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or Jay-Z’s “Bonnie and Clyde ’03,” love in rap today is most often synonymous with sex as an expression of submission or power. As Ja Rule has emblazoned on his chest, “Pain is love”: The existence of feeling is damaging. There is no innocence in hip-hop, as there is little left in American youth today. The sexual promiscuity of teens and preteens in all economic spheres is proof positive of that. It is a time when twelve-year-old girls and boys are contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and when in Boston in December 2002, neither police nor school officials had a legal or administrative precedent for disciplining a fifteen-year-old girl who was caught fellating a sixteen-year-old boy on her school bus while three of his friends cheered her on. The very adult imagery of hip-hop and pop music are adopted by teens and preteens at progressively earlier ages.

“The question to me is not is Eminem good or bad,” says Farai Chideya. “It is, what is his place in society? Here’s this guy with this very adult content and it’s not friendly to girls but I’ve seen him on many teen magazines targeting girls. Would a black rapper who was on some pimp trip end up on the cover of a girls’ magazine? I don’t think so. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing. It’s great that people are acknowledging Eminem’s artistry, but celebrity in America puts people in privileged positions where they’re lauded in ways that don’t even make sense. It’s one thing for me as a thirtythree-year-old woman to listen to his album, it’s another for a twelve-year-old girl to listen to it. It’s hard because kids are much more worldly than anybody wants to admit, but at the same time, when I’ve had conversations with girls, mostly black girls, about these issues, they’ll say ‘He’s not calling me a bitch, he’s talking about those other bitches.’ When you talk about hip-hop lyrics, you never want to think you are the one that’s getting called out, but the reality is that when somebody is talking about women, you’re all getting called out. You’re a bitch, I’m a ho, my mom’s a bitch. There’s a consciousness gap in the way people process these lyrics.”

Kim came by to say hi: Eminem and his inflatable wife on stage in Seattle, Washington, June 23, 2000.

Eminem has said from the start that his music is for adults. He plays only clean versions of his music around his daughter and does not grant interviews to the teen press. Those magazines that feature him on their covers do so without his consent. Regardless, younger fans who are coming of age in an era of harsh entertainment and male-dominant music, unless they care to research the past, have no other norm; that worldview is what they dance to. While other generations worry about the implications of this imagery, males and females alike shrug it off as another aggressive expression. It would seem that an antifeminist age is certainly upon us when anti-Kim Mathers websites and endless anti-Kim messages are posted on the Internet by Eminem’s young female fans.

“Gay liberation and women’s liberation threatened the hierarchy of male dominance,” Richard Goldstein says. “There is a hierarchy that figures like Eminem stand for, which is heterosexual males, with white males at the top. It still really is, for all the ideology of racial harmony, a hierarchy based on race. It is a hierarchy based on maleness, so the person with the least femininity rises to the top. When Eminem says he is indifferent to women and hates them and ejects any sign of femininity from his personality and projects everything he hates about himself onto women, that is a macho value, which makes him an alpha male. They have to be homophobic because any man identified with the feminine must be on the bottom; otherwise, the hierarchy is threatened. When gay liberation and women’s liberation threatened those roles, you had a state of terror among men and women. What happens when the order isn’t there? What happens to desire? What is heterosexuality like without the hierarchy? These are major questions.”

If a greater equality between men and