- 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)