and giving men who dare catcall long, vicious glares, but, behind closed doors (and also in clubs, bars, restaurants and tube carriages), I still listen to, and accidentally enjoy, misogynistic rap music. I’m a hip-hop hypocrite and I bet you are too.

“To be a woman who loves hip hop at times is to be in love with your abuser,” tweeted Ava DuVernay in 2015, amid a backlash against NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, which concerned its revisionist approach to depicting the group’s misconduct towards women. It’s a damning verdict on whether or not it’s acceptable to sing along to “A Bitch Iz A Bitch”, no matter how much Ice Cube insists that there’s a difference between a bitch and an “upstanding lady” – although I’d like to think that society collectively decided that song should no longer be played a long time ago. It’s the more subtle misogyny that catches me out, particularly if it’s rapped on top of a distractingly catchy beat. I wince at the specifics of Notorious BIG’s “Nasty Girl” but will still cheer if I hear its Deodato sample being fed in by a DJ on a night out.

It’s reasonable to assume that Kanye's not going to deliver a feminist masterpiece on his new album

That being said, Kanye West & Lil Pump’s “I Love It” was condemned to the trash pile as soon as I heard Pump open with “You’re such a fkin’ hoe”. There’s an argument that the inclusion of Adele Givens saying, “Cause you know in the old days they couldn't say the shit they wanted to say/ They had to fake orgasms and shit/ We can tell ns today, ‘Hey, I wanna cum, motherfker’” as an intro and outro subverts the outright degradation of women in their lyrics, magically transforming “I Love It” into a song about sexual liberation. To me, it reads as an insurance policy add-on, a crash mat for West and Pump to bounce back off as soon as someone tells them that, actually, it’s not very 2018 to tell a woman that you “like a quick f*k” and that you’re willing to buy her a boob job in exchange for a blow job. The acknowledgement that sex should be enjoyable for everyone involved, indicated by Givens’ speech, might be a step forward, but expecting it in exchange for gifts and verbal abuse reveals that it’s all for West and Pump’s personal gratification.

© Lil pump/Youtube

It’s a lot easier to judge men who are behaving badly right now – just ask the ultimate beneficiary of the hazy laws of hindsight, Brett Kavanaugh. Kanye West’s ninth studio album, Yandhi, is due to be released on 23 November, and if we take a quick sample of lyrics from his previous work – perhaps, his most notorious: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous” – it’s reasonable to assume that he’s not going to deliver a feminist masterpiece. Clamping down on the classics, the songs we’ve heard throughout our whole lives and were written before the fight for gender equality went mainstream, however, can be a lot harder to police.

Take Snoop Dogg, for example. In 2015 he told Sky News that his attitude has changed towards women, but that he has “no regrets” over his previous lyrics because “that was how [he] was trained when [he] first started”. He went on to say, “I don't feel like you can be ashamed or mad about not knowing – if you don't know, you don't know.” His admission that the way he spoke of women earlier in his career was wrong is refreshing and indeed his work can’t be judged with the same scrutiny as 2018 Kanye West’s (who should definitely know), but does this give us a free pass to listen to Doggystyle guilt-free?

The society we live in was built on misogyny and so to reject all of the products of this is to reject a great deal of our culture

Technically, the answer is no. If we want to make real progress towards gender equality, then it would probably be beneficial to stop listening to music that hinders that process in any way. Even if Snoop Dogg knows his old lyrics were wrong, his modern listeners may not, and the sexist morals they continue to perpetuate stand in the way of the feminist fight.

But nobody’s perfect, particularly in a world that’s attempting to unravel hundreds of years of patriarchy. The society we live in was built on misogyny and so to reject all of the products of this is to reject a great deal of our culture. Reconciling my enjoyment of sexist rap music with my feminism is tough – some will probably say it’s impossible – but the road to gender equality was never going to be a straight line and the sooner we accept our individual moral flaws, the better. A holier-than-thou approach to anything never turns out well, so we may as well lay all of our sins against gender equality bare. Call me a fake feminist if you want, but call me a hoe in real life and you’ll have hell to pay.

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