I was reading this morning various statements people had made about the new song and video WAP. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a new song by Cardi B and a collaborator. Many women and black media outlets invariably described it as “empowering”. A new anthem for women in the modern age. There were, of course, some critical church ladies on both the right and left who argued that it was a kind of sexual debasement. But those critics were largely ignored or criticized themselves for prejudice and for resisting empowerment. Both classes of critics, of course, would argue that this isn’t what real empowerment is, but the moral landscape is significantly fractured enough that there isn’t really a coherent platform for that debate, and the arguments were largely lost in name calling and propaganda. After all, you can’t resist empowerment.
After reading the glowing endorsements of many and varied women about how obsessed they were with the amount of gender and racial empowerment the song represented, I decided I had better read the lyrics. After reading them through, and there are a lot of them (this isn’t a Soulja Boy song, it has a lot to say), I was left with just one question. What exactly is empowerment?
This probably seems like a stupid question. After all, it’s a word we hear all the time. It’s one of the major guiding moral values of our society. So surely we all know what it is, right? I’m not so sure. Empowerment certainly sounds good. And we use it in a way that implies it’s a really, really good thing, almost unquestionably good, a fundamentally positive moral value. It’s the main object of a vast amount of our moral and political effort at the moment, so surely we must know what it is and why it’s so unquestionably good to have more of it, right?
I’m genuinely not convinced that we do. Or that we even all mean the same thing by it, or all have the same idea of why it’s something we should want, what we’re expecting to get from it. And if that’s the case, that a big problem. For something that big and that monolithic in its value and that central to our cultural values to be, possibly, little more than a political buzzword with merely colloquial significance to different people, that is a problem. The term wields vast political power, it’s certainly a term people use in a practical and polemical sense quite readily. So what is it? Just a means to advance an argument? A totemic cudgel? A weapon of significant cultural weight for us to bonk on the heads whoever stand in our way or whatever cause we want to advance and envision it as supporting?
What is empowerment? The fans of WAP have really made me wonder. It’s a very different concept from those that motivated previous cultures, such as honor, duty, virtue, or nobility. It’s hard to see how it would fit into the framework of values in a place like Imperial China or ancient Rome or traditional Yoruba tribal life. But it means something to us today. It’s one of the great engines powering our society. So what does it mean?
After much thought and much consideration of how people use it, I think empowerment can actually be boiled down to a very basic instinct or claim or value. And I think the tricky thing about it is that it’s actually far less tricky or complicated than our use of it makes it seem. For all the incensed vapors we wrap around it, all the prismatic colloquial uses we apply it to, there is actually one fundamental meaning behind it that it wears quite obviously and proudly on its sleeve.
Empowerment simply means getting power. And power means I get (to do) what I want. That’s it. That is the hard, unvarying core that persists across all cases. Empowerment simply means acquiring power. And removing its obstacles. Power means I get what I want. I do what I want. I have power. Other than that, it’s pretty non-specific, which is why so many people can use it in whatever way they want to use it. And it makes sense as a value because it is a basic human desire and instinct. It is a basic way we define the good. It makes sense to us. It has appeal. It’s very fulfilling to see the obstacles to us getting what we want removed and very fulfilling to to be able to then get and do what we ant.
Of course, it should be no special surprise that empowerment is fundamentally about power and having more of it. The clue was in the grammar. Cardi B and her empowered fans are empowered because they’re getting to say and do whatever it is that they want. In Cardi’s case that means using her body to get money, attention, fame, pleasure, whatever it is that she’s into. Pussy, just like money, is a form of power over those who need or desire it. And she enjoys her pussy and enjoys using it and enjoys using it to get what she wants. (And apologies to my reader’s sensibilities, but if you’ve read the lyrics to the song then there’s no point in being coy. The song is literally about Wet Ass Pussy.)
And that’s empowerment. Because the point of empowerment is simply getting what you want. If pleasure, worship, and wealth are what you want (and isn’t that what the vast amount of people want), what’s wrong with that? And empowerment is simply freeing yourself to get it, removing the obstacles that prevent you from getting it.
Since we don’t have the right or ability to tell people what they should want, we don’t get to define what counts as empowerment. And any arguments to the contrary can be countered by pointing out this fact. You may assume that we want similar things, but empowerment as a defining value doesn’t commit us to any of that. That’s just your personal prejudice, what you want. That doesn’t mean s#! % to me. You’re just trying to steal my power. You’re part of the problem.
So is WAP empowerment, female, black, or otherwise? I think if you’re honest, the answer would have to be, yes, it is. Unless you want to deny the reality of the power Cardi is interested in. And I think you would have to be either an idiot, an ideological zealot, or hopelessly blind to practical realities to do that. This is empowerment. Unless you want to invoke some sort of culturally imperialistic transcendent value that holds across all people and defines what they should want according to some ideal standard of value and human identity. In which case its not really empowerment any more, and the central moral value has shifted back to something like virtue (a particular vision of an ideal humanity we are all obligated to conform to).
Empowrment as a fundamental cultural concept simply means that I get to do what I want and no one gets to stand in my way. This is the definition that cuts across all cases, the basic instinct in humanity that imparts force and value to it as a cultural lodestone. How stable a central cultural value it is, how it compares alongside those of other cultures and times across world history, is up for discussion and for testing.
Our society is one that values maximizing individual autonomy. We believe in the right of the individual to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, however they choose to define it. Our individual narratives may provide the context and content for what that means to us, where we locate the center of our value, where we locate its walls and limits. But empowerment as a moral category and argument exists independently from those grand narratives.
Cardi, in her context, is just as empowered by taking off her clothes and rubbing her pussy in front of the world, if that gets her what she wants, as someone whose idea of getting what they want means taking their pussy off the market and preventing themselves from being seen in that way. In the arithmetic of empowerment, the choice between the two is arbitrary. The expression of what empowerment means to someone is really just down to cultural and individual differences that you can’t argue with without invoking some sort of larger, transcendent moral value that would override empowerment and push it off its central place.
So here’s to WAP, the new anthem of female black empowerment. Inspire yourself with it, inspire your sons and daughters. Raise it among the great moments of racial and cultural emancipation.
Making Nobody Happy 