Female Dogs

Ever turned on the radio at an inopportune time and accidentally blasted a barrage of curse words at the kids you're babysitting? Ever wondered to yourself, "Why on earth do they say all that @$#%?" Welcome to Female Dogs, a visual analysis of the language used by rappers in the 21st century aimed to answer:

It would be helpful to start at the beginning.

In the 1990s, artists like Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill were some of the first female artists in hip hop to reach widespread success. These women challenged stereotypes, redefined femininity, and expanded the creative possibilities within rap music and the greater culture of hip hop. In a genre in which songs are almost wholly defined by their lyrics, these artists put female voices and words directly in the spotlight.
  
In recent years, artists like Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion have topped the charts, won Grammys, and attained even greater visibility and acclaim. They have also brought a fresh perspective to the genre, filled with unapologetic sexuality, confidence, and individuality.
  
Women in rap continue to thrive, making strides in the industry while promoting diversity and representation. They have become role models for aspiring artists, proving that women can excel in entertainment and command attention. With their powerful voices and compelling storytelling, women in hip hop have left an indelible mark on the genre, shaping its evolution and inspiring future generations of artists.
  
Note: The genres of “rap” and “R&B” belong to the greater culture of “hip hop.” For the purposes of this project, all musical artists involved are referred to as “rappers,” but may technically fall into more R&B or have some of their discography fall outside the traditional definition of rap.
  

Why me? Why this?

I took a class through VCU during my senior year of high school called "Gender, Politics, and Consumerism in a Global Context." It was two semester-long courses, one called Cultural Texts & Contexts and one called Gender & Consumer Culture. The latter was all about analyzing media through a gendered lens. We watched movies, peeled through magazines, read lyrics, and essentially consumed any gender-related media we possibly could. It is important to note that I took this class in 2020-2021. WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion was released on August 7, 2020. My professor pulled up the lyrics and music video for my class to analyze on April 26, 2021. 

Although the instinct of the class was to laugh at this vulgar assignment, it was actually quite enlightening for me. It was the first time I had thought about the why of vulgarity, of self-sexualization - the first time I had thought about the role that language plays in our access to agency as women. 
  
When the final project was introduced, I thought it would be interesting to continue my already-piqued interest in this subject and see if I could find any interesting correlations between the gender of rappers and the type of language they use. I expanded it slightly to include different types of expletives as well as words that refer to different subjects but tried to maintain a sense of interactivity with my visualizations so that readers would be able to take a closer look if they wanted to.

I scraped my data from Genius.com using their API. I researched 20 different artists, 10 male, 10 female, and used the lyrics of each artist’s top ten most looked-up songs as the basis for my analysis. It was a strenuous process, but I am very happy with what I’ve accomplished. 
  

Make no mistake – this analysis is not meant to assert that male rappers use more “bad” language than female artists do. This graph shows the percentage of each artist’s lyrics that are made up of expletives/epithets, by gender. There is a much larger spread of expletive proportions for the female rappers, with some hitting proportions of 6.9% explicit while some had 0.2%. On average across all artists, 2.9% of rap lyrics were made up of direct references to women, sex, substances, money, or general expletives. 

Here is a plot of the same proportions split up by type of epithet and color-coded by gender. It’s clear that all of the rappers have different affinities for different kinds of expletives, so it would be an unfair generalization to continue in my analysis as though all female rappers have the same tendencies or goals. That being said, I will be talking about the potential contexts behind some of the common language choices in later analysis.

Artist by artist

Here's an interactive treemap that you can filter by specific artist to see your favorite artist's affinity for bad words.

The B-Word

Everyone knows what it is. Maybe it was the first curse word you ever learned (like me!), maybe it’s your idea of a term of endearment, or maybe it’s your idea of a horrific insult to hurl at another human being. Regardless of its significance to any of us, the word “bitch” gets quite a lot of use in rap lyrics. 

As I looked through my findings, I was unsurprised to see that female rappers used the word more frequently than male rappers. For some of them, it was in their top ten most used words in all of their lyrics. But I knew that this frequency didn’t tell the whole story. I created a function to find the context around the “b-word” for each instance, and found the following. 
  

Male rappers used the words "my bitch" 35 times, making up 1.45% of their total epithet usage.

    Female rappers used the words  "my bitch" 32 times, making up 1.34% of their total epithet usage.

Male rappers used the words "your bitch" 12 times, making up 0.6% of their total epithet usage.

    Female rappers used the words "your bitch" 25 times, making up 0.97% of their total epithet usage.

Possession and self-volunteering:

In a society dominated by hegemonic masculinity, power is a tricky thing for individuals who fall outside of the traditionally ideal, white, heterosexual, cisgender male identity to find (and keep). Gender is present in everything we do – from the way we interact with others to the way we pose in the bathroom mirror when we are completely alone. It is a socialized part of us. One of my favorite quotes about this concept comes from Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride:

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

It makes sense, then, that our language usage is another representation of gender power dynamics. These figures maintain that as well. For example, when male rappers refer to women as “theirs,” there is an inherent ownership that is only enhanced by the usage of a derogatory term like “bitch.” Not to mention, being called a “bitch” is considered the height of insult for men. However, it would be an overgeneralization to claim that men are the only ones whose actions contribute to the power differential – women can be complicit in both indirect and direct self-oppression.  When female rappers commonly refer to “the other woman” as “your bitch,” they are not only assigning ownership of the woman to the man, but dehumanizing her by diminishing her identity down to, literally, a female dog. There are other contexts in which female rappers refer to themselves as “your bitch,” speaking to an unseen audience, but the combination of a possessive adjective plus a derogatory term will always elicit issues. There is also potential that the goal for these women who self-volunteer as someone else’s property is protection.

Self-sexualization:

Self-sexualization refers to intentionally engaging in behaviors aimed at making oneself seem more sexually appealing, such as putting one’s body on display or speaking in a promiscuous manner. According to the American Psychological Association’s Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, if women are taught from a young age that sexual behavior is rewarded by society, they are inclined to adopt those behaviors and internalize these standards, even subconsciously. While looking at the data, especially for artists such as Cardi B, Megan the Stallion, and Doja Cat, the percentages of references to women and sex are strikingly high. However, I believe it to be a representation of the self-sexualizing behaviors that many women take on to feel some sense of power. There is also much to be said for the role of sexuality in the life of a Black woman. In the media, Black women are consistently put in stereotypical, hypersexual roles, reducing them to objects them rather than empowering them. The vulgarity with which Black female rappers approach sexuality can be off-putting at first, but it seems to be a reclamation of something that the media has otherwise stolen from them. 

If you're looking for something a little more light-hearted (and a little less safe for work), click the link to see your favorite rapper's bad words in fun graphical context.

© 2023 Bella Grace Finck