- Where young girls once aspired
to be models and ballerinas,
they now aspire to be hip hop video girls,
the next hot girl in the
hottest artist's video.
Having lived that life, I can say,
it's not everything it's cracked up to be.
- Okay, so the book.
- (laughs) That book.
Dah.
- Isn't everybody else gonna answer this?
(laughs)
'Cause I don't, yo.
- (laughs) Good book.
Just classic, legendary read.
(gentle hip hop beat music)
- There was already this,
you know, kind of, backlash
towards video modeling, video
vixens, just music in general,
for being misogynistic and
whatnot and then this book drops,
Confessions of a Video Vixen.
I was like, are you effing kidding me?
- I met Karrine Steffans
at Keith Paschall's house
and she told me about the
book that she was writing.
We were sitting at the table talking
and I expressed to her,
like probably millions
of other people in the industry, like,
why would you tell this story?
- Kiss and tell?
Like, that's you're business model?
- Obviously, a lot of
rappers were very frustrated
that a lot of this information
was getting out there.
- [Announcer] Karrine
tells all in her 2005 book,
Confessions of a Video Vixen,
and calls out the hip hop industry
for treating women as
disposable sex objects.
(dramatic note echos)
- I'm very excited about this book,
I'm excited about the
way that it turned out.
It's my story, you know,
and it's not someone else's story
or what I heard about
something, it was just,
it's me and my story and I know
that it's the story of other people
and I'm excited to hear
what the world has to say.
- You tell your story,
but you tell their story
and take away their privacy
by naming them for profit.
(crowd lightly claps)
There's something very wrong,
something very unfair, about that.
- I just think the book
put us in a bad light.
I feel like, you know, they focus on her
and made all of us seem
like we're like her.
We all sleep around, we
all want these artists
and that's not the case.
- I underestimated how much urban culture
and that music hates its women,
especially the women who talk.
- A woman is judged by the man she's with
a lot more times than
how many men she's with.
Because if I had sex 20 regular,
nobodies and school teachers and firemen
that you don't care, you wouldn't care.
- There's always gonna be hoes everywhere,
in every workplace you got a hoe.
I mean, that's fact.
There's a hoe in, you know,
if you work at a hospital,
if you work at a nail shop,
you know your hoes and
she was just one of them.
- I did videos for a year,
actually less than a year,
that's it, it was less than a year.
But I'm the most memorable
video girl there ever was.
- To be real with you,
I had never heard of her before,
until that book came out.
I had never seen her in any magazines,
I had never seen her in any videos,
so honestly, I didn't know
where she had came from,
all of a sudden.
- I thought that she was an urban myth.
When I'm reading this book
and I'm hearing about all her experiences,
I was literally, like,
where the fuck was she?
Where was she?
Like, I never saw her.
I didn't know what she looked like
until I saw the cover of that book.
I was like, are you kidding me?
And the experiences that she outlined,
those were her choices.
She chose to be paid to be
in the trailer with whoever
and in the car with whoever,
doing whatever it was that
she was doing with them.
That's not my story.
As a matter of fact,
I was the queen of no.
No, I'm not wearing that.
No, I'm not doing that.
Can I kiss you?
No, don't touch me, I
have a man to go home to.
- I don't think she was,
people wanted to see her or know her name
when she was in the videos,
I don't think she had that it factor.
She got that when she
talked about famous people,
you know what I'm saying?
That's what made her
famous, not the videos.
- She was on Oprah.
I'm watching Oprah, like,
this chick is on Oprah.
This is the girl that
was in Keith's kitchen,
telling me she's writing this book
and now she's sitting on
Oprah, looking like a Mormon
and talking about her
experience in music videos.
- For you to try to ruin other
people's lives and families,
you knew these men were married,
you know what was, what you played,
you knew what part you supposed to play
and put that out there.
I can't respect that, I
just can't respect her.
- Karrine more was like
the diary of a groupie
more so than a video vixen,
you know what I mean?
Because she was basically
taking money for sex
and they were, like, paying for her bills
and all of these other things.
The perception of that book,
it wasn't ingested correctly
into people's minds, you know?
Because that's just one person's story.
So at the end of the day,
you can't classify a whole
genre or a whole class of women,
or a whole profession of women
based on Karrine's whole
hoe-ish ways, you know?
- It was a shock to everyone.
It was before social media.
- Yeah.
- Twitter wasn't a thing, you know,
Facebook was kind of a thing a little bit.
- Right.
- We didn't have Instagram,
those things didn't exist
and I let you, I was
the first social media,
like, I let you see things
that you'd never seen before.
It is a misogynistic industry,
I don't think thinking
like a man is good enough,
I think thinking like
a misogynist is best.
- When the book came out,
it put a stamp on all of us.
- That book put a black
stain on the culture,
it put a black stain on the models
because you'll never be
a vixen, you'll be a hoe
and that's what that book did.
- Whether or not you were in
a trailer performing fellatio
or you were in a corner reading a book,
catching up on your studies,
we were all lumped into the same category.
And it was incredibly frustrating
to be defined by somebody else's actions.
- Here's the thing, if
I was ever concerned
about the reactions of
others, I wouldn't be here.
I might still be a stripper.
If I was concerned about
the world's reactions
to what I think and what
I write and what I feel.
- I'm talking about the
elements of hip hop,
from b-boying to DJing,
these things rose from
the ashes like a phoenix
and this music and this culture
and created money and
a lifestyle for people
that were in the hood and that came up
by their bootstraps
because of their talent.
Hip hop has done so much
that you would pimp it out like that,
the whole thing was for money.
I'm sure she would say that too.
That her whole aspiration behind that was
fuck you, Im'ma get paid.
- We saw an opportunity to grab headlines,
to sell millions of
books, to end up on Oprah,
to do the whole thing.
That, my dear, is good business.
But here's the thing, when
men do it, it's expected.
When a women does it, it's a problem.
- Within hip hop, within the industry,
I think she was criticized
and sort of frowned upon
and people didn't want their
business out in the streets.
But when I think about that, I think of,
well, if you could rap
about her in a record,
or rap about another women in a record,
then she had the right to
tell her story in a book.
- Women, especially women
of color, defend their men,
even, and especially, when
their men are dead-ass wrong.
They support and defend
rapists, child abusers,
drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals.
They will stick up for these men because
God forbid they rally against,
and make better, their own men.
Now, you fast forward 12 years
and there is a new movement of feminism,
there is a new movement of
just awareness amongst women,
especially women in urban culture.
And women are not defending men,
as much as they were, in their filth.
- Karrine definitely was
a disrupter, you know.
And if we talk about modern times
and what that means for women,
the way that the disruption
is happening these days,
whole industries are pretty much crumbling
and what Karrine did in hip hop,
she was exposing those same type of antics
10, 12, 13 years ago
and for her to expose those things,
I think it kind of curtailed
a lot of the abuses that happened.
So, no matter how mad
people would get at her,
her doing that probably saved
probably couple of other women.
- If that book woulda come out now,
it might have not gone that way.
It's her body, it's her choice, right?
That's the era we're in now,
that's what we're recognizing.
- We're at the beginning of the new age,
we're now entering a
whole other perception
of female sexuality and that narrative
is no longer shaped by men.
- I think it's important
to leave proof of life
and to discuss all parts of your life
and not be ashamed of any of it,
especially for the women because
so much of our history
is erased by patriarchy,
by standards and all those things,
it's so important for
us to stand up and say
this is what we did,
this is why we did it,
maybe this is why we
would never do it again.
But here are the lessons,
here's what we took from it,
here's how we changed the culture,
here's how we changed society,
here's how we owned ourselves,
owned our bodies, did our thing
and came out of that all right.
- I can respect that she took everything
that she went through and
just made it a business
and capitalized off of it.
I think my emotions were tied
into a lot of it initially
because I was in those places
and I was around a lot of vixens
that were fighting for something different
and were trying to break through
the whole negative thing
behind it, you know?
- You know, these beautiful
women unfortunately
weren't given their props,
as much as they should have.
Those stories should be
told, they should be honored,
these women were so important for hip hop.
- Absolutely, the video vixen concept,
the idea of these girls,
they are very, very much a
huge part of the culture.
The huge part of why hip hop
has evolved to being what it is.
- To be a part of hip hop
history, it feels great.
To be a part of any type of
history is an amazing feeling,
to be put in that category.
- You know, the silent
movie stars that we were,
we play an iconic role
and it couldn't have been done without us.
- So I think, yeah, we deserve our props.
(laughs)
(gentle computerized music)
