Dear Eminem,
I’m writing to you in a very different vein than your doomed friend Stan, although he thought the two of you “should be together” and I guess I’m writing for the same reason, but different.
Let me explain. I’m not a crazed fan. Honestly. And I’m not writing because I plan to emulate your “politically incorrect vaudeville routine” (Rux 18) wherein you murder your mother, your twice ex-wife, and bring your daughters and ask them to push Kim into the water. Or the other disturbing yarns you’ve spun in the last fifteen years.
But I am attracted to you against my better nature. As a queer man who likes sex with men, as a feminist theorist devoted to anti-misogynist and anti-racist praxis, my desire to find you goes against everything I teach my students and espouse in my writings. Let me be clear, by attracted to you, I mean that I would have sex with you. Often. That I was turned on by your photo shoot in Vibe last year where you posed as a butcher in a white jacket soaked with blood. That even your rhymes and your flow and that nasal voice that drones gets me in ways that don’t make sense.
Then again, whoever said that sexual attraction was logical, rational or morally right? Those who have, I disagree. We fall into lust against our better natures, against all the other ways we describe our stable sense of a self that makes perfect A to B to C causal sense. I bought your most recent album Recovery which dropped a few weeks back and hit number one. It’s dominating the charts, your singles are all over the radio, and I’ve got the album on repeat on my iPod. But why?
You have a song on the album called “Seduction” and you claim to seduce with words, but let’s be real, the song lies. Em, you’ve never been a smooth operator, you’ve been a big talker and you’ve taken without asking. You don’t seduce - you dominate, you attack, you take, you fuck without apology.
In his essay, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux writes, “Eminem’s eminence rarely attempts to address serious social or political ills, nor is it obsessed with hypercapitalism. . . . He maintains his whiteness with quirky vocal Jerry Lewis-like phrasing and a bright Greek-god bleached-blond buzz cut; and the classic hip-hop realism he was initially influenced by when he first studied the style of Naughty by Nature and Nas has been replaced with his own brand of contemporary Surrealism that abstracts and exaggerates hip-hop lore more so than any of his authentic heroes or contemporaries dare try” (27). Eminem “does not offer us the real, he offers the surreal” (Rux 22). Recovery is a highly personal album about beating drug addiction and choosing a new path. Gone are the gross-out skits and any real sense of fun and we are left with an Em that’s “cold as a cold wind blows” but the surrealism hasn’t left. I like it, don’t get me wrong, Em, and you are still wont to “hog [tied] a ho” so I can see you’re still the man we know and love/loathe.
At one point on the album you order the listener to “Bring me two extension chords, I’m ‘a measure my dick, sh
it I need 6 inches more,” before summing up, “Fuck my dick’s big, bitch.” In between the long gazes into the abyss and wonderings about roads not taken, nestled behind the samples of Black Sabbath, REM, and Lesley Gore (points for creativity), you really like to sing about penises and anuses. On your first single “Not Afraid” you describe a man who’s “got the urge to pull his dick from the earth and fuck the whole universe.” “I’ll be goddamned if another rapper gets up in my ass,” you say in “Cinderella Man,” while over on “Almost Famous” you’re sticking “my dick in this game like a rapist.” Now I know, there’s a textbook reading here that sex is about power and you need to assert that power over and over again, that’s the rapper’s bravado and you’ve got it in spades. But it’s also about being the one fucking, never the one being fucked – only you can fuck the game, only you can fuck the universe, but no one can ever fuck you.
In his book Homos (a title that echoes your own use of this as an epithet across your career along with its ugly stepbrother faggot which always makes my skin crawl), Leo Bersani writes that “nothing is more threatening to the culturally enforced boundaries between men and women than a man participating in the jouissance of real or fantasmatic female sexuality” (121-122). Specifically, Bersani is talking about the shame and discomfort surrounding men being penetrated by other men in anal sex. The experience of being the penetrated or fucked party, and thus presumably the docile and submissive party that just lays there in a fantasy of heterosexual domesticity outmoded yet still circulating, is linked to “female sexuality” and the jouissance or ecstasy to be found there.
Further, Bersani writes in his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” about the passive position in anal sex as being one that teems with destructive potential. Sex, according to Bersani, is a self-shattering experience. He writes, “It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other” (324). Bersani’s argues that the sex act is caught up in the tension between wanting to assert one’s self as master in the physical moment and ceding power and thus abolishing self through the act. There is subversion in even allowing women to be on top in normal missionary sex; consider the frisson for example that is found in Usher’s song and video “Trading Places.” Add to that the shattering of self possible in truly letting go in the moment of orgasm, in truly not being present.
I suspect that the fear of this runs rampant in Recovery and across your career, Mr. Mathers. In my favorite track from the new album, “Cinderella Man,” you ask the listener to guess who the returning champion is, describing that, “he came to the ball in his wife beater, lost his Nike shoe,” before explaining that, “He’s in your ass, he’s in your ass, he’s all up in your psyche too.” It’s as if you’ve read Bersani, the way that being inside the listener’s ass means you’re inside the listener’s psyche, the way that being in control of the sexual situation, topping, means that you are even more yourself and take control of the bottom’s psyche/self. You are larger than life (this isn’t a penis joke) with that surreal edge that means you aren’t merely a great lay for the ladies but you’re able to infect them through their asses. Of course, you need not be up in the asses of ladies in this song since it’s all metaphorical and thus it could be my ass or another man’s, just as long as it isn’t yours.
I’m not calling you gay now, Em. I know you’ve had a checkered past with the LGBT community, with charges of defamation from GLADD that you responded to with your memorable Grammy performance with Sir. Elton John. More recently as the “new tolerant” Eminem you told the New York Times Magazine that gay people should be able to marry because, “I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.” I am calling you a top or maybe just wondering how many times you can mention your cock and balls and other people’s asses without people wondering. I know it’s not a new attack, but I propose a different spin, or maybe I’m just practicing some wish fulfillment with the aid of theory. Maybe I want you all up in my psyche.
Maybe I’m most confused by this string of rhymes from Recovery’s opening track: “Motherfucker might as well let my lips pucker / Like Elton John, cause I'm just a mean cock sucker / let the world on fire, piss on it, put it out . . . Who the fuck is you pushin', you must have mistook me for some sissy / Soft punk looking for some nookie or bosom / Go ahead, fucking hater push me / I told you ain't no fucking way to shush me / Call me a faggot cause I hate a pussy / Man the fuck up sissy, G's up.” Rap’s hard to understand already when it comes to rapid-fire flow but add in ventriloquizing others and it’s a complicated game. Perhaps you are someone else when you call yourself a “mean cocksucker,” but it seems rather like the tactic here is one of a masculinity hat trick, admit you and Elton John share a predilection for oral sex with men, challenge others to call you gay/queer/faggot and then turn around and sic that same epithet at these haters. The impression is that you’re too much of a man to be concerned with this, that you’re innate masculinity overcomes your admission of rad oral sex skills. You call yourself a “sick pig” elsewhere on the album and even force a listener to sip urine through a straw but I wonder if your sick pig is my queer conundrum. I wonder if you realize some gay men call themselves pigs because they are willing to be submissive receptacles for the bodily fluids of other men.
But you’re too violent for me to buy you as a total bottom/sub. On “Space Bound,” you wax about a brilliant love affair and then in great detail describe murdering the woman with tears streaming down your cheeks. It’s a change from “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” (covered here eer
ily by Tori Amos [please ignore the bootleg vid]) when you brought along your daughter to dump the body in the lake, but you are still asserting your masculinity through surreal fantasies of murder. Far and away more troubling is “Love the Way You Lie,” in which you and Rihanna sing about a violent and toxic relationship. In the chorus, Rihanna, the Barbadian pop diva, sings “Just gonna stand there / And watch me burn / But that's alright / Because I like / The way it hurts.” The very public nature of Rihanna’s partner abuse case with ex-boyfriend Chris Brown adds a further valence of unease in this song since she’s singing about complicity with domestic violence and finding pleasure in the pain. You rap that you love her, but in the same breath vow that “If she ever tries to fucking leave again, I’m ‘a tie her to the bed and set the house on fire.”
Maybe I’m drawn to all of these inconsistencies, to your sureness, to your fascination with sexual power and your assumption that your public self will overcome any possible doubts the public has about your sexuality. I cannot condone your violence, your misogyny, your hatred of women, your coldness toward compassion, your positioning of yourself as the great white hope.
Maybe my sexual attraction comes from your own obsession with your sexual equipment, the way that your surreal erotic life is improbable and that you always maintain your position on top. But if you are so broken and bruised after your tumble with drug addiction maybe release comes from letting go of who Eminem has always been and no longer trying to get into the world’s psyche. Maybe you need the jouissance of the bottom.
Maybe.
For now I’m hitting repeat on “Cinderella Man.”
Still confused,
Me
I’m writing to you in a very different vein than your doomed friend Stan, although he thought the two of you “should be together” and I guess I’m writing for the same reason, but different.
Let me explain. I’m not a crazed fan. Honestly. And I’m not writing because I plan to emulate your “politically incorrect vaudeville routine” (Rux 18) wherein you murder your mother, your twice ex-wife, and bring your daughters and ask them to push Kim into the water. Or the other disturbing yarns you’ve spun in the last fifteen years.
But I am attracted to you against my better nature. As a queer man who likes sex with men, as a feminist theorist devoted to anti-misogynist and anti-racist praxis, my desire to find you goes against everything I teach my students and espouse in my writings. Let me be clear, by attracted to you, I mean that I would have sex with you. Often. That I was turned on by your photo shoot in Vibe last year where you posed as a butcher in a white jacket soaked with blood. That even your rhymes and your flow and that nasal voice that drones gets me in ways that don’t make sense.
Then again, whoever said that sexual attraction was logical, rational or morally right? Those who have, I disagree. We fall into lust against our better natures, against all the other ways we describe our stable sense of a self that makes perfect A to B to C causal sense. I bought your most recent album Recovery which dropped a few weeks back and hit number one. It’s dominating the charts, your singles are all over the radio, and I’ve got the album on repeat on my iPod. But why?
You have a song on the album called “Seduction” and you claim to seduce with words, but let’s be real, the song lies. Em, you’ve never been a smooth operator, you’ve been a big talker and you’ve taken without asking. You don’t seduce - you dominate, you attack, you take, you fuck without apology.
In his essay, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux writes, “Eminem’s eminence rarely attempts to address serious social or political ills, nor is it obsessed with hypercapitalism. . . . He maintains his whiteness with quirky vocal Jerry Lewis-like phrasing and a bright Greek-god bleached-blond buzz cut; and the classic hip-hop realism he was initially influenced by when he first studied the style of Naughty by Nature and Nas has been replaced with his own brand of contemporary Surrealism that abstracts and exaggerates hip-hop lore more so than any of his authentic heroes or contemporaries dare try” (27). Eminem “does not offer us the real, he offers the surreal” (Rux 22). Recovery is a highly personal album about beating drug addiction and choosing a new path. Gone are the gross-out skits and any real sense of fun and we are left with an Em that’s “cold as a cold wind blows” but the surrealism hasn’t left. I like it, don’t get me wrong, Em, and you are still wont to “hog [tied] a ho” so I can see you’re still the man we know and love/loathe.
At one point on the album you order the listener to “Bring me two extension chords, I’m ‘a measure my dick, sh
it I need 6 inches more,” before summing up, “Fuck my dick’s big, bitch.” In between the long gazes into the abyss and wonderings about roads not taken, nestled behind the samples of Black Sabbath, REM, and Lesley Gore (points for creativity), you really like to sing about penises and anuses. On your first single “Not Afraid” you describe a man who’s “got the urge to pull his dick from the earth and fuck the whole universe.” “I’ll be goddamned if another rapper gets up in my ass,” you say in “Cinderella Man,” while over on “Almost Famous” you’re sticking “my dick in this game like a rapist.” Now I know, there’s a textbook reading here that sex is about power and you need to assert that power over and over again, that’s the rapper’s bravado and you’ve got it in spades. But it’s also about being the one fucking, never the one being fucked – only you can fuck the game, only you can fuck the universe, but no one can ever fuck you.In his book Homos (a title that echoes your own use of this as an epithet across your career along with its ugly stepbrother faggot which always makes my skin crawl), Leo Bersani writes that “nothing is more threatening to the culturally enforced boundaries between men and women than a man participating in the jouissance of real or fantasmatic female sexuality” (121-122). Specifically, Bersani is talking about the shame and discomfort surrounding men being penetrated by other men in anal sex. The experience of being the penetrated or fucked party, and thus presumably the docile and submissive party that just lays there in a fantasy of heterosexual domesticity outmoded yet still circulating, is linked to “female sexuality” and the jouissance or ecstasy to be found there.
Further, Bersani writes in his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” about the passive position in anal sex as being one that teems with destructive potential. Sex, according to Bersani, is a self-shattering experience. He writes, “It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other” (324). Bersani’s argues that the sex act is caught up in the tension between wanting to assert one’s self as master in the physical moment and ceding power and thus abolishing self through the act. There is subversion in even allowing women to be on top in normal missionary sex; consider the frisson for example that is found in Usher’s song and video “Trading Places.” Add to that the shattering of self possible in truly letting go in the moment of orgasm, in truly not being present.
I suspect that the fear of this runs rampant in Recovery and across your career, Mr. Mathers. In my favorite track from the new album, “Cinderella Man,” you ask the listener to guess who the returning champion is, describing that, “he came to the ball in his wife beater, lost his Nike shoe,” before explaining that, “He’s in your ass, he’s in your ass, he’s all up in your psyche too.” It’s as if you’ve read Bersani, the way that being inside the listener’s ass means you’re inside the listener’s psyche, the way that being in control of the sexual situation, topping, means that you are even more yourself and take control of the bottom’s psyche/self. You are larger than life (this isn’t a penis joke) with that surreal edge that means you aren’t merely a great lay for the ladies but you’re able to infect them through their asses. Of course, you need not be up in the asses of ladies in this song since it’s all metaphorical and thus it could be my ass or another man’s, just as long as it isn’t yours.
I’m not calling you gay now, Em. I know you’ve had a checkered past with the LGBT community, with charges of defamation from GLADD that you responded to with your memorable Grammy performance with Sir. Elton John. More recently as the “new tolerant” Eminem you told the New York Times Magazine that gay people should be able to marry because, “I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.” I am calling you a top or maybe just wondering how many times you can mention your cock and balls and other people’s asses without people wondering. I know it’s not a new attack, but I propose a different spin, or maybe I’m just practicing some wish fulfillment with the aid of theory. Maybe I want you all up in my psyche.
Maybe I’m most confused by this string of rhymes from Recovery’s opening track: “Motherfucker might as well let my lips pucker / Like Elton John, cause I'm just a mean cock sucker / let the world on fire, piss on it, put it out . . . Who the fuck is you pushin', you must have mistook me for some sissy / Soft punk looking for some nookie or bosom / Go ahead, fucking hater push me / I told you ain't no fucking way to shush me / Call me a faggot cause I hate a pussy / Man the fuck up sissy, G's up.” Rap’s hard to understand already when it comes to rapid-fire flow but add in ventriloquizing others and it’s a complicated game. Perhaps you are someone else when you call yourself a “mean cocksucker,” but it seems rather like the tactic here is one of a masculinity hat trick, admit you and Elton John share a predilection for oral sex with men, challenge others to call you gay/queer/faggot and then turn around and sic that same epithet at these haters. The impression is that you’re too much of a man to be concerned with this, that you’re innate masculinity overcomes your admission of rad oral sex skills. You call yourself a “sick pig” elsewhere on the album and even force a listener to sip urine through a straw but I wonder if your sick pig is my queer conundrum. I wonder if you realize some gay men call themselves pigs because they are willing to be submissive receptacles for the bodily fluids of other men.
But you’re too violent for me to buy you as a total bottom/sub. On “Space Bound,” you wax about a brilliant love affair and then in great detail describe murdering the woman with tears streaming down your cheeks. It’s a change from “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” (covered here eer
ily by Tori Amos [please ignore the bootleg vid]) when you brought along your daughter to dump the body in the lake, but you are still asserting your masculinity through surreal fantasies of murder. Far and away more troubling is “Love the Way You Lie,” in which you and Rihanna sing about a violent and toxic relationship. In the chorus, Rihanna, the Barbadian pop diva, sings “Just gonna stand there / And watch me burn / But that's alright / Because I like / The way it hurts.” The very public nature of Rihanna’s partner abuse case with ex-boyfriend Chris Brown adds a further valence of unease in this song since she’s singing about complicity with domestic violence and finding pleasure in the pain. You rap that you love her, but in the same breath vow that “If she ever tries to fucking leave again, I’m ‘a tie her to the bed and set the house on fire.”Maybe I’m drawn to all of these inconsistencies, to your sureness, to your fascination with sexual power and your assumption that your public self will overcome any possible doubts the public has about your sexuality. I cannot condone your violence, your misogyny, your hatred of women, your coldness toward compassion, your positioning of yourself as the great white hope.
Maybe my sexual attraction comes from your own obsession with your sexual equipment, the way that your surreal erotic life is improbable and that you always maintain your position on top. But if you are so broken and bruised after your tumble with drug addiction maybe release comes from letting go of who Eminem has always been and no longer trying to get into the world’s psyche. Maybe you need the jouissance of the bottom.
Maybe.
For now I’m hitting repeat on “Cinderella Man.”
Still confused,
Me
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