MEN HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT OUR PENIS’S FOREVER. LET CARDI AND MEGAN HAVE THEIR FUN.

WHY CARDI B. AND MEGAN THEE STALLION’S “WAP” IS ACTUALLY A PUBLIC HEALTH TRIUMPH

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were told that being locked away from friends, family, and everyone else around us didn’t mean we couldn’t produce something special. You see, back in the dark days of the bubonic plague, a man named William Shakespeare wrote the masterpiece King Lear. Since Shakespeare was a mere human being just like us, the thinking goes, there’s nothing stopping us from creating our own legendary works of art.

But Shakespeare, while he had an unending pandemic to create King Lear, never came close to creating this rhythmic flow of genius from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”:

Put him on his knees, give him somethin’ to believe in
Never lost a fight, but I’m lookin’ for a beating
In the food chain, I’m the one that eat ya
If he ate my ass, he’s a bottom-feeder

In four lines, Megan Thee Stallion exalts the privilege of performing cunnilingus on her, before issuing a taunt, a guarantee of endurance from her vagina. Megan is a religious experience, a powerhouse, an apex predator, and a provider.

“WAP” is the acronym for Wet-Ass Pussy, a three-minute, seven-second paean to lubricated vaginas. Cardi and Megan rap a brawny, brassy fantasy about female sexual prowess. They swerve humor (“punani Dasani”) into flashy nastiness (“I wanna gag, I wanna choke / I want you to touch that lil’ dangly thing that swing in the back of my throat”) and smirking bravado (“Your honor, I’m a freak bitch, handcuffs, leashes / Switch my wig, make him feel like he cheatin’”) and have created the anthem for our pandemic summer.

Since premiering on Friday, the music video — which censors the song to “Wet and Gushy” — has accumulated more than 85 million views on YouTube. “WAP” debuted at the top of Spotify’s US Streaming charts with 2.3 million plays, and made history as the first female collaboration to do so while breaking records for the highest first-day streams for a women-led rap song.

Music doesn’t often make much room for an anthem-like “WAP,” sung unapologetically by two Black women. For every song like “WAP” that gets mainstream play, there are too many to count about straight male escapades.

Gender is more complicated than biology, but in our reaction, the “wet-ass pussy” serves as a metonym for all female and assigned female at birth sexuality. In its success and its backlash, the song exposes America’s scathing double standard. Sex from women is meant to be desired. We’re encouraged to ogle and obsess over their bodies. But when a woman reciprocates that desire and flexes control, she’s crossed a line — too bawdy, too raunchy, too nasty. Suddenly, she needs to think about what she’s said and the example she’s setting.

Americans want wet-ass pussy — we just don’t want to hear from the people who have them.

PUSSIES ARE NORMAL AND HEALTHY THINGS. WET-ASS PUSSIES ARE ALSO NORMAL AND HEALTHY THINGS.

THE BACKLASH TO “WAP” IS ABOUT SHAMING WOMEN

Megan and Cardi are rapping raunchy things that subvert the way women, especially Black women, are supposed to act in the bedroom with men. They aren’t the first ones to do so, and they aren’t the first ones to get criticism for it.

Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” was a 2002 hit that doubles as a manual for performing satisfactory cunnilingus. And as Khia told Vice in 2012, she received backlash for the song and witnessed a double standard.

Layered into that is the thorny history of pop culture and society hyper-sexualizing Black women and their bodies. This played out on America’s biggest musical stage, the Super Bowl halftime show, where in 2004 Janet Jackson’s exposed breast almost ruined her career. (Justin Timberlake, her co-performer, was asked back in 2018.)

Not unlike how Timberlake walked away unscathed after what was touted as a bombastic affront, male rappers don’t often face this kind of scrutiny when rapping about sex. Demetria Lucas wrote on Medium:

Where is all this ire when male entertainers rap about sex? I mean, when the Ying Yang Twins were whispering, “Wait ’til you see my dick” — as if no one had ever seen a penis and it was really something special to behold — no one called them hoes. Akinyele instructing women to “put it in your mouth,” Biggie bragging about “tongue delivering” and women “shivering,” Kendrick Lamar (of all people) crowing, “I know you want this dick”: None of it raised eyebrows.

“Sexual women are seen as worthless trash while virginal women are seen as respectable women of god who should worshipped,” Burke, the porn actress, told me, boiling down what she thought of the controversy.

In “WAP”, Cardi and Megan created a sexual power fantasy for women, created by women, from a woman’s point of view. That fantasy is about a wet-ass pussy — a not something outlandish, just a prerequisite for decent vaginal sex. The song tells a lot about Megan and Cardi’s fantastic sex lives, but the scandalized reaction tells us even more about how we see sex in America.