Megan Thee Stallion and the Anatomy of Misogynoir

"We making bitches and hoes out our women too much. We can't trust ourselves and we don't know who to trust..."

I was talking to my homegirl the other day when that dreaded Megan Thee Stallion conversation slithered into the mix.

It’s one of those topics that always makes my blood pressure rise because people start reaching immediately. She and her husband started doing what I’ve now seen a hundred people do when Meg’s name comes up: rummaging through conspiracy, rumor, and vibes to explain why she somehow wasn’t a victim. You can’t ruin somebody’s life like that, she said. Look how her career took off after what happened. Maybe her best friend shot her.

Same script, different day. Donald Trump once (in)famously said,” I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” Well, in hip-hop, the rules of patriarchy harm Black women every day, only for our favorite rappers to get applauded for it. And I couldn’t help but think about how I’ve seen so many fans say that how you feel about Megan Thee Stallion is a pretty good barometer for how much you care about Black women. Because somehow this woman got shot, had bullet fragments in her body, sat through a public trial, endured endless humiliation — never mind the jail cell confessions and music videos chopping up horses’ legs — and people are still looking for a 1080P angle where she deserved it or made it up.

To be clear, this hypocrisy is not unique to Megan — Black women have to produce impossible evidence to be granted the most basic human sympathy. But the scale of this extended campaign against her makes her not just a useful case study, but a useful examination of the gendered rules for how violence operates in hip-hop.