Doggystyle forms a feminist

Latoya Peterson has a brilliant guest post this week over at Feministe about feminism, misogyny, and hip hop. She writes:

“Stupid,” he taunted me from across the room. “You need to stop looking all dumb and learn to start acting like a girl. You need to look like this!”

He walked over, and shoved the CD cover in my face.

Yes, the infamous Doggystyle cover.

The implication – that I was to emulate the sexualized bitch (literally!) depicted on the cover, reduced to a pair of shapely haunches for the pleasure of the males in my surrounding area – made me shake with disgust. To this day, I have never listened to Doggystyle in full, nor have I allowed a copy of the CD to stay in my line of sight.

Sometimes I wonder how different I would be today if my parents hadn’t shielded me so from pop culture images. (Really, I probably hadn’t ever seen that Doggystyle cover until a couple of years ago.)

Tags: doggystyle, feminism, hip hop, misogyny, snoop dogg