I was an MTV kid. And not this new fan-dangled MTV that’s full of real TV shows that aren’t hosted by Xzibit. Old skool MTV where they actually regularly played music videos.

Just for a chuckle, here’s Xzibit in his prime:

I could sit for hours and hours and hours watching Nelly and Kelly fight their love for each other, Christina getting dirrty (filthy, nasty etc), and and endless parade of women who were presented to me as sexy. I grew up thinking sexy was Destiny’s Child in Bootylicious and the girls in the Hot in Here video. These women are showing a lot of flesh and they have a lot of flesh to show – big boobs, big butts and they are black. As a child I had absolutely zero understanding of how people with a different skin colour to mine would have different life experiences and be affect by social structures. In fact, at a young age I was already convinced through the intense saturation of popular culture throughout my formative years, that the best thing I could be as a girl was sexy and desired by men and the best way to be sexy and to have men desire me was to have big boobs and big butt and dance until I was really sweaty. This changed thankfully when I was about 15 and I realised that girls rule and boys drool.

But that idea of ‘sexy’ is still very firmly planted in my head and it is very coloured for me. I didn’t look at Barbie and crave her long blonde hair and skinny legs. I looked at Ashanti and wanted Ja Rule to be mesmerised by me (which I think is a little bit different for an upper middle class white girl in Australia, the place where I believe Hip Hop goes to die).

Even though I now have a much richer understanding of the political and social ideologies that construct black female bodies in the stereotypical often hyper-sexual ways that I was flooded with as a child and a teen, I can’t entirely unpick and remove my idea of sexy, because it’s so ingrained into the way I view bodies and my own body.

So thank god for Nicki Minaj and Beyonce. Honestly, thank god that there are women who own their sexuality, their flesh, and their pleasure and are not merely subjects of a dominant sexualised male gaze because for so long my feminist inclinations and my ideas of sexy women seemed quite incongruous. I always knew that there was a space where women could be sexual and be sexual for themselves and for their chosen sexual partners because they want to be, and not because anyone else wants them to be. I always knew it was so unbalanced that boys could be boys and explore sexuality from as young as 9 or 10 but the only time we learned about orgasm in our sexual education at an all female school was in relation to a male ejaculation that could result in pregnancy. So often did I feel the odd one out and shamed for the fact that I was openly and frequently a sexually aware, horny little teenage girl.

When Anaconda by Nicki Minaj came out I remember a little voice in my head whispering ‘Revolution’. I also remember playing the song at work and singing (read: rapping awfully) along to every single ling while my female coworker and best friend listened on with disgust, embarrassment and confusion. When Only by Nicki Minaj cam out I remember doing the exact same thing and her exact same reaction. When Feeling Myself by Nicki and Beyonce came out I remember doing the exact same thing and her exact same reaction. When Wild for The Night by ASAP Rocky came out I remember us both singing along and dancing like idiots. Here’s a little snippet of that gem for you in case you don’t know it;

‘Its the weekend and Im creepin with my niggas
Drunk and disrespectful, calling women bitches
I dont mean no harm but wont you and your friends
Meet us in the cut and we can do the business
God my witness that I only wanna kick it
And yo girl just said they with us
So we rolling in them Benzes
Wont you po’ it up and stop the babysitting?
She got drunk as fuck and swallowed all my kids
Back to the Mac, tats on her back
Ass so fat, hit that from the back
When it clap from the back, she clapping it back
She flat on her back and its back to the trap…’

For some reason she didn’t have a problem with this, but could not accept that Nicki might rap about letting Drake and Lil’ Wayne ‘eat my ass like a cupcake’.

I think there’s a long way to go until women can let other women be sexually dominant and have sexual agency and ownership of pleasure with no male guidance. And I know this lecture was really about race but I just had to flesh out why I think artists like Nicki Minaj, Angel Haze and Azealia Banks actually really inspire me because I don’t think I understood it myself until about 20 minutes ago. That they can stand up against, subvert and unpick the history of unadulterated and undiluted gaze that has been fixed upon them for their skin, their sex and their sexuality is a great thing of absolute courage and bad-assery to me. I guess my final though is just, Nicki, where were you when I was 13?