Member-only story
Why Men Are So Bothered by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’
Your patriarchy is showing, sir
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
During the wee hours of Friday morning, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion dropped the song and music video for their much-anticipated collaboration “WAP” — which, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, is a filthy acronym. It’s more shit-talking than Shakespeare, but there are quotables galore. “Punani Dasani.” “Swipe your nose like a credit card.” “Let him taste it, now he’s diabetic.” There’s a semi-truck horn that comes at the perfect time. It’s a fun, funny, and ridiculous song in the way that songs boasting about sexual prowess often are.
It’s nothing we haven’t heard before. Missy Elliott, Foxy Brown, Trina, Lady Saw, and Lil’ Kim — to whom Meg and Cardi pay homage in the video via a stone fountain of themselves posed in the iconic Hard Core spread-eagle squat — were boasty about the power of the pussy and lyrically loose-lipped about their sexual exploits 25 years ago. So was Adina Howard, a self-proclaimed “freak,” and before her, a long list of women, including Millie Jackson and Ma Rainey, who were equally explicit about their sexual desires and expectations.
Men boasting about their sexual prowess is so common, it’s cliché. Yet when women declare they, too, like and want sex? On God, we’re all doomed, B.
And yet, nearly 90 years after Bessie Smith sang about wanting “a little hot dog between my rolls,” menfolk (and women too) are out here clutching pearls because Cardi said she wanted “a King Cobra” that could “touch that lil’ dangly thing that swing in the back of [her] throat.” A whole lot of women loved “WAP” and laughed along with it — but plenty of others are big mad about the lyrical content. “What about the children?!” they ask. “Hoe culture is the downfall of the Black community!” they declare. “These women need fathers! And God!” they proclaim.
Oh, dear.
I’m so confused by so many things about this outrage, but let me start here: Where is all this ire when male entertainers rap…
