Portraying Women

Sheldon Sanford

In the song “No Hoe”, by D-Lo, women are portrayed as promiscuous and care free. From the beginning of the song, you know right away that it’s sexist and promotes women as pieces of meat and that they only care for their bodies, nothing else. Throughout the song, E-40 and D- Lo keep saying how they don’t care about women.

In the beginning of the song, there is a fashion show scene where all the women are dressed up in revealing clothes and are objectified by hungry men. The camera focuses either on their breasts, or their hips if their wearing a short dress. During this same scene, there is one guy in the front row rubbing his hands together and smiling delightly, makes the girls look like sex slaves waiting to be bought by the audience. This scene is promoting objectification in the sense that all the girls on stage are like objects to be looked at, or even to be bought and consumed.

Throughout the entire music video, women are being depicted as objects to be possessed, instead of mature women to be befriended. Every dress in the video reveals a lot of legs and breasts which just promotes viewers to think that that is all that matters, and then view those girls as objects and act as D-Lo would. Every girl in this video has a short dress and is very beautiful. All these girls are recklessly drinking and dancing trampy and it just sends a bad message to viewers and women.

Unnatural behavior is vital in this song because women are constantly putting themselves all over other guys and rubbing up on them carelessly. It’s natural to dance, but the way the women do in the video makes it seem unnatural. It’s contradicting how E-40 and D-Lo are singing and calling these girls hoes, and saying how they only want sex out of it, yet all the girls still end up getting with them and still like them even though they are treated badly and knowing they only want their bodies. It’s unnatural behavior to act like a hoe and just put yourself out there for anyone like these girls do in this video knowing that they’ll get treated badly and that these guys are just in it for the sex.

D-lo is living the upper class life with expensive jewelry, fancy clubs, and expensive alcohol. It’s for this reason why women are so attracted to him, and why their addicted to this lifestyle. Since he is living the high life, he believes he can do whatever he wants so treating women poorly and disrespecting them is just part of his daily life. People living in the high class like D-lo, are very confident and aggressive towards women and are very controlling of what they can and cant do.

I believe this video is portraying women badly. First, it’s objectifying women because all the girls on stage are treated like objects just waiting be be bought and taken home with them. Second, unnatural behavior is promoted because all of the girls are drinking and dancing sloppy, not caring about their bodies or how they might be treated. Lastly, from the second this video starts, it promotes sexism right away because the girls dresses are way to short, and their breasts are hanging out carelessly.