Charles Holmes: “The Conservative Crusade Against Wet Ass Pussy”

Candace Owens was appalled that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion were allowed to perform their Wet Ass Pussy routine on the recent Grammys. Almost completely naked, the two women engaged in a series of gyrations suggesting any number of sexual acts to the accompaniment of what is apparently passing for music these days. Equally controversial is a video recently released by gay Black Rapper Lil Nas X in which he gets amorous with a figure who appears to be half-man, half-snake, before descending into hell where he gives Satan a lap dance, flagrantly flaunting his buttocks in the latter’s face. His chief audience, Nas has himself admitted, is children, indeed he has published a children’s book. As if to remove any doubt of his loyalties, he is now attempting to sell what he calls Satan Shoes, 666 pairs of adapted Nikes which, among other things, have had a drop of blood added to their liquid filled soles.

Is it not disingenuous to deny that there are repercussions to the antics of these “artists,” repercussions directly related to the moral decay cited by Pastor Rivers at the heart of Black urban America? In Aug. of 2020, Rolling Stone published an article by its Pop Culture critic Charles Holmes defending what we shall henceforth euphemistically refer to as WAP, an article whose violations of logic are truly embarrassing.

Holmes, who is Black, begins with the brilliant statement that the spirit behind WAP seems to him “unimpeachable,” “the universal benefits of wet ass pussy” being beyond argument. Conservatives, he says, need to “rebuke their life of dry genitalia,” need to stop promoting “a world full of misery and devoid of lubrication.” But is there no middle ground between a mindless pursuit of sexual gratification on the one hand, and a puritanical rejection of the pleasures of the flesh on the other? Yes I know there are Christian fundamentalists on the Right unwilling to tolerate any sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage. But the rational “conservatism” to which I am committed simply demands one consider the repercussions of one’s actions in the real world, the inevitable human toll of a life lived without restraint.

The simplistic alternatives posited by Holmes are echoed in the equally simplistic response of Lil Nas X to the charge that his Satanic video seemed to promote a fundamental disdain for the traditional Western notions of Good and Evil. There’s a mass murder in this country every week, he said, and you’re telling me that I’m destroying America! That both mass murders and the moral ramifications of his video might each be reprehensible is apparently beyond him. Indeed the disdain for moral restraint preached by Marcuse in “Eros and Civilization” which has come to infect every aspect of our culture, including the mind of Charles Holmes, inevitably seems to entail the absurd accusation that considering the real world repercussions of human behavior is just a White, Patriarchal, “dry-ass,” “conservative” bias.

Google Holmes and you will be informed by Rolling Stone that he “covers the complexity of the modern rapper’s spirit,” his intent being to illustrate how “American pop culture invigorates the heart.” Like most on the Left, he forgets that we also have brains!

While the sort of unbridled licentiousness celebrated by the videos cited above would seem to be relevant to the problem of teenage pregnancies within “the hood,” indeed to the massive increase in abortions in U.S. society as a whole, let us evaluate Holmes’ defense of WAP from a Feminist perspective. California Republican De Anna Lorraine suggested that Cardi B and Megan had “set the entire female gender back by 100 years with their disgusting and vile WAP song.” Clearly her point was that while Feminism has struggled for decades to dissuade Men from seeing Women as mere sexual objects, WAP implied that they were in fact preeminently just that. At the same time, of course, one might argue that while Men are fully in touch with their own sexuality, they tend to be impervious to the sexual needs of Women, needs highlighted by Cardi B and Megan. Ultimately our response to this progressive/ conservative debate rests upon our definition of what it means to be human, upon the belief either that we are mere animals entitled to our satiation as such, or intelligent/volitional beings morally responsible for our actions. As it seems to me that there is only one sane and indeed pragmatic response to that question, we must reject the vision of human sexuality represented by Rap Culture, a vision that inevitably entails a world of mindless, primitive animals impervious to both the repercussions of their actions and the needs and rights of others.

In typical “progressive” fashion, Holmes, unwilling to discuss the moral ramifications of the Rap “ethos,” suggests that “right-wing trolls” such as Ben Shapiro tend to indict Black performers such as Cardi B and Lil Nas X for purely racist reasons. It’s the sad, diversionary stratagem repeatedly used by the contemporary Left, the insistence that seemingly rational refutations of their world-view, however unassailable, are always rooted in Hatred.

Oh, by the way, Kamala recently referred to Cardi B as a “role model” for today’s kids! Lovely!