Issue Paper

Music Videos and the Issue of Young Women’s Self-esteem Music Videos came about in the 1990’s when the TV station MTV came about. Women play a huge role in these music videos to help them look visually appealing and to help songs that normally wouldn’t sell to sell and get ratings. In these videos woman were depicted and stereotyped to look a certain way. Are the women that are being presented in these videos affecting young girls’ self-esteem? And how can the imaging in these videos be changed to help the young girls who watch it? Music videos came to popularity in the 1980’s with such television stations as MTV, BET, and VH1. The aim of these music videos is to market and promote different artists through the use of visual appeals. Gangster rap, a subgenre Hip-Hop music, presents violence, homophobia, and sexism in its lyrical content. This type of music presents the youth with an ideal identity, one that is consumed with money, cars, drugs, and multiple women performing sexual favors. Gangster rap videos usually focus on the buttocks, hips, and breast of women, (specifically black women). These videos depict black women as: hypersexual, money-hungry, sex objects. The success of these music videos relies on the imaging of these women in these videos and their use of their sexual appeal to sell the song. Music videos portray woman in a positive and negative light and these portrayals of woman could essentially play a role in a young girl’s self-esteem.
People within the music video industry as well as the viewers have differing opinions as to why they do not like the social standard for music videos. In Lil Wayne’s music video for “Love Me”, the woman are shown half naked playing on swings and are in what appears to be dominatress outfits.(LilWayneVEVO). These type of imaging are the ones in which people who argue that music videos are detrimental are strictly talking about. The standard for majority of music videos are that of the Lil Wayne music video