Tag Archives: BBC

Who wants to be a video chick?

Not me. Last night, the BBC attempted to tackle the issue with a sliver of sensitivity in the documentary ‘Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys’.

I can’t be the only black woman who is sick to the back teeth of other black women’s bodies being oiled up, dissected and objectified in hip hop and grime music videos.

I’m tired of seeing hip hop, R&B and grime videos that so gleefully encourage and illustrate male dominance and female subservience. By dominance, I don’t mean a numerical advantage- quite the opposite. Women often outnumber men in these videos, but the men are fully clothed and the women are partially dressed. The men are speaking and the women are silent. The women are jiggling their buttocks into the camera lens, but there no sign of the dominant male figures waggling their crotches into the lens for the good of the audience. 

Call me a prude, but the truth is I couldn’t care less about the supposed sexual liberation or empowerment that these women gain from starring in these videos. Instead, I’m pretty worried about the skewed representation of black and minority ethnic women in the mainstream media. I’ve followed hip hop, R&B and grime music since my early teens, and from the beginning I understood that misogyny was the norm. The day I realised hip hop wasn’t going to tackle its misogyny any time soon was the day hip hop star Chris Brown punched, slapped and bit his R&B girlfriend Rihanna, and his fans bent over backwards to excuse the abuse and blame the victim.  In hip hop, grime and R&B, the majority of black women’s bodies are constantly up for degradation or consumption.

In hip hop and R&B, lyrics about and towards women have changed dramatically over the years. In 1994, Boyz 2 Men crooned the lyrics ‘I’ll make love to you/  like you want me to/ and I’ll hold you tight/ baby all through the night’. Eleven years later, the Ying Yang twins rapped the lyrics  ‘You like to fuck, have your legs open all in da butt / Do it up slappin ass coz the sex gets rough’, with a chorus consisting almost entirely of the words ‘I’ma beat that pussy up’. Note that the word ‘pussy’ is completely divorced from the unfortunate female who happens to possess the genetalia in question. It’s no surprise, then, that the representations of women in the music videos that are paired with these songs are increasingly degrading and misogynistic.

In a world that’s crying out for black female role models, these images only peddle in and pander to the empowerment lie, albeit with new specifics. Black women aren’t really represented as fully human in these videos.  Instead, we’re subservient, covered in baby oil, and constantly jiggling. We’re portrayed as tantalisingly voluptuous and always sexually available. Our bodies are dissected by selective camera shots like slabs of meat.

Americanised popular culture is inescapable, and black women need diverse and positive representation. Currently, we’ve got Michelle Obama and Rosa Parks firmly in the heroine camp, and on the other side of the scale we have video chicks- black women who are paid to wear thong bikinis and shake their oiled buttocks at the camera.

Sometimes it feels like hip hop, R&B, and grime videos hold a unique kind of contempt for black women , one that prioritises female subservience and submission above all else. Feminists often protest objectification, but the knee jerk default is to challenge the Hugh Hefner-esque, pink and blonde, creamy skinned feminine sexual ideals.  We must never forget that black women are heavily objectified in the media too. We just have a different cookie cutter mould that we’re expected to conform too. Big buttocks, heavy breasts, thick thighs, tiny waists and full lips. It’s just as narrow, and just as damaging.

And what of the women who are enticed into the industry on promises of glamour, money and fame? What I saw from the BBC3 documentary, the ambition was possible, and also, very, very rare.

The UK has always lagged behind the USA, and the video chick phenomenon is no exception. Black women in the US have already reached Katie Price proportions when it comes to exploiting the video chick role- the BBC3 documentary reports that the most successful video chicks can make $9,000 for just showing up a premiere and $12,000 for two days filming. A few years ago, ex-video chick Karrine Steffans released the hotly anticipated expose and biography Confessions of a Video Vixen, detailing her career starring in videos and her affairs with the hip hop stars who hired her.

But here in the UK, video chick haven’t quite reached that level yet. Instead, women often respond to adverts on social networking websites calling for girls to star in low budget grime or hip hop videos.  In the words of one of the grime video directors who featured in the documentary, these women are often ‘swindled’, and promised pay that never appears.  This female empowerment lie tricks women into playing into the misogynist’s hands. You can have the money, the fame, the confidence and the admiration. You’ll be a better person for it. All you need to do is take your clothes off, spread your legs, push up your breasts, and pout.

For the purpose of convenience in this post, black defines those of non- Caucasian origin- African, Asian, Middle Eastern, mixed race, etc.

Ageism? No, that’s sexism

Take a quick glance at the UK’s trending topics on Twitter, and you’ll find the recent inclusion of the hash tag #proudofthebbc, in response to the Conservative led governments’ threat to cut the licence fee. There’s no denying the fact that BBC is a British institution, providing service to millions. But with every pro comes cons, and it appears that the twittersphere have conveniently forgotten media reports of a dossier sent to the chairman of the BBC Trust Sir Michael Lyons, by ex BBC presenter Selina Scott, last week. Scott was unceremoniously dropped from BBC Breakfast Time, and the 59-year-old maintains that her forced departure was due solely to her age. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.

Long standing newsreader Moira Stewart was one of the first to go, amidst an outcry of ageism and sexism from the press. She has since been reinstated and is now reading news bulletins on BBC Radio 2. Her controversy was, more recently, followed by Strictly Come Dancing Judge, Arlene Philips’ shock departure from the  show that she originally pioneered. Labour’s Equality minister at the time, Harriet Harman, spoke out in defence of Philips, as did Conservative MP Nigel Evans who told The Daily Telegraph: “We had the problem with the BBC and ageism when they got rid of the excellent Moira Stuart. This seems exactly the same. They are ditching a person whom they see as being on the wrong side of the tracks as far as age is concerned and replacing her with a younger model. It’s almost like a TV presenter scrappage scheme’.

These unfortunate women are either replaced by a younger face (in Arlene’s case, this face belonged to 30-year-old Alesha Dixon), or they disappear altogether. It’s a strange sort of ageism.  Funnily enough, the British Broadcasting Corporation isn’t caught out kindly asking it’s older, and more specifically, male television presenters, such as David Dimbleby or Bruce Forsyth, to retire. Quite the contrary. In fact, during the BBC’s general election coverage, 71 year old Dimbleby, who has been with the broadcaster for 48 years, covered the election action live for 18 hours whilst the nation voted for a hung parliament. This can’t be a case of the BBC considering its older anchors incompetent of doing the job, then.

Nigel Evans MP was correct to an extent, but it’s frustrating how the media’s coverage of the BBC’s ruthless culling of its older female television presenters is repetitively branded as ‘ageism against women’, when it is in fact, a case of old fashioned sexism- implying that women are only fit to appear on our television screens if they’re young and attractive.

When a woman’s age becomes an issue, and is perceived to hinder her ability to perform, yet the same rule doesn’t apply to her male counterparts- that’s sexism. This sort of treatment should not be labelled ageism, because the very word implies the discrimination applies to all, regardless of gender, when clearly it doesn’t. Singling out a gender for a reason so binary and reductive is both laughable (in theory) and unbelievable (in practice).  This is disgusting behaviour from one of Britain’s well loved institutions, even more so shocking because the corporation often finds itself setting an example to society, silently filtering into the British consciousness.

Proud of the BBC? I think I’ll pass.

An open letter to BBC3

I used to feel confident in trusting the BBC. I and many others my age enjoyed our late 90s childhood years. We were quite comfortably over saturated with CBBC’s after school entertainment- the eye catching, bright colours, the chirpy, spirited young presenters who seems to relate to us all so well. It suited our demographic well and I don’t think any of us, at 8 years old, had any complaints.

However, we are not children anymore. The BBC’s mission statement maintains that they aim to ‘enrich people’s lives with programmes that inform, educate and entertain’. All very well. Considering the BBC’s diverse range of media outlets are aimed at an all inclusive modern day Britain, I can only assume that, in the case of BBC3, these programmes have been carefully designed for idiots. Let’s not beat about the bush here- it’s pretty much an ‘either/or’ situation.

BBC3 seems to take the BBC’s mission statement and manipulate it ever so slightly; instead of these programmes being informative, educational and entertaining, they are educational or informative or entertaining. And, lets not forget, BBC3’s definition of entertaining is dubious at best. As students, we fit rather neatly into the channel’s suspiciously vague 15-34 year old target audience demographic.  Essentially, BBC3’s target audience age range may contribute heavily to the core of the problem. The rather loosely grouped ages 15-34 tends to span from under eighteens to those well established into adulthood, and all those tricky years in between. What do BBC3 choose to feed these fertile, tumultuous, rapidly expanding young minds?  Well it seems that if you’re aged 15 to 34 and you find yourself suddenly and urgently concerned about Danny Dyer’s opinions on the existence of aliens, BBC3 is your first point of call. To put it simply, almost all of their programmes are so incredulously cretinous that I often wonder, whilst watching, if BBC3 are actually just playing some kind of cruel joke on me. The informative ‘Don’t Get Screwed’ is a programme consisting of consumer law set to a Top Of The Pops soundtrack and fronted by vacant looking pretty people who appear to be suspiciously dead behind the eyes. Then there’s the relatively new ‘Hotter Than My Daughter’ series- a makeover show presented by a forgotten member of a forgotten girl band that pits mothers and daughters against each other in a bid to look the most attractive.

Get your act together BBC3, because I am not informed, not educated and certainly not entertained by these poor excuses for television programmes. Of course, it’s important not to forget BBC3’s educational documentaries, but even then, they’re fronted by a presenter with celebrity credentials in order to drag in more ratings. As far as I can remember, BBC3’s origins were rooted in showcasing sharp, young British comedy and drama. Although these gems still sparkle on their listings, it’s now rare. There appears to be such a lack in quality British programming for young people- in turn giving way to vapid, soulless, condescending MTV style programming for the masses. Is this the way forward for youth television?