Getting Low--Devastation of The Other

The language of war is used to dehumanize the enemy and disassociate the soldier from his own destructive power.  In Vietnam, American soldiers burned “hooches” instead of houses, and killed “gooks” instead of people.  Individuals and homes were reduced to mere things that are easier, in a moral sense, to destroy.  Coincidentally, rappers use the language of hip-hop and rap culture the same way, creating a disposable subspecies of human that is used at the rapper’s fancy.  In the music, men smack “bitches” instead of assaulting women, and demand sexual favors from “hoes” instead of respecting the rights of ladies.  There is a common thread that runs through Western culture that teaches that if a person is dehumanized they can be taken advantage of and therefore be used without guilt since the individual being destroyed is not fully human.  It is the use of “The Other” for ones own purpose that creates exploitation that devastates people and cultures.

Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D. wrote about the dehumanization phenomenon within the context of the Vietnam War in his book, Achilles in Vietnam, during chapter 6, “Dishonoring the Enemy.”  Shay is a psychiatrist working with Vietnam veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and wrote his book to compare the firsthand stories of his patients to Homer’s epic, the Iliad.  Shay uses Achilles in Vietnam to highlight the parallels between the war of the Greeks and Trojans and the Vietnam War to better understand combat stress.  His main goal, however, is to educate people on the ruinous effects that war has on the individuals who survive.  In the chapter “Dishonoring the Enemy” he compares modern depictions of the enemy as “the other” with the ancient view of the enemy as a person who shares many of the same beliefs, ancestors, and culture.  Suring the Vietnam War, it was prevalent amongst soldiers, GIs, to use language that allowed them to efficiently carry out their task of death by changing the enemy from a person to something less, like an object or an animal. 
The enemy must in some way be dehumanized, degraded less than full human status. Collectively, the population [and soldiers] of the other country must become “gooks,” “Nips” “Japs,” “Krauts,” or “Huns.”  One must first hide from the full humanity of the opponent before [one] is able to kill him. (103)

This disassociation allowed the soldier to kill, uninhibited by the moral constriction of murder, but in the simple eradication of vermin or in sport.  By viewing the enemy as less than human, the GIs could keep the death toll high, shooting “gooks” in a live video game or hunting “dinks” for sport in the jungle, keeping the body count high, one of the sole indicators of success during the Vietnam War.  The language of their game allowed them to objectify the enemy and use it for their own ends, to kill.  During earlier wars however, it was much easier and much less derived to dehumanize the enemy after the Japanese (“Japs”) bombed Pearl Harbor and the Germans (“Krauts”) instigated holocaust.  Although naming to fit the deed in previous wars and naming despite no deed other than a communist uprising during Vietnam, the military has a long standing, and successful, tradition of the dehumanization-through-language tactic.

Likewise, rap artists use language that turns a woman from a person to an unemotional object able to be purchased, used, and discarded.  There is a popular rap song by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boys, “Get Low,” that is a prime example of the dehumanization of women, part of their famous chorus ringing, “To the window, to the wall, (to the wall)/ To the sweat drip down my balls (my balls)/To all these bitches crawl (crawl).”  The objectified women in this song yields to sexual intercourse within the epitome of male fantasy with his sweat, his body enjoying the motions, and the women crawling back, on hands and knees like an animal, to him for more.  Never in those few lines do the Eastside boys sing about consent, mutuality, or her pleasure, just brutish sexual acts.

As the song progresses, Lil Jon and his Eastside Boys do not give up their chase for toys as they go after the pole dancers, shaking female butts in short skirts, and watch “Lady’s Wet Boxing” in their “Get Low” music video.  During the song one rapper chants, “[L]ooking at [me] with yo palm all out bitch I ain't even seen you dance/ Twerk something baby work something baby/ Pop yo [vagina] on the pole do yo thang baby.”  In his club women are nothing more than money grabbers—men pay them and then the women leave, pay them to do a little dance, and then get rid of them.  It is an animalistic sexual view in which sex is objectified as having only monetary and physical value without the emotional, the human elements, involved.

The whole event degrades women who have already been degraded in the past.  According to Mary Anne Layden, Ph. D., from University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychiatry, writes that, “Most strippers…are adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse…between 60%-80%.  One study found that…55% had Borderline Personality Disorder, and 60% had Major Depressive Episodes [.]  These are severe psychiatric problems and many of them are connected to childhood sexual abuse.”  Lil Jon and the Eastside boys may have paid for their pole dancer, but they have also succeeded in destroying the humanity within these women and encourage other men to do the same.  They prey on women who were degraded in the past and demand from them additional dehumanization for their goal of “no-strings-attached” sexual gratification.  It them is a repeating cycle of trauma where a man sees the bad behavior of another and repeats it, perhaps abusing his daughter who will grow up and endure a life of additional abuse by men.

Other issues occur with the borderline pornographic rap music videos and their extremely explicit lyrics.  During Dr. Layden’s work in psychiatry in the treatment of victims of sexual violence and perpetrators of sexual crimes, she has, “not treated one case of sexual violence that did not include pornography.  In every case of sibling incest that [she] ha[s] treated, the pornography involved has been sex magazines most often Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.”  Pornography plays a big role in the degradation of the female character, a visual depiction of rap lyrics like “Get Low.”  The women of pornography are used as “lust tools” by men in order to achieve an end of sexual release, the women’s bodies a visual sexual toy for the men’s eyes. 

Dr. Layden also cites studies in which pornography leads to a differing attitude of men’s view of women.  One study found that, “When normal college mates are shown pornography, 50-65% of them then say they would be willing to rape a wom[a]n if they thought [he] wouldn't get caught.”  Such findings are initially shocking, but are not when one considers a woman’s role in the pornography industry as an object rather than a person; such views may be carried over to males in which his closest relationship to women are through naked internet pictures and explicit videos.

Jacqueline E. Lawson writes from the same angle with respect to the treatment of female Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.  In her article “She’s a Pretty Woman—for a Gook,” Lawson describes the ill-treatment of Vietnamese women by American GIs, their apparent misogyny a product of their culture brought out by the war.  Lawson explains tacit military approval of killing Vietnamese citizens, especially women, for fun, like a strange beetle under toe, when she writes, “Dehumanizing—by feminizing—…[r]educ[ed] the Vietnamese to mere “gooks”—something between a woman and an animal—[and] helped bolster the morale of the troops in the field [emphasis added]…” (23)   The dehumanizing of the Vietnamese allows the troops to recoup, take R&R, and have fun with an object that is something less than human, to be played with and discarded.  Lawson follows her claim with several quotes from GIs, one by Mark Baker in Nam, about men that took what they wanted and then kept souvenirs:
Guys were taking turns screwing her.  It was like an animal pack…Guys were standing there with their rifles, while I was screwing her…Baby-san, she was crying.  So a guy just put a rifle to her head and pulled the trigger…After we raped her, took her cherry from her, after we shot her in the head…we started stomping her body…everyone was laughing about it…we cut off one of her breasts and one guy got the breast.  But the trophy was the ears. (30-31)

Rap artists do to the women in their songs and videos what those men did to that woman in Vietnam, albeit more psychologically than physically.  They use her, treat her as subhuman—ganged by an animal pack—and throw her away when finished.  They keep morbid souvenirs like the leg of a doll or an undergarment from one of Lil Jon’s strippers.  The rappers don’t pull the trigger, but they are destroying with the metaphoric bullet the image of woman, stomping on her character.

Lil John’s and the Eastside Boys are not the only rappers that misuse and dehumanize women.  Ludacris, another popular rapper, produced his album Chicken and Beer in 2003 featuring the rapper salting, and preparing to bite into, a woman’s leg, see below.

Fig 1.  Source: Wikipedia, Chicken and Beer. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_&_Beer>

On Ludacris’ album cover a woman’s leg is an appetizer, like his chicken and beer, just waiting for Ludacris to take a bite.  She is simply a party favor, demoted from human to snack, playing her docile role in Ludacris’ misogynistic fantasy.  The question to be asked, then, is if he is going to throw the bones of her leg in the trash when he’s done with his meal?  In a scene like this, it seems impossible to think he would give her a proper farewell when he was finished. No, she pays with her leg, and women pay with their character, dehumanized in the mass media appeal of rap music.

Of course, Ludacris is not eating a real woman—right?  It is just a leg for show, to sell records, nothing more than a picture.  Lawson, author of “She’s a Pretty Woman—for a Gook,” would stand to disagree with Ludacris.  The Vietnamese counterpart to the leg on the cover of Chicken and Beer is grouped into the same category of “appetizer,” a toy and disposable.  Lawson describes another account of a GI, Private First Class John Ketwig, U.S. Army, who tells about a girl treated inhumanely because she was not seen as human:

“Cunt!  Whore!  You gonna die, oh you gonna die bad, Mama-san!…”  …The huge hose was brought into the middle of the circle…The tarnished brass nozzle was forced between her legs…A scream startled from her throat…Red and pink and brown and white and green, a torrent mixed with flesh and high pressure steam knocked the intimate circle back.  The white flood of water died away, the lifeless hose discarded. (30)

There is a mentality among the Vietnam era military that if a GI kills a “cunt,” a “whore,” a “gook mama-san,” then he is not actually killing a real person; he is only destroying an object, or if it actually is a person, it would be something lowly—only a call girl.  There is no remorse in “cleaning up the trash” as an amusing chore of war as there would be in disposing of a human being, little moral dilemma in burning an ant in a ray from a magnifying glass as there would be in killing a person for the pure enjoyment.  Likewise, Ludacris appears to be killing the woman on his album cover for the pure enjoyment, to enjoy her with a taste of beer and chicken, and because she is depicted faceless, nameless, and in impressively high and uncomfortable male-fantasy-stilettos, Ludacris would group her into the “mama-san” category.  She, under the magnifying glass of mass media, is burning an image of women as objects into the eyes of Western society.

It is not surprising, then, that America, the United States, the epitome of Western Culture, was founded on the same beliefs as those held in popular rap music and the use of dehumanization as a military tactic.  Columbus set his boat ashore and ended up doing the same thing: trivialize the natives in order to plunder their land for goods and gold.  Barry Lopez wrote his book, The Rediscovery of North America, in hopes that people would discover, to their horror and thus spur their quick action, that they were growing up in a nation founded on the belief that they are superior to all, all is beneath them, and they should use the land and resources as they see fit.  Such boasts are echoed in rap music with Lil Jon using women, to whom he thinks he’s superior since he paid for them, for his own instant gratification.  A number of GIs during the Vietnam War used the native women as they saw fit, for nonconsensual R&R, and shot their enemies for sport.  Lopez hopes for this disconnection with the lives of others and the divorce of the land to stop, and starts with an example of how it began:

"What followed for decades after this discovery [of America] were the acts of criminals—murder, rape, theft…and humiliation.  Bartolomé de las Casas…was eyewitness to… 'the obdurate and dreadful temper' of the Spanish, which 'attended [their] unlimited and close fisted avarice,' their vicious search for wealth.'…It was 'a continuous and recreational slaughter,” practiced by men who felt slights to their personages…or felt thwarted in their search for gold or sexual congress." (5-7)

What followed for decades continued to follow for centuries and evolved from an outright slaughter to the slaughter of human spirit and a respect for the material, rapper’s gold (see the rings on Ludacris’s fingers and his apparent pleasure in the dehumanization of women by consuming her), instead of people.  The rapes continued, the theft of moral character ensued, and humiliation still occurs.  However, outright slaughter still occurs in places in which it is allowed, as in the context of the Vietnam War where this recreational killing did occur, as evident by the testimonies within Lawson’s work.  The mass media is a catalyst for this degradation, spreading through the people, feeding the wallets of the rap artists, to their avarice, and feeding to the dehumanization of half of the nation’s citizens.

Language can be used to construct sonnets, give historical accounts, and write wondrous tracts of fiction, but it can be as destructive as it is beautiful.  It can also be used to destroy character, to degrade and to murder.  It is the use of “The Other” in order to achieve personal gain, whether it is a body count in war, record sales, or a one night stand with a paid woman.  Lopez was correct when he said, “[W]e face a crisis of character…we know we are thousands of miles from home, and that if we mean to makes this a true home, we have a monumental adjustment to make, and only our companions…to look to.”  (57-58) There is a crisis of character within this nation in how the nation views its enemies and how many of it men view women.  It is up to the people to speak out, stop purchasing music that degrades, to vote, and to construct works of language to battle words like, “[L]ooking at [me] with yo palm all out bitch I ain't even seen you dance."