This list was curated by me. It’s based on conversations with other Black women born during the 20^th century, and of course on my own thirst. The dates below indicate the time period of hotness that landed them on the list. This list is a living document. Don’t be surprised if I update it.

And if you’re a Black woman, send me your fave hot white guys! Maybe I’ll add them :)

11.) Jason Patric (1987-89)—My Big Sis, Tammy, was obsessed with The Lost Boys when it came out. I wasn’t sure if she actually cared about the plot, since the only thing she wanted to tell me about was how fo-ine Jason Patric was. I thought this was strange. He wasn’t Black. More to the point, he wasn’t her main man, Ronnie DeVoe, from New Edition. Her talking about her thirst for Jason felt naughty. Like, not only was she cheating on the man she assured me would one day be her husband, but she was thirsting after a white man?! My inability to wrap my mind around the problem, however, dissolved the instant I saw the movie. I might have been only around 8 years old, but the punk-queer aesthetic of the movie and the man—all spiky hair, bare chests, and pouty lips—required no further explanation. (And don’t act like you didn’t have crushes in elementary school.)

10.) Rafa Nadal (2005-2011)—When I first encountered Rafael Nadal on ESPN, I had to ask myself why I didn’t start watching tennis sooner. I mean, there had been Patrick Rafter (and I encourage you to do your Googles there). But Rafa was an entirely different order and magnitude of hot. Besides his adorable face, who could deny this badunk? Y’all, this was before everybody in the mainstream started talking about thickness. And to this day, not enough men make those lists. Technically, as a very tanned Spaniard, I’m like is he white? And that uncertainty did allow me to follow him unabashedly for years. But race isn’t about just skin color. Everybody in his family is white. And he is too. But you do wonder about the origins of that back baby got.

9.) Brad Pitt (1992-2004)—It almost feels obligatory to have him on the list, but lowkey, did you know a single Black woman during this era who wasn’t trying to fill her eyeballs with as much Brad Pitt as was available? Admit it—you didn’t. My own mother wanted me to watch Legends of the Fall, just to see how hot BP was in it. And she was right. But the peak of his hotness has to be Troy. Even though Paris (Orlando Bloom) is technically the cute one in the Greek myth, Hollywood does not pass up an opportunity for a hot-white-guy two-fer. So they put Bloom alongside a Mr. Pitt dripping with sex appeal. Was it the pecs? The shoulder-length wavy hair? Hmm, I’d better watch that movie again to be sure I can really remember the time, like MJ.

8.) Chris Cornell (1994-2005)—Soundgarden’s albums spoke to the strangeness of being alive in the aftermath of the Reagan era, as we watched our collective spiritual vacancy get filled with sheer buying power. But even in eerie videos like “Black Hole Sun,” you can see he’s got the goods. Then, when he joined supergroup Audioslave, I started to get annoyed by how good looking he was. That powerful, resonant voice mixed with that face seemed like the sin of overindulgence. Or maybe double-dipping. But I soon realized I had no business questioning the Divine.

7.) Arnold Schwarzenegger (1977-1994)—You know how you like someone, but you’re not sure why? I always loved Arnold’s movies as a kid. It didn’t occur to me until I watched Pumping Iron in grad school that it was all about them muscles! Lord Jesus. It’s a good thing he won all those awards for his physique, because otherwise I was going to propose we give him one now. Like a Lifetime Achievement Award. Put your liberal politics in your pocket, and look at this man from a purely objectifying lens. His body for nearly 20 years was a marvel. You almost want to be killed by him in Terminator. It feels like an honor.

6.) *Keanu Reeves (from then, until now)—OK. You might think it’s cheating to have a man who is part-Asian on the list. But the way race works is that if you’re white passing, people can consider you white. Which is one reason why he’s able to get so many leading man roles. The other? Sheer hotness. Go back and watch My Own Private Idaho, Point Break, and Speed. Then ask yourself why didn’t do that sooner.

I once (almost) dated a man who looked like a young Keanu Reeves. I spent our entire one dinner date staring at him in wonder. Our waiter was a blond white guy, and I wanted so badly to turn to him and ask, Can you believe I’m dating this man?! Which anyway, technically, I wasn’t. Turns out that this guy—the lead guitarist of some local garage band—mostly wanted to talk to me about being like head groupie/roadie. Which I would have agreed to, except I got the impression he wasn’t actually going to have sex with me. So, I left him alone.

But Keanu? Who is aging like a man who is Asian and not white, plus has a partner who is accomplished in her own right and near his own age?! No! This man is to be cherished.

5.) Eddie Vedder (1991-1996)—The night I knew I was quitting the academy, I dragged my ass home from a grueling academic term of nonstop racist-and-sexist onslaughts inside a Black Studies program that championed its own “justice-oriented” ethos. *sigh.

I lay on my couch and set YouTube to autoplay. Lo and behold a video for a song I loved as a teen, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam, came on. I had never seen the video. I had seen “Jeremy” countless times on MTV back when it still played music. But this? Where the hell had this been all my life?

The video is grainy. It opens with Vedder berating the crowd about what the band will and won’t do. What they will and won’t tolerate. It’s anti-corporate, pro-community, leftist self-possessed raw power. Ooh, ooh, ooh. (Remember men like this? Is it just me, or are most of the men standing proud and loud in their firm convictions now on the right? Where are all of the bold leftist political men?? And between EV’s anti-corporate activism, and this Malcolm X rep (!), I think Vedder—potentially like many rock stars during that era—just might have been more radical than many of the mainstream rappers…)

The track cuts in and I quickly forgot my worries. I sat up. Vedder was whipping that long hair around. Then he free falls into the crowd. I was rapt. At the end, I realized I had been watching most of the video on mute—I’d accidentally hit the remote when I sat up. I watched it two more times, and it was even better with the sound on.

4.) Sergio Ramos + Fernando Torres (2006-2012). In the mid-00s, there was nowhere better to go drinking than in San Diego. San Diego had the most broke sloshes per capita in America, so the happy hours were incredible.

In 2006, a few friends and I went to a Spanish tapas place for happy hour. They had the World Cup on. That’s when I first laid eyes on these two men. Sports titans. Champions of the Spanish national fútbol team. Can you imagine seeing these two fine-ass (& rather close) friends on a 20-foot screen? It nearly gave me a heart attack.

3.) Cristiano Ronaldo (2008-2012)—It was close between having Ronaldo or Beckham on the list. I chose Ronaldo because the only reason I even found out David Beckham was hot (between like 1996-2005) was the docuseries on Netflix. That counts less than real-time thirst. (We’ll give DB an honorable mention.)

Actually, Ronaldo is cute enough as far as I’m concerned. But once for Mother’s Day, I wrapped a gift to give to my mother. I happened to be at the Vons near her house, and saw a magazine with Ronaldo on the cover of it, so I bought it for her. I was sure she didn’t know who he was, but I was also sure my mother had eyes.

I put the magazine in a gift bag and gave it to her, along with the wrapped gift. She pulled out the magazine,

“Oh! Thank you!” She cried. She loved it!

“Mom,” I said laughing. “That’s not the gift.”

“Oh,” she said. But instead of opening the gift, she kept thumbing through the magazine, searching for more pictures of Ronaldo.

2.) Alexander Skarsgård (2008-)— Who the hell is responsible for this man? Like who do I address about him?

Every time you turn around, here come this white man, in his late 40s mind you, being sold to us like a slab of meat. It was bad enough when he was young. Now, he wanna have the audacity to be a sexy, ageless white man? WTF?! No!! Aging gracefully is the one privilege denied white guys! How’d he slip through?

For years, I fell for it. Ever since I saw True Blood and did a double take, whenever he was in a movie I’d run out and see it. I wasn’t even pretending to care about the plot. Why the hell would I want to see The Legend of Tarzan? I didn’t. But I did pay to see it. And I got my money’s worth too.

Goddamnit Hollywood! You stop being a f*cking pimp, turning decent, respectable Black women like myself into johns, paying $20 a pop to see how many more muscles this man has added to his abs! How dare you?

I am not falling for this no more. I’m not gon keep paying to inspect the definition of his lower torso. (I’m waiting to watch Pillion on streaming.)

1.) Michael J. Fox (1985-)—I recently, randomly found a book by Michael J. Fox on Audible. It was a retrospective of the 80s classic Back to the Future. Like everyone else alive then, I loved that movie. I picked up the book, and it did not disappoint.

What appears to be my neurodivergence pushes me to try to know everything about something I really like. So, after I read that book, I read every other book he’s ever written—turns out he’s a prolific author—about Hollywood, Parkinson’s, marriage, and children. I was so moved by his vulnerability. It’s such a rare and beautiful quality.

After that, I (re)watched a number of MJF classics, starting with Teen Wolf. He’s just the cutest thing in it. I knew I’d seen it a couple of times before. But when I watched it again in 2025, I was freaked out to realize I had damn near memorized nearly every scene in the movie. I could recall multiple direct quotes. Imagine not seeing a movie for 30 years, and still being able to quote it. My only option was to admit that Michael J. Fox, the original short king, is my life’s biggest white guy crush.

Hey gurl! Where you been? Have you seen Friday yet?

I’m not sure how many times I saw it at that little theater, because it stayed there for months. And you cannot beat a $2 movie with a Black cast, and Black audience. No sir!

I don’t have to explain to you all the things there are to love about the movie. But for me, the biggest draw was Chris Tucker. His smooth chocolate skin. His large bright eyes. His amazing talent for physical comedy. I watched the original as many times as I could as I waited on the sequel.

When they brought the movie back with Mike Epps, I was like Who is this clown! How could they make a Friday without the funniest person in the original? I almost couldn’t bring myself to watch it.

It took the release of All About the Benjamins for me to appreciate Mike Epps’ comedic chops. Go anywhere in Black L.A., even now, and start reciting them lotto numbers like: 15, 30, 37, 38, 45, 47. Watch every other Black person in earshot start reciting them with you.

Still, it wasn’t until his 2024 comedy special Ready to Sell Out that I began to appreciate his genius. He takes us on a journey in this special, as he does in all of his specials. And when he arrives at the core bit, the one about selling out, he has this to say:

I’ve been acting like I don’t like white people for 40 years. I only do it in front of Black people. When Black people ain’t around, I am white.

This is a hilarious revelation, especially coming from a Black man who is a former drug addict and dealer, who has been to prison more than once. And as you can tell from his breakout roles in Friday and All About the Benjamins, he became a Black household name by playing hood characters in Black movies. How could a poor Black man, an ex-con from Indiana, famous for reppin’ street life, proudly proclaim himself to be white?

Epps explains that he’s always liked white people and apparently seen himself in them. But other Black people were preventing him from living out a normal life spent in the bosom of white folks:

Black people put pressure on you to be racist. I wasn’t even racist all this time.

This is not how the dictionary defines “racist.” Racism implies a power relationship between the people who invented the concept (i.e. white people) and those who’ve had to be subject to its rule (i.e. everyone else). While a Black person can be racist against other people of color, there are no “anti-white” aspects of the racial system for non-whites to mobilize against white people.

But that aside, Epps is pointing to something important. He’s describing a profound shift in the ways Black people, and I’d argue especially Black men, have related to the idea of what it means to be a Black person getting cozy with white people. He’s also signaling the changing face and character of the “sellout,” from white-washed middle-class striver, to hood-ass brotha on the come up.

In an earlier post, I gave the standard definition of the word “sellout,” a term dating back to slavery. Today, it’s typically described as a Black person who would betray other Black people in the interest of getting some taste of white favor for themselves. This is often in the form of a financial payout. The idea is that they have sold themselves (or in some cases other Black people) to white people to turn a profit.

There’s just the slightest hint of prostitution in it, where the Black person (usually male) is a trick, and the white man is the pimp. And that’s apt. Because it turns out, sex, and not money, was at the root of some of its earliest uses. Back in the day, “sellout” was used to castigate a Black person (usually male) who would have a sexual relationship with a white person (usually a white woman).

In a stinging irony, one of the first people known to have been excoriated for selling out by these terms was none other than famed abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. For over 40 years, Douglass had been married to a Black woman named Anna Murray. In their decades of wedlock, they welcomed and nurtured five children. But Murray moved on to the sweet hereafter in 1882. After that, in 1884, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white woman and fellow abolitionist.

If you’re like me you’re thinking, Uhhh, wasn’t that just the kind of thing to get a Black man lynched in those days? The answer, in general, is yes. But they married in Washington D.C., which at that time did not outlaw interracial nuptials.

The fact that it was legal did not stop people, both white and Black, from being outraged by their matrimony. According to Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law at Harvard University, the once beloved Black leader was swiftly denounced for this supposed betrayal. One Black-owned newspaper intoned, “Fred Douglass has married a red-head white girl…. We have no further use for him. His picture [has hung] in our parlor, we will [now] hang it in the stable.”

The particular form of betrayal here was “sleeping white,” a variation on the idea of sleeping with the enemy. For much of our history, it seemed Black men have been more likely than Black women to catch hell for this so-called “racial treason.” There was the case, for example, of Jack Johnson, the world’s first Black heavyweight champion in 1908. Johnson dated and married a string of white women, before being convicted of violating the Mann Act in 1912 for transporting his white lover across state lines.

And while these, and much worse il/legal repercussions could befall any Black man seen so much as looking at a white woman — because you haven’t forgotten about Emmett Till — this post isn’t about the white violence that erupts in the name of defending the sanctity of the white race. This post is about how Black people have responded to Black-on-white sexual affection. And if throughout much of American history Black men were more likely to be slammed as sellouts for hooking up with white women, it’s because Black men have been far more likely than Black women to pursue the affections of a white partner.

As I have explained in my book The End of Love, by the early 70s, within only a handful of years after interracial marriage was legalized across the United States, Black men were 4X as likely as Black women to marry a person of another race — most commonly white. This was happening during a period in which Black people were less likely to get married at all. That is to say, as fewer Black people were choosing marriage overall, Black men were rushing to the altar with surprising alacrity to lock it down with white women.

A central problem with interracial relationships for many Black people has been the fear that the aims of collective freedom would be thwarted by these so-called sellouts. That rather than allying themselves with the Black cause, they’d become traitors, showing their allegiance to white power and privilege at the expense of Black liberation.

One of the most vivid representations of this comes from the aughties classic Undercover Brother. The plot centers an underground covey of agents in an all-Black justice league who have been mobilized to foil the plans of “The Man” (read: powerful white men), who’s trying to undermine the presidential campaign of a prominent Black man. In this way, the movie appears to anticipate the election of Barack Obama. But what makes the film interesting for this piece is that the lead character, Anton Jackson (played by Eddie Griffin), is thrown off course by a white female agent from “Operation Whitewash.” The agent, played by Denise Richards, is named Penelope Snow — which is bad enough — but she is actually referred to as “White She Devil.”

Penelope Snow orchestrates an encounter with Anton. She bats her blue eyes and whips her blonde hair and BAM! Anton is in love. He shaves his afro. He starts drinking lattes and wearing chinos with sweater sets. AAVE is out, as are rhythmic movements, as he falls for what is described in the movie as “The Black Man’s Kryptonite.” In other words, a relationship with a white woman is depicted as turning a Black man into a cheap sad version of a middle-class white man, who’s sold his soul (not in the spiritual but, in the Black power sense) by being with a white woman.

This was the old view of a sellout: a Black man sliding between white thighs and transforming into a counterfeit white man who’s never heard of black berries and sweet juices. It was still in circulation during many of our lifetimes. But that started to change about 15 years ago. And rappers were, again, at the forefront of the shift.

By the 2010s, something had profoundly shifted in the understanding of what it meant to be a Black man with a white woman. All of a sudden, Black men were not characterized as selling out for being with white women. No, suddenly Black men, especially “real niggas,” have redefined being with a white woman as the goal, that apex sexual flex for a Black man from the hood. This is the ironic new height of Black masculinity. And even before Mike Epps, rapper Vince Staples was pointing me towards the new contours of the game.

I was watching the Vince Staples show. In the episode “Black Business,” he goes to a bank to apply for a small business loan. While he’s there, he’s getting no love for being a rapper, and is about to be denied the loan. He is incensed at the racism! But then, a few of his homies just happen to storm in to rob the bank. Mid-robbery, one of them decides to put his game down hard on the white women hostages — and only them. Flashing a toothy smile and handing out IG info, this man is desperate to land one of these white women.

In another episode, Vince is talking to two Black women. These women are uncooperative. He says to them, “I hate niggas,” then storms off. Seeing all this I thought, so Black men wanna be angry at white men for being racist, and at the same time show how much they hate Black women and desire white women?!

Do I even have to tell you that I suspect this began with Ye? He began his career slamming the unfairness of life as a Black man, then turned a corner where he started devoting an incredible amount of his lyrical efforts to Kim. He refers to her as an angel, a devil, a prom queen, his love. He wants to fight Pete Davidson over her. He wants to buy the house next to hers. More than anything, he talks about her like she’s a drug, and he’s an addict, as he raps desperately and apologetically on 530 asking “who gon’ break whose heart first? Always just breaks mine… I’m tryna leave you alone.”

The idea is that white women are an addictive, dangerous influence on Black men. They were like Kryptonite when seen as sapping their strength (i.e. making them look and act white). But now, they get to have white women and be “real niggas!” White women are literally likened to cocaine (or “snow”), something to make them high, to elevate their consciousness. This is part of the reason white women are often called “snow bunnies.”

The term snow bunny originally referred to someone who liked to hit the ski slopes. Now, it’s used by Black men, and especially rappers, to describe a skin tone and addictiveness (”snow”) as well as hotness (like Playboy “bunnies”). It’s not clear which rapper used this term first, but let’s consider who’s been using it lately.

In 2022, rapper NBA YoungBoy released a song “Snow Bunny” in which he brags that his girl, “she the same color as my Rolls Royce, Caucasian.” The following year, a rapper named yungcameltoe released one of his biggest songs to date, “Snow Bunny Heaven.” In it, he proclaims, “when I die, I’ma go to snow bunny heaven.” He has a remix video where you can see him listing a variety of European countries, explaining that if the women aren’t from one of them, he’s not interested. According to his social media accounts, the song went viral in 2025.

It’s not just the relatively obscure rappers. Gunna brags on a snow bunny in his 2024 song, “one of wun.” Infamous rapper Future is thrilled to have “lunch time in Cheetah with snow bunny divas,” if you listen to his 2022 song “Back to the Basics.” Rappers Juicy J, Punchmade Dev, and Bootsy Collins have all released songs salivating over snow bunnies. And Tay Money, a white female rapper, has her own song reppin’ her stats as “his favorite snow bunny…I got a hundred mil’ if he say he ever dump me.”

If we believe Mike Epps, this is that new “sellout” look. Except most other “real niggas” don’t see themselves as selling out so much as glowing up. As long as a Black man still looks hood, he can otherwise be as white as he wants and still claim he’s “down.” Like that DaBaby video where Black men with gemmed-up grills take to the links to golf a few rounds. Look the street part. But love all the things white men do, including the fetish object, “snow bunnies.” Turns out that for many folks, Blackness isn’t about values or community. It’s not about love, dignity, or respect between Black people across genders. It’s about aesthetics.

Now you can understand why I’ve considered Mike Epps a genius. He opened my eyes to the new school of sellouts: Black men who are real hood and in love with whiteness. Since race science is responsible for some of the most vulgar “real nigga” stereotypes, I guess it’s a match made in snow bunny heaven.

Pepsi. Taco Bell…Hammer, get this clear. Gimme money. “Your Ad Here.”

As a kid, I remember finding the sketch funny, even though it wasn’t clear to me why he was being dissed. When I asked my parents about it, they explained that he seemed to be happy to license his image to any company in exchange for a bag of cash. In other words, he’d “sold out” because he seemed to be willing to associate himself with anyone or anything, if the money was right.

I later began to wonder about this representation of Hammer, that of a sellout. As I grew older, I came to understand that the term “sellout” had been used by African Americans during and after slavery to describe a Black person who would betray the interests of Black people writ large in order to score a personal come up. From what I knew about Hammer, he’d tried to portray a message of Black unity, community engagement, and collective success. Shouldn’t we want major brands to support this message? I thought.

But to understand why Hammer was being called out in 1992, we have to understand the changes rap music was making, and how that affected our perception of the sellout.

Stanley Kirk Burrell, professionally known as MC Hammer, was born and raised in Oakland. One of eight children, he grew up with next to nothing, owing in part to his father’s habit of losing money at poker tables. A rabid Oakland A’s fan, as a boy Stanley used to dance in the parking lot before Oakland A’s games to make himself a little change. When the A’s owner, Charlie Finley, caught his act, he hired him to be their bat boy. The players started calling him “Hammer,” an homage to the home run king “Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.”

After a brief stint in the Navy, Stanley decided to return to his roots in entertainment. He added rapping to his skills as a performer, and decided not just to cut an album, but to create a label. Hammer released his first album, Feel My Power, on his label Bustin’ Records in 1986. After moving over 60,000 units, largely from the trunk of his car, he had major labels chomping at the bit to sign him.

His second album, Let’s Get it Started, released in 1988 with Capitol, shattered existing rap sales records. The album went multi-platinum, the first inkling of the massive sales potential of this burgeoning genre. The third album, Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, which dropped in 1990 was the first ever rap record to achieve diamond status. From that moment on, Hammer was no longer simply an MC. He was a global celebrity, and a major brand in his own right. This enabled him to start making some unbelievable sponsorship deals.

Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em had a commercial sponsorship tie-in with Post’s Sugar-Crisp cereal upon release. Buy a box and get an MC Hammer trading card. His 1991 album Too Legit to Quit coincided with the release of his short-lived animated TV series Hammerman. Hammer was everywhere, turning his dance-rap act into a $33 million dollar empire by 1990 (nearly $70 million today).

And he didn’t just pocket the money and keep it moving. He honored where he came from. At his height, Hammer employed over 200 people from his hometown of Oakland. He gave them opportunities to earn a legitimate living in the music industry, provided housing support, and even created a platform for Black talent from Oakland to thrive, becoming a booster for acts like Oaktown 357. He reportedly paid upwards of $5 million dollars annually to support this massive community-oriented endeavor.

This didn’t seem to have anything to do with the definition of a sellout that I’d learned. During the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, what Hammer did — hustling hard to be an entrepreneur who not only was working to make money for himself but bringing other Black people up with him — might have been considered precisely what it meant to be “pro-Black.”

But, unfortunately for Hammer, he achieved this tremendous crossover success during an era in which the idea of being “pro-Black” was changing, and rappers themselves were at the forefront of making the change. Hammer’s star power started to slip in 1991, when none other than Tupac Shakur publicly dissed him for “diluting rap” on a KRON TV Hip Hop special. This is what Tupac had to say about Hammer:

He did sell 10 million records…[but] selling records don’t mean nothin’. I mean, I’m down with him because he’s a brother and he’s making his mail, but…he’s playing that Sambo role and the reason everybody’s buying his record is because he’s no threat and everybody wanna see Sambo dance.

Cue the entire studio audience erupting in applause.

“Sambo” is a racial slur that originally meant docile, irresponsible, and lazy. None of this had anything to do with Hammer, neither in his personal biography, nor his public persona. But, in later minstrel depictions of the Sambo, he’s shown as high-stepping and smiling big to entertain white audiences. And it’s this later, minstrel depiction of the racial caricature that the well-read Tupac was leaning on.

One of the most incredible things to me about watching this clip of Tupac is that it’s not clear anyone in the audience even knows who he is. His first appearance on a rap track was in January 1991 — mere months before this special. He was featured on Digital Underground’s “Same Song.” His breakthrough debut album, 2Pacalypse Now wouldn’t be released until November of that year. At no point in the clip is he referred to as “Tupac” and the audience members don’t seem to be the slightest bit surprised to be sitting next to him. He seems to be simply another brotha, a hip-hop head going to a live taping to discuss the state of rap. It didn’t matter that he was a rap nobody. What a young Tupac said had touched a nerve.

It was, after all, the early 90s, when rap was going from being about fun and games, social critique, or even love, to an elevation of gangsta-ish. In this evolution of the genre, blackness increasingly meant repping the hard knock life. It meant being “tough” and “hard” in the mold of Ice Cube — who also publicly hated on Hammer and was one of the many rap voices crying “sellout” when Hammer was brought up.

All at once, hood niggas were *re-*defining blackness in terms that had nothing to do with Black pride, respect for other Black men — much less Black women — or giving back to the community you came from. In the new world that was being forged by gangsta rap, “pro-Black” got collapsed onto being a “real nigga,” which meant growing up poor, being willing to throw hands or pull guns, stacking your chips, and trolling for “bitches.” To be dancing and having fun — which lol at Tupac’s hypocrisy because that’s exactly what Digital Underground was all about — was to be “sold out.”

But what a funny, self-serving maneuver on the part of Tupac and the other thugs, real and fake. Just as he was about to release his own album repping Thug Life as his brand, suddenly hood shit was presented as the only kind of blackness that was “real.” And only self-described “real niggas,” like him, were willing to stay down, by refusing that non-threatening, white people entertaining, product-endorsing pop image.

The problem, of course, is that when you look at this new way of viewing “acceptable” blackness, what you find is that the only place it’s a threat is to the Black community itself. Glorifying drug dealing, robbing, shooting Black men, and slapping Black women, these entertainers were a threat, but not usually to white America or racist structures. The Black people who were a threat to the American racial order, like Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, or even MLK Jr, had been incarcerated and beaten with clubs. Or murdered. They had not, as Tupac, N.W.A, Ice T, Snoop, and a host of other rappers have done, capitalize on young white men’s pulsing desire to see that other, other racist stereotype. You know, the one where instead of Black men playing the Sambo, they play the Buck?

There’s a lot of Tupac’s music that I love. But let’s not act as if he and a bunch of other “gangsta” or more broadly “gangsta-bling” rappers didn’t routinely give us the Buck: hyperviolent, hypersexual, uncontrollable, and savage.

A famous Black male author came to UCI—where I once worked as a sociology professor—to give a talk. In it, he described rap as “Buck music.”

Lately, some Black people have decided to revisit the curious case of MC Hammer. They’ve started to wonder: weren’t them other rappers just jealous? I mean, Nelly hated on MC Hammer for endorsing Taco Bell, then had the audacity to link up with the brand for a Celebrity All-Star game and other purported endorsements. Lil Nas X — while not a gangsta is still a rapper — has been Taco Bell’s Chief Impact Officer since 2021.

I thought Snoop was gone when he did that duet with Katy Perry. But by then, most people were cool with gangsta rappers going pop and amassing high-profile sponsorships, so long as their image remained “hard.” I don’t have to tell you that no one said a single thing about Snoop’s Pepsi endorsement.

Snoop and Ice Cube have, like MC Hammer, been known to give back to their local communities. And Hammer and Tupac ultimately made amends by the time Hammer signed to Death Row Records. Apparently, Tupac even wrote some songs for him.

But for me, a pressing question is about what gangsta rappers took from Black communities by promoting such a narrow, non-productive, and stereotypical version of blackness, and especially of Black masculinity. Why have so many Black people, for so long, been so willing to cheer for Buck music? Didn’t the music of Marvin Gaye and James Brown serve to instill pride and love? How can we look at the state of Black affairs and think our sonic signature has nothing to do with our devolution as a community?

I think a lot of these rappers are doing their own high-stepping to entertain white men. White men are the single biggest demographic consuming rap. How come nobody’s ever just come out and accused gangsta rap of selling out? After all, if 50 Cent is to be believed, a good number of the so-called gangstas are fake anyway, which is why he coined the term “wanksta.”

Maybe we were afraid that if we didn’t publicly endorse it, we’d be treated like we were not “down,” not “keeping it real,” and would be hated on for acting the part of the amenable, docile Black. Except, that’s exactly what we did by pretending the Buck image was somehow our truth.

One of the more worrying aspects about her rise to fame, though, were the constant comparisons to Lil’ Kim. On the surface of things, the juxtaposition makes sense. Lil’ Kim innovated an aesthetic she labeled “Bla…

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This changed when my uncle, Ken, introduced the family to Seinfeld. Ken was boisterous and uproarious. He was never at the house being quiet and fitting in. He was that uncle you knew was there from the moment he arrived until he left.

Ken was hella “pro-black-man.” He loved to disrupt his neighbors’ quiet enjoyment of their homes by blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” at full volume while jumping around and singing along in his 2br apartment situated in a chichi corner of Pasadena.

At my grandmother’s house one day, Ken turned the TV to Seinfeld. I had heard of the show, but my TV date calendar was booked. Besides, none of my friends were watching it. I was surprised to see a man so deep into Black Nationalist, or more precisely Black-male, politics watch a show with only a fleeting appearance of Black folk. So I addressed him about it:

“Why are you watching this?” I asked, point blank. He took it as the accusation that it was.

“This is Seinfeld.” He replied defensively, turning away from the show to face me. “You should watch it.”

“It’s so white.” I muttered.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not good.” He said, cutting his eyes at me, and then returning his attention to the show.

So I watched it. And like many people who watched it, I became a fan almost instantly. Within months, me and my brother would be quoting George Costanza lines at one another.

I liked the premise. A show about nothing. Just a bunch of early middle-aged white people getting up to stuff that ranged from childish or foolish, to reprehensible.

To watch it now, though, I realize the stated premise is misleading. The show is not about nothing. The show is, in fact, about the cockcrow of the fuckboy era.

The term fuckboy, as I explained previously, saw its usage explode between the 2000s and 2010s. Since then, Black male entertainers, and especially gangsta-bling rappers, have been some of its biggest megaphones, spewing and celebrating fuckboy principles.

But of course, terms like this are invented to describe a behavior that’s already in progress. So as I set out to determine why and how some men were becoming these lamentable tools, I reasoned that someone, somewhere, had observed it. Or even started it. And they probably were proud to record their achievement.

I hit paydirt almost immediately. In men’s magazines, and centrally Playboy, I found how and why fuckboyism launched: fuckboyism arose among disaffected white men in response to the perceived gains of feminism.

Playboy it seems, was white men’s central anti-feminist retreat. Too often, it’s treated as little more than T&A on display. In fact, Playboy was a home-base not just for what’s good and right with sexy pliant women, but also for discussing women deemed disgusting and horrible. It gave men a course-correction, a way to change their behavior toward “bad women” in retaliation for their failing to live up to the feminine ideal.

That is, Playboy was integral to the creation of fuckboyism. It did this using three strategies. First, it explained the origins of romance. Consider the fact that most women, then and now, think “love” and “romance” are synonymous. But the editors of Playboy knew better. And so they’d tell men what romance was, and why vulgar women (gold-digging/feminists/careerists) were unworthy of it.

William Iversen, one of Hef’s most reliable contributors, offered a brief history lesson. The “Romantic Ideal,” he begins, “is a masculine creation.” In this way, men and not women were the true romantics. The “very concepts of romantic love and devotion…have been sung and celebrated by male poets, novelists, composers and playwrights for at least 600 years.” In this sense, men are of course, under normal circumstances, in favor of romance.

But the feminist age does not count as normal circumstances. When the world is operating as it should with two genders of people knowing their place, women will support a man. They will lift him to greatness with their tender and unassuming natures. But now, even though American men would like to continue to court women using the rules of romance, and to “gallantly marry for love…” their aims are thwarted by the “American girl” who views marriage less as a merger, and more like a hostile takeover. These women demand to know the balance of a man’s bank account before even engaging the question of a date, since now “the female notion of connubial bliss is largely one of expanding consumer satisfactions, whether of goods, services, style [or] status.”

I don’t have to tell you that this indexes some serious anxiety about men’s ability to continue to hold the economic reins, which has always been an important way men hold power over women. Could they keep women subordinate if men weren’t the sole providers? Seemingly not. Worse yet, when women have their own economic prospects, they may be less interested in just any old man willing to offer a commitment.

Instead of being proper women, then, too many had become gold-digging/feminists/careerists. In spite of the obvious differences in these types, they were all dumped into a dustbin of “bad women” unworthy of romance or commitment. All they wanted, it seemed, was a diamond ring big enough to blind their girlfriends.

Which brings us to the second strategy: Opt for no-strings sex instead of commitment. Per Iversen, since “feministic propaganda” was converting women from sweet things into auditors, men might best avoid these bad women all together. Instead of trying to romantically court many women in search of a future wife, men should save their energy and their feelings. Rather, let men engage in their “natural inclination towards polygamous sexual activity.”

The women eligible for this should be young, hot, and eager to get it on. As another author suggests, look for women who are “trim.” Women who betray a “frank and untroubled acceptance of her role as a woman,” which includes mastering “the art of pleasing men.”

The third strategy seals the deal. If a man does decide to settle down, it can’t be with any of these loud-mouthed, money-grubbing, battle axes. The court-able, marriageable woman should be young, thin, and otherwise white hot like the idealized women they’d hope to get down with. But in order to be wife material, she’d need to be selfless. The woman should put her man’s needs before her own. This woman is a “good girl.” She is also “a giver, a lavisher.”

These are the three primary tenets of fuckboyism: understand what romance is & don’t romantically court bad women, get as much of the good-good as you can and generally avoid commitment, but if you choose marriage, do it with a lithe little sex-kitten who will put a man’s needs above her own.

Fuckboyism on parade.

But, you may be thinking, these articles are from the 60s. What does that have to do with fuckboyism today? Or Seinfeld??

According to a 2017 article by The New York Times, Playboy invented modern masculinity. It had tremendous cultural power. Playboy, in case you don’t know, is regularly considered the most popular men’s magazine of all time. Worldwide. At its peak, it sold between 5-7 million copies per month. That’s in the ballpark of 60-85 million copies per year. And, that’s an undercount of the actual number of men who read these rags. I don’t have to tell you that Playboy magazines used to be passed around more than a joint backstage at a Snoop concert.

It just so happens that the peak of Playboy (~1970s) coincided with the dawn of a new age. The age of the “man shortage.” Suddenly, right as the Boomers were reaching a marriageable age, all the marriageable men were gone! What the hell happened to all the men?! Ebony reported on it first as a “Black man shortage.” But by the early-80s, The New York Times claimed (white) men were suddenly unwilling to initiate partnerships.

So, there’s the lack of commitment. But by the 1990s, the other two elements: wanting the kind of relationships we now call “situationships,” and appearing to be pretty well intent on getting a tall, thin, white woman in their choice of partner, were evident.

Candace Bushnell — yes, that Candace Bushnell — published in 1996 (coinciding with the Seinfeld era) that juggernaut, Sex and the City. Don’t be fooled. The book and the show are very, very different. The book is a chronicle of what she describes as “the end of love” in Manhattan (where Seinfeld takes place) in the 90s. What she describes as “Love vs. The Deal.” White middle-and-upper-class men there would regularly forego a banal kind of love affair, preferring to pursue models and have endless affairs with other women that were going absolutely nowhere. The men she met told her things like, “I want beauty. I have to be with a beautiful woman.” About this dastardly situation (read: our current situation) Bushnell surmises,

“When it comes to finding a marriage partner, New York has its own particularly cruel mating rituals…Everyone knows the rules — but no one wants to talk about them.”

Bushnell is like a descendant of Betty Friedan. She was describing the new Problem with No Name. But instead of being the emptiness white women felt inside about being housebound, it described the white men who refused to commit to women, even women they might love (!), if the women didn’t meet standards previously articulated in Playboy.

I still love referencing Seinfeld. It’s an important cultural touchstone. Only now, I can’t help but to notice all the fuckboy antics of Jerry and George. Watch it now and notice how Jerry notoriously pursues models or women who might pass for one. He has one relationship after another with no hope of anything deep developing.

George goes out of his way to manipulate women to get what he wants. In the episode on “hand,” he is thrilled to make his girlfriend desperate to figure out the best way to please him — before she grows wise to the con and dumps him.

And of course, their biggest fuckboy antics? Their emotional immaturity. They do not want to be honest with women about their feelings. There is no such thing as romance or courtship. We don’t see Jerry thinking much about commitment, and George is saved from commitment by his fiancé dying while preparing the wedding invitations.

No, Seinfeld is not about “nothing.” It’s in large part about the new era of relationships between men and women. A great deal of it is about fuckboyism — we just didn’t have a name for it yet. Consider the irony: most white male Boomers have never heard of the term used to describe the behavior their generation innovated.

— Learn more about the role of porn and white male discontent in creating fuckboyism in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

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So, I was surprised when recently I was caught completely off guard by Rick Astley’s 1987 chart topper, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s signature 80s with all the fixins’: big hair, oversized blazers, denim-on-denim, a Black man used as a prop, and more than anything else, gleaming white teeth. It wasn’t the aesthetics that threw me — these same elements are fashionable today. It was the lyrics. It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d heard a man emphatically proclaim his “love” qua devotion, to a woman.

It’s strange that Astley’s hit would be strange for a number of reasons. For nearly 1000 years, paeans to so-called “romantic love” had been among the central messages of all songs made in the West. And of course, the majority of them had been made by men.

But, there’s even more to it than this. Many Americans may not know that “romance” is not an innate, biologically-determined way for men and women to relate to one another. As it turns out, it is simply a medieval Western cultural pretension.

Romance as we know it was born in 12th century France. Roving singer-poets, known as troubadours, toured the slice of Western Europe that today includes much modern-day France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. They regaled audiences with tales filled with deep emotions, passionate sexual attraction among the nobility, and loss. It is these three elements that comprise a “romance” or a “romantic love.”

The troubadours were a huge draw. Their serenades were so popular that they changed the way people talked about their lives and sexual affairs. Their songs helped provide the grammar for what we now call the “romance languages.”

This style of romance was a smash success from its inception. But it was never meant to be for everyone. The romantic tales told by the troubadours were of a “courtly love,” one in which a gallant knight battled brutes to rescue his amour. That is, these nearly 1000-year-old Western European tales is where we get the idea of knights in shining armor rescuing ladies. And in case you didn’t catch it, this was only ever meant to be about the nobility — commoners need not apply.

Lancelot and Guinevere are considered the first model of courtly love. He, a knight, she a queen, married to the most powerful king in all of the known world, King Arthur. All of them were fictional characters. But, here’s another important thing: that she was married and above his station made her entirely inaccessible. (This is the origin of the idea of a woman being “out of his league.”)

It was her inaccessibility that made pursuing a sexual affair with her exciting, and even dangerous. Because a knight could not just run up on a woman of that pedigree. She was a married royal. He, a mere noble at her service. So, knights and other men used the idea of romance to envision themselves as courageous and honorable. Noble women used romance to suggest they were worthy of this brand of love-as-pedestalling. Their connection was both exhilarating, and doomed by this tale of love that, curiously enough, was also scandalous.

And yet, tales are all they ever were. There is little evidence to suggest that this was ever the way knights or any other men actually treated women on any large scale. Indeed, while most of the troubadours were men, there were a handful of women going around singing about the pretenses of these narratives, and the phony men who composed them.

That was not the worst of it. Perhaps more troubling for those of us who live under the guise of a multiracial democracy, the courtly love that would later be our romantic blueprint was reserved for elite women, and the men who wished to be put on by them. The knights were prototypically found fighting first for king and country, and secondly for the hand of a “fair maiden.” Make no mistake — these knights were not about to lower themselves for a peasant woman, or for a woman with dark or so-called swarthy skin. This was before the birth of race, but after the rise of color prejudice in Western Europe. Yes, in most of the many surviving depictions of Guinevere herself, her shining white skin (and often blonde hair) are waxed ad infinitum.

By the 19th century, romance evolved from being about a courtly love that was literally an extramarital affair, to being the reigning ideal for finding a life-long partner. This meant all the original valiant acts — standing up for women, defending their honor, never pressuring them for intimacy, humbling yourself in their presence, putting their needs first, giving them gifts like flowers — plus it tacked on the requirement of men in long-term partnerships during that period: providing for their women and children financially. Suddenly whole new populations of women who had only ever read about romances were expecting to have one. Men, of course, were expected to deliver the romantic treatment. Still, it was not to include any of the aforementioned “low” sorts. Could, for instance, the Irish women who arrived in America during the wake of famine expect to be courted by Anglo-Saxon men? Hardly. It goes without saying that Black women who were enslaved were typically raped and subjected to other forms of assault — no romances for the readily violable.

Still, Americans remained fervently attached to the idea of romance. Riiiggghht up until the feminist movement. The first wave opened men’s eyes to the “problem” of romance. To the vexed expectations among a growing number of women to “have it all”: to be equal to men, and to be “courted.”

Many men were content to play the game so long as women understood their place, and were the right types of women: those who were attractive and of high status. With the first wave of feminism, men started to ask why they’d work so hard to please women who weren’t willing to be chaste, attractive, homemakers? How did women politicking in the streets need (much less deserve) the romantic treatment?

The first way out of romance arrived after the First Wave of Feminism. It was pornography. In rags like Playboy, men waxed lyrical about their hatred of romance.

The second, which came on the heels of the Civil Rights and Second Wave feminist movements — and what I consider in many respects to be porn’s public face — was misogynistic, and often misogynoir rap. For while men began consuming porn hard and fast in the 1950s — it was rarely discussed in polite company. But rap took America (and later the world) by storm beginning in the late 80s. It carried many messages, but one of its most enduring is the disdain of the “low” sorts of women. The hoodrats, the ratchet sorts. The poor white “Kim” types. But more than any other group, Black women.

How to contrast Rick Astley’s profession of timeless, romantic, devotion to an (undoubtedly white) woman in 1987, where he croons,

We’re no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I… Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you… Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

With N.W.A’s 1988 jump off “A Bitch Iz a Bitch”?

Yo, you can tell a girl that’s out for the money… But a nigga like me’ll say “fuck you”… Cause the niggas I hang with ain’t rich We’ll all say “Fuck you bitch!” Now what can I do with a ho like you Bend your ass over and then I’m through

The romantic Astley thinks it’s his duty to do whatever he can for the (attractive, high status) woman who has him in his deep feels. Meanwhile, N.W.A. sees women who they describe as “snobby” — seemingly meaning that they have a high status or just standards these men don’t meet — as petty gold diggers. As “bitches” to be fucked and thrown away.

And it’s not just N.W.A. No one is a bigger figure against loving women (especially us “low” types) than Snoop. His mantra, we don’t love them hoes is nothing short of a brand and a global export.

The late 80s was the turning point in music. It was the beginning of commercial rap, that anti-romantic genre, finding its way to the top of the music game. Despite seeing a slide in its infamy since the Covid years, it is the most consumed form of music in America. And a good number of the most popular songs are about the hatred of women.

You may have never noticed it before, but popular rap has long been anti-romantic. This is the real difference between commercial rap, and nearly every other genre of music. It tells men do not get caught up tryna romance a woman, especially one who thinks she’s “a lady” deserving of the treatment.

Love and romance are not the same. Sexual love is a deep care mixed with physical attraction. Anyone could feel this for any other person. But, our ideas of sexual love have been colonized by romance.

Romance articulates the rules used by men to court women. The men must be of at least middling status and perform the aforementioned valiant and financial acts. The women should be of a higher status, and as close to the apex of white hot as possible. It’s hetero-regulating. And since the 19th century, it has been used to legitimize, elevate, and solidify a sexual and emotional bond that is expected to end in marriage, largely of the well-to-do. Notice that most romantic stories star two rich white people. A good number take place in the middle-ages, up to the Victorian era (pre-women’s suffrage).

What happened to romance? The answer is simple. Romance began with a song. It was choked by the competing demands of the movement eras. Its die-off was triggered by 20th century mainstream porn and popular gangsta-bling rap.

But don’t worry. If you are not an elite white woman, who finds a slightly less wealthy, but still high-status brave man, you weren’t likely to have a romance anyway.

— Learn more about romance’s white fetish, and how it marginalizes Black and other insufficiently white women in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

And the fucking Tupac thing?!

No, I haven’t been able to get through it. But, while I was feeling the need for some 90s nostalgia, I did watch a biopic about two other notorious Black male entertainers who once owned the airwaves: Milli Vanilli.

If you aren’t at least a Millennial, you’re like, Who the hell is Milli Vanilli? Back in the day, they were a hugely popular singing-dancing pop duo. Their first song, “Girl You Know It’s True,” was released in the States in 1989. It was a mega-hit, doing numbers most new artists can only dream about, and reaching #2 on the Billboard charts. Their next three songs, “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number,” “Blame it on the Rain,” and “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” each made it to #1.

Their debut album clocked 10 million sales worldwide, and 30 million singles sales. Those are nearly unfathomable numbers. Then, within months of the album’s release, they had won the Grammy for Best New Artist.

It’s funny now that the Grammy was for best new “artist,” because artists they may have been, but singers they were not. Yes young folks, turns out that these guys were lip syncin’ the hell out of some songs.

But this post isn’t about the controversy that roiled when the world realized these two men were not singing their own songs. For that, check the biopic. This post is about the unexpected, for me at least, realization that their first big pop hit had originally been a rap song.

“Girl You Know It’s True” was written by the Baltimore-based rap group, Numarx. The band saw their single get its 15 minutes of fame when it was released in 1987. It was likely considered a local hit, since it moved some 100,000 units — not bad for a rap track in the late 80s.

The song was written by band member Kevin Liles when he was a teen. Talking to Angela Yee and Charlemagne in 2022, he explained that he was “16, in love,” and decided to set his feelings to music. The band never made a music video for the track. So, you can imagine his surprise and outrage when he saw one on MTV two years later, starring Milli Vanilli. The Milli Vanilli version, he claims, sold 18 million copies.

It’s an incredible mountain of drama heaped onto what many of us older folx already knew about the scandal. But I couldn’t stop thinking one thing: a rap group made a song about love?!

If you’re an old person like me, you’re like, of course! LL Cool J’s discography is littered with love songs, from “I Need Love” and “Around the Way Girl,” to “Luv U Better.” Being a brown-skinned girl in a fair-skinned world, I always loved “Black Coffee” by Heavy D. And how could old skool hip-hop heads forget The Lost Boyz’s “Renee,” a tragic tale of love, aspiration, and untimely demise told poignantly by the charismatic Mr. Cheeks?

If we’re talking about other forms of love, like love of family, let’s get it with Tupac’s “Dear Mama.” When it comes to all forms of Black love, I have to mention one of my all-time favorite hip-hop albums, Black on Both Sides, by the artist then known as Mos Def, which featured the soulful tracks “Love” and “UMI Says.” And this is what UMI Says:

My Umi said shine your light on the world (Want Black people to be free, to be free, to be free) Shine your light for the world to see (Want Black people to be free, to be free)

Even Drake, once considered the reigning softboy-cum-fuckboy king, landed his first big hit with a song about how amazing his girl was: “Best I Ever Had.” He even uses the word “love” in it.

But that was 16 years ago, when many of today’s young rap fans were still tottering around in nappies. Love ain’t much of a topic in today’s rap. Google “which rap songs are about love” and find out. The vast majority of songs that Google gives you will be before 2010. Only a sprinkle appears after 2020.

It’s a shame really, because did you know that rap was a musical genre forged in love?

It began in the early 70s, the tail end of the Civil Rights Era. Urban areas across America were getting steadily deadlier. There was a deep pain and sorrow among Black and Brown youths, who had been hearing about a “progress” coming that none of them could see or touch. In the boroughs surrounding New York City, gang violence was about to detonate.

Then, on the verge of a war that would have involved dozens of street gangs, a few of their leaders, including Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez decided to put an end to the hate. He argued that instead of violence and retaliation, they should strive for peace and unity. After all, their beloved neighborhoods and relatives would be the only casualties in an all-out street war. Melendez was a key figure in brokering a peace deal among 50 rival gangs.

The irony that it was the gangbangers themselves (and not, say police) who made the streets safer should not be lost on anyone. Following years of constant beef, people were finally free to enter previously foreclosed territories. They could now make new friends, find new lovers, and create public art. There was a tremendous joy and relief at this new freedom, and the possibility for loving human connection. Former gangs transformed into music groups that would jam together, and battle one another, with poetic rhymes and turntablism. This was the birth of hip hop.

I’ve already told you about some of my favorite rap songs about love. And you know that by 2010, such songs were rare. So, what the hell happened? Where did the love go?

Love started to leak out of the equation the minute rap got rich. That largely coincided with the birth of so-called “gangsta rap,” coming from the likes of N.W.A. and Ice-T. (And, as a native Angeleno, it does steam me up that the West Coast gave us what is arguably the first musical sub-genre devoted largely to hatred, specifically misogynoir and other forms of anti-Blackness.)

To be clear, N.W.A. wasn’t the first rap group to strike it rich. Run DMC and Eric B. and Rakim made major duckets in the ‘80s. But “gangsta rappers” might just have been the first to find a formula that rich white guys could really get behind. It was arguably the first, but undoubtedly the longest lasting, form of crossover rap. It is the biggest form of mainstream, commercial rap, rivalled only by the equally vacant “bling bling” rap. Dre more or less gave us the equation for success (Black degradation = more sales in white spaces) in Dre Day. And didn’t Straight Outta Compton imply this as well?

Do I even have to tell you what mainstream, commercial rap is about today? No, you already know. It’s “get the cash by any means necessary.” It’s obscene, disrespectful (especially of Black women), lurid, sad, mean, and angry. There’s so much pain and sorrow in it. A Black man I know used to play me this song, “Weight of the World on My Shoulders” that goes something like I got the weight of the world on my shoulders — I can’t hold it. It’s indie, and I can’t remember the artist’s name. (Holla at me if you know, pls.) He describes all the ways he feels trapped being a Black man from the hood: he’s broke, his bills are piling up, he got that baby mama drama. He didn’t know how he was supposed to make it in what Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five called “this land of milk and honey.”

It’s a familiar story. And, there’s a place to express pain. I’m doing it right now. But where’s the healing in rap? Where’s the unity? The solidarity? The stealth plan for liberation from all this? The love??

It’s all pain, anger, getting over, and biting back. It’s mostly Black male artists. It’s mostly white male consumers.

Now, even most rap songs mentioning love, are still about hate. Hell, a 17-year-old Aussie rapper named The Kid LAROI made it to #1 on the US Billboard 200 with his debut commercial mixtape. The title? F*ck Love.

So, when I saw that Milli Vanilli biopic, you can understand how after decades of gangsta-bling shit ruling the genre, I was like “a rap group? Black men? Talking about love?!“

But now I see that was my bad. I’d forgotten where we came from.

— Learn more about how rap developed, and made a left turn from love and community uplift to Black (and often female) degradation, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

The holidays are when we are hit with some incredible and memorable skits from our fave media outlets. But I recently ran across a few worrying throwbacks:

I was scrolling down a YouTube rabbit hole when I landed on an SNL video from 2021 titled “The Night I Met Santa.” In it, Billie Eilish plays a breathy songstress channeling Marilyn Monroe’s old Hollywood glamour. Flanked by backup singers (played by Kate McKinnon and Ego Ngowim), she explains that she’s thrilled by the idea of meeting Santa. Miraculously, she does one night! But, for some reason, she doesn’t want to be vulnerable in front of St. Nick. So, instead of responding earnestly when Santa starts asking about her behavior, she goes on the attack:

“He said my name and I said ‘yes.’ He asked if I’d been naughty or nice And I said, ‘who’s asking, virgin?’”

There was a strange sexual subtext now in the “naughty or nice” part, as the bit was implying Santa was slut-shaming. It could have been a great dig; Santa’s seemingly only willing to reward “nice” girls with gifts, so the apparently “naughty” character claps back. But if it was intending to address a gendered form of sex-shaming, it did so by introducing one.

That set me off. I started looking for other references to male virgins on SNL. Wasn’t long before I found one. In another skit from the same year, “Three Sad Virgins,” we find Pete Davidson’s character humble bragging about the nonstop paparazzi shots and toasts in exclusive clubs with celebrities. Backed by a trap beat, Davidson explains:

“All my friends are cool and famous Except these three sad virgins…”

Three sad virgins, What? Three sad virgins, Whoa!

The camera pans to three young, white, and geeky looking guys. These “virgins” hop up to protest that they have had sex, “just not super recently.” Davidson attempts to reassure them they are simply playing characters in a parody video. They are only supposed to represent archetypical “sad virgins,” he explains, and somehow this appeases them. But the next verse finds him making specific references to their other supposed physical and character flaws — being dumb, having fart breath, and having a weird penis — about which the characters spiral in horror and embarrassment.

At the very least, this video does appear to be making a commentary about celebrity culture. The unfamous desperately want the approval of the famous. But of course, creating distinctions between the cool and uncool is the basis of fame.

Here’s the trouble with these male virgin jokes being bandied about by liberals: they treat straight men as if their identity should be tied to conquests. It suggests a (straight) man who has never put any meat in a taco is not worthy of respect.

What’s weird is, I thought men defining themselves as extensions of their cocks was the kind of meat-headed 1980s rom-com bullshit that we, leftists, now identify as a lynchpin of “toxic masculinity.” I’m pretty sure that one of the main problems with players and fuckboys — the common titles today bestowed on “toxic” types — is that they try to hustle women into giving up the ass with little resistance and nearly nothing in return? We claimed we wanted men to be sensitive and caring, and to stop objectifying us.

The reality is by virgin shaming we are objectifying them and us. We turn them into extensions of penises that have or have not “gotten wet.” And we giggle delightedly when we find that oops! hahahhahha! This one hasn’t figured out how to get his member into any female! It suggests any vag will do. We’re holes, and holes are interchangeable like Malibu Barbie’s outfits. Just throw any one of them on. Any box will do to get a man this form of gendered respect. It doesn’t matter who the woman is, or if she even feels it. (Here I’m reminded of that troubling Jennifer Lawrence vehicle, No Hard Feelings, where a high school boy’s parents pay her to have sex with their son. So, sex trafficking. But in the end, because she “owes it” to all three of them, she goes through with it! And he can proudly proclaim he’s no longer a virgin. Full. Body. Shudders.)

Weren’t we all shocked and disgusted by the incel/Republican line about men “having a right to sex” that Trevor Noah explored in 2023? We were like, don’t women have a right to refuse?! Yes. But turns out we often treat men like they don’t. It’s an incredible catch 22.

We don’t get to run around being mad at men for being “toxic,” while also shaming them for failing to accumulate the roster of pussy Chris Brown bragged about when he used to want you and her and her and her. Because make no mistake about it, one of the implied victories for Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Sixteen Candles was that he was given free license to assault a hot girl by one of the hot popular guys. She didn’t consent to it or even remember it. But he had an instant aura of cool having finally lost his virginity. That post-rape swag!

Which one do we really want? Intelligent and sensitive men who use their sexuality wisely with willing partners? Or men afraid of being shamed for being virgins, so they’ll devise any plot to get the pussy? So far, we’ve been saying we want vulnerability and intimacy, then laughing in the faces of men who haven’t smashed the ass.

Virgin-shaming is like slut-shaming. They both assign worth based on the amount of sex people are having. This Thanksgiving, let’s be grateful for decent men, for vulnerable men, and for virgins. Let men go sexless, instead of encouraging toxic conquest (read: rape) culture.

— Learn more about Western sexual history in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

By the early 90s, music videos were my lifeblood. It defined us, the so called “Gen Y.” Whenever I was at my grandmother’s house, I made sure they were on in any room I could requisition.

It seemed the 1990 EPMD video “Gold Digger” was always on. You’d walk into the room, the wood-grained technology would reveal a grainy image of a Black woman in hot pants and strapless top, bedecked with jewels, sporting a miner’s hard hat and wielding a pick axe. Flash to a disillusioned Erick or Parrish wondering how they’d ever fallen for a woman tramping for cash. Just like Ye would a decade and a half later.

Having lived through all this, it didn’t surprise me that by the 2010s, the consensus in America seemed to be that, well, Black women were gold diggers. It did surprise me, however, when I started looking into the problem, that this is a term that did not originate amongst Black people at all. White women, it seems, invented it.

It began as a bit of fun amongst friends. During the early 20th century, which is to say over 100 years ago, a dancer with the Ziegfield Follies named Kay Laurell was hanging around with American playwright, Avery Hopwood. One of Laurell’s friends walked by. Laurell addressed her friend sweetly, saying “Hello, gold digger.”

Hopwood turned to Laurell in amusement. He asked, what in the world is a gold digger? So, Laurell put up him on game:

That’s what we call ourselves!...You men capitalize on your brains, or your business ability, or your legal minds—or whatever other darned thing you happen to have! So why shouldn’t we girls capitalize what nature has given us—our good looks and ability to please and entertain men? You men don’t give something for nothing—why should we?

This was too rich a revelation for Hopwood to sit on. Already by the early 20th century, white men were getting skittish about the inroads women were making in politics and culture, not to mention the growing demand that men “treat” women to anything from meals and outings, to jewels on these newfangled events called “dates.” Now, he had evidence that for some women “dating” was a small-time con.

So, in 1919, the same year (white) women got the vote, Hopwood released his first play simply titled Gold Diggers. It was a smashing success. Ten years later the play was optioned for the big screen. The 1929 film Gold Diggers, starring Tallulah Bankhead was another hit. But it was arguably the next rendition of The Gold Diggers of 1933 with Ginger Rogers that gave American culture its most unforgettable filmic version, because this one arrived with a catchy tune:

Oh, we’re in the money Come, on my honey Let’s lend it, spend it, send it rolling around Oh boy, we’re in the money I’ll say we’re in the money We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along!

Of course, what it took to “get along” was being hot enough for a man to want to pay for the pleasure of your company.

Hollywood would continue releasing films churning up the dread that hot chicks were just after the dough. This genre may have reached its apex with Marilyn Monroe’s iconic performance in the 1953 classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This is not to say films about gold diggers aren’t still being made. Only that they don’t titillate the way they once did. Lady Gaga’s and Adam Driver’s 2021 contribution House of Gucci was met with cold critics. Still, it turned a nice coin, grossing more than twice its budget.

The disconnect between what popular audiences will pay for, and what critics believe is worth spending two hours on, may explain why the most enduring and profitable medium for decimating the gold digger has not been movies at all. It’s been popular music.

Now for the uncomfortable part. Who’s responsible for making the gd gold digger a Black woman? Partly the answer is Ronald Reagan, since the gold digger picks up on the terror surrounding the “welfare queen,” the mostly mythological Black woman having babies to rack up welfare checks. But more than anyone else, it’s been us. Black people.

EPMD admitted “Gold Digger” spelled incredible success for the band. Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” was the single biggest hit of his career. Billie Jean was one of the bestselling, highest grossing songs in the career of the man known as the “King of Pop.” And though Michael didn’t come right out and say “Billie Jean” was trying to pin a baby on him for the child support, did anybody think there was any other reason he pretended she was doing it? Because make no mistake, all of the songs I’ve mentioned are about fictional characters who never asked any of these men for anything.

When Black male entertainers blackened the gold digger, they made oodles, and oodles, and 000000s of dough. That’s the final irony. It is so extraordinarily profitable for Black men to claim Black women are gold diggers, that in reality it is Black men who turn an unjust profit. And the price is Black women’s reputations.

But we don’t get to play the victim. We love them jams. Damn. I still think Billie Jean is my favorite MJ song of all time.

— Learn more about the history of the maligned gold digger in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

The thing was, he was a sociology major at a private liberal arts college. I was a sociology professor. His mother and I were friends.

I didn’t see the harm in talking to him. I thought he must have questions about how I achieved my fabulous success. Perhaps he’d wanted to learn from a real G about how to thrive in a discipline that purports to challenge the racism it often mobilizes instead to keep white men in positions of authority? There were few people in the city more versed in navigating this particular conundrum than me.

When we finally got on the phone, he didn’t seem to have much to ask me at all. Every now and again he’d ask me to explain this or that, but mostly I was listening to dead air. I kept thinking the call was dropped, and I’d be like, Hello? A second later he’d return lethargically to the conversation.

It only dawned on me right as he was suddenly rushing me off the phone after I mentioned his mother (dunt! dunt! dunt!), that he must have been masturbating to my voice, without my prior knowledge, or of course, my consent.

He is what I call a “cis-handed” man. It’s a man who gets off on masturbating to women who have not consented to be involved. It combines the idea of “cis-het,” with the backhanded compliment of being abused by a man who thinks you’re hot.

It disgusted me to realize that this student didn’t view me as a sensei, but simply as jerk material. But more than anything, I was confused. Why would he have done this? Why would he have gone out of his way to get one of his mother’s friends on the phone for this?

Bill Burr to the rescue! At the time when this happened, I was a regular listener to his Monday Morning podcast. I especially loved when his no-nonsense wife hopped on to tell him and the listeners about themselves. Hilarious. But it just so happened that mere weeks after my surprise violation, he read a letter on the show. It was a young man asking if it was “OK” that he had a girlfriend, but nevertheless went on dating apps to find attractive young women, and masturbate to their voices over the phone, before ghosting them? Bill had enough sense to say effectively, No, it’s not. But better, he explained his view that what was leading this young man to effectively become a repeat masturbatory offender, was a pornography addiction.

Too many of us treat the ubiquity of pornography as if it’s harmless. This could not be further from the truth. In reality, pornography is addictive, and many people, especially straight young men, are addicted to it.

There is a panoply of mental health issues associated with this. But for my taste, too much of the conversation about its social effects focuses on how men end up treating their partners, rather than how they come to view and treat women writ large.

Here are some of the ways continuous porn viewing affects men:

— It can lower their empathy for women in general, not just their partners. In a great deal of mainstream porn (that is neither queer nor humanist), women are getting f%&ked for male pleasure alone, not for women’s pleasure, or for love. This presents women as a collection of juicy, waiting cavities, and not people with feelings and desires that should be honored.

— It can desensitize them to the importance of consent. There’s not a whole lot of porn where women say no, and mean it. Worse yet, did you know there is an entire (popular) genre of porn called “non-con”? This means young men can literally Google search for porn where women are being assaulted, find it, and get off on it.

— It can lead to sneaky, deceptive sexual behavior. Because so much porn presents women’s consent as taken for granted — or worse yet, treats violating women as erotic — men might try to orchestrate scenarios where they get off by using a woman who has never consented to being involved. And, because porn can contribute to a fear of real intimacy, and often performance anxiety and erectile fails, these assaults might just be masturbatory.

When the #MeToo movement was at its height, did you notice how many men were #MeToo’d for non-consensual masturbation? Besides the best-known cases (e.g. Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, and Jeffrey Toobin), there was Matt Dababneh (a former California assemblymember), director and producer Brett Ratner, screenwriter and film director James Toback, pianist and composer Danny Elfman, and another (dis)honorable mention for Harvey Weinstein. So many cis-handeds.

We are only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to identifying the problems of porn addiction. It is facilitated by porn’s extraordinarily easy access; in this country it is available to anyone, of any age, from birth. While smut is absolutely involved in the dissolution of long-term partnerships, we should acknowledge that the menace it creates is not just a private matter. It affects people who never consented to have anything sexual to do with that hominid over there.

— Learn more about the history of the maligned gold digger in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

But that day, the dogs didn’t try us. So I boarded the bus with a good feeling. And there he was. Jadeem. The 7th grade boy I had a crush on. He was seated in the last row of the bus. I walked back in that direction. Careful not to get too close. Not to be visibly jocking him.

I took a seat two rows ahead of him. Periodically, I’d turn around to say something to one of the other homies. Catch a glimpse of him. Some days, I thought he noticed me, took an interest in me. Other days, I thought he didn’t.

That day he didn’t take an interest in me or anybody else. While we goofed and gawked, he bopped to his own groove. He had his headphones on, the big thick 90s version, later brought back by the likes of Dre. His eyes were closed. He nodded his head, enraptured. I didn’t wonder what had bewitched him so. I could hear the song bleeding through the speakers. It was the biggest rap hit of the summer. “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect:

All I wanna do is do my Zoom, Zoom, Zoom and a Boom Boom!

JUST SHAKE YOUR RUMP!

I had seen the video. Black girls of every hue traipsing around a sunny beach in bright, tight, tiny bikinis. Some of the men in the video are shirtless, but all of them have on pants or shorts — that is, not bathing suits. Many are wearing T-shirts, and some are wearing full tracksuits and work boots. Most of the video is a close-up of Black women’s shaking asses. Teddy Riley is seen notoriously filming the entire scene on a 90s-era camcorder, reminiscent of that Aretha Franklin gif people trotted out when Jesse Williams dropped his dong on us.

Something about the song, but especially the video, had always bothered me. I went to my aunt who was like a big sister. She was 22 at the time. I was like,

“Why are the men fully dressed, wearing boots and the whole thing, but the women all have on tiny bathing suits?”

“What difference does it make?!“ She’d cried in her loud nasal accent. “It’s fun! Just enjoy it!” My sis, bless her, was the definition of a ratchet LA chick. Though she might deny it at times, at other times she reveled in it.

It wasn’t just her. Everybody I knew seemed to love the song. My mom would be pumping her fist singing it, rolling down the street in her doo-doo brown Nissan put-put.

I looked at Jadeem differently after that.

Five years later, when I was a senior in high school, I went on a campus visit at UC Berkeley, where the college seniors asked us, the incoming freshmen,

What happened to love in the Black community?

It was a question we high school girls couldn’t begin to answer, so we fumbled. But the boys retorted: Why a girl wanna get mad when you wanna pass her to the homie?! No, the boys had a great time.

I flashback to “Rump Shaker.” I remember that being unlike any other rap video I’d ever seen before. But it was exactly like the majority on BET and MTV by the late 90s. And everywhere else ever since.

For the longest time, people kept trying to convince me featuring Black women exclusively as shaking asses, as pieces of pussy to be passed between men, as “the nappy dugout,” is just party music. Have fun! But how can it be fun, or more preposterous yet, “sex positive,” if Black women feature only as the latest hole for fucking? As “them hoes over there,” while the men bleat, “we don’t love you hoes?”

No, misogynoir is not just for funsies. How many young Black women just like me found that out while trying to date men in the age of popular rap, of hip pop? The kinds of men who show Black women again and again that they wanted to find a quiet place to fuck you, then release you back into the wild? And let’s never forget, while it was mostly Black men making this music, white people are the single biggest audience for rap music.

Maybe you’re a young Black femme wondering why none of the Black boys or men you’ve met would remotely consider you for a partner? Maybe you’ve got Black daughters who’d like to find a respectful partner, but can’t? Maybe you’ve got Black sons who won’t even look twice at a Black girl, considering them “too ratchet,” or “too trashy”?

Sure, white supremacy invented the Jezebel. But rap is now a global phenomenon. And it became one largely by having Black men wipe their feet on the dignity of Black women. Yes, among rap’s many achievements, we have to add to the list spreading the view that Black women are thick jiggling asses, and holes to finger-cuff, with the homie of course.

We need to own that first, and then we need to do better.

— Learn more about the history of the maligned gold digger in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance