Confessions of a video vixen on the misogyny in the hip hop culture
Multi-platinum rapper Ja Rule in a 2005 performance. He is among the rappers who got into a sexual relationship with Karrine. He gave her the pet name 'super head'.
What you need to know:
- Karrine Steffans had a traumatic childhood marked by her mother's abuse and neglect, which led her to pursue a life in the hip-hop industry as a stripper and video vixen.
- Her involvement with various rappers exposed her to the misogyny, objectification, and degradation of women in the hip-hop culture, where she was often exploited sexually and emotionally.
- She wrote the bestseller Confessions of a Video Vixen to warn girls about the damaging effects of the hip-hop industry on women.
Karrine Steffans was born on August 24, 1978 in the 28 square-mile Carribean island of Saint Thomas. Her mother, Josephine, was of Puerto Rican, Jamaican and Danish descent. She was the ultimate personification of evil - irrational, lacked affection, impatient and had no paternal instincts. Josephine was so physically abusive, she would strip Karrine naked and assault her so viciously, she'd bleed profusely and lose consciousness.
Josephine talked down upon her daughter’s straight-A academic brilliance with rueful expressions of negative comments. She frequently called Karrine stupid, degraded her good looks and made her feel unworthy.
When Karrine was 13, they moved to Tampa Florida in the US. Exhausted by her mother's wickedness, Karrine resolutely ran away from home. She lived in an abandoned house located in a crack-cocaine infested, prostitute-riddled neighbourhood, while begging strangers for money to buy food. After police located her and tracked down her father Kenneth, Karrine moved to Phoenix Arizona to live with him from January 1994.
During the summer, she pocketed $36.57 of her savings and escaped in search of a reprieve, from her father and his girlfriend's consistent bickering. Her then boyfriend Reggie, introduced her to his mother who was a stripper in a local club and at 16, Karrine began working as a stripper under the pseudonym Yizette Santiago.
By 17, her exceptionally impeccable athleticism of working the ten foot stripper pole had caught the attention of 1980s famed rapper Kool G Rap. He invited her to his palatial home in Glendale suburb in Phoenix, instigating a tumultuous three-year relationship.
He habitually spat on her face, frequently called her stupid, ugly, skinny and worthless, while battering her every time she protested his flirtations and affairs with other women.
When Karrine was three months pregnant, after enduring several horrendous miscarriages, Kool G Rap kicked her out of his house and decreed her to sleep in a homeless shelter. On January 19, 1998, Karrine gave birth and named her baby boy Naiim. A friend bought her a plane ticket and she moved with Naiim to Studio City in Los Angeles, California where she stayed in an apartment leased to her by rapper Chuck-D.
While dating another rapper Ice-T, Karrine exchanged contacts with multi-platinum rapper Ja Rule in the Garden of Eden nightclub. A few weeks later, they met at room 416 of L’Ermitage, an über-luxury hotel in the heart of Beverly Hills, and had sex. Ja gave Karrine the pet name super head, due to her bedroom exuberance.
The close-knit hip hop community, soon caught wind of the self-explanatory nickname and numerous rappers pursued Karrine. Method Man of hip hop band Wu Tang Clan, Aftermath CEO Dr Dre, R&B singer Ray J and Fred Durst, lead singer of rock band Limp Bizkit all used their celebrity status to seduce her.
It’s a commonality for rappers to instruct women they've briefly met to accompany them in group sex with the woman they are dating and Ja did that frequently with Karrine. After years of listening to how worthless inadequate and mediocre she was from her mother and Kool G Rap, Karrine's broken self-esteem effortlessly gave in to sexual demands of rappers in a longing to feel worthy.
She was exasperated by the flood of personalities within rap's elite, and delved into drinking heavily while experimented with XTC pills. XTC was popular in the hip hop culture in the early 2000s and artists mixed it with alcohol to exude confidence and enamour their bodies with the stamina to have sex all day and night with several women.
The hip hop lifestyle disregarded all conventional relationship rules while, instilling the objectification of women. It was trendy for rap stars to ask their side girlfriends to sleep with their male friends. As Ja and Karrine's intimacy concluded, Ja's boss and Murder Inc. CEO Irv Gotti began a sexual correlation with her during Ja's video shoot for his song Between me and you. He would pass her out to his acquaintances, who were made up of radio heads and record executives.
She became his 'payola' and whenever there was someone who Gotti thirsted to impress, he would send Karrine to him. Presenting her as his resident whore, he relished when rappers used and discarded her, which occurred often to her and numerous women.
One of the people Gotti sent Karrine to was hip hop mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, on Valentine’s Day 2001. Irv subsequently directed Karrine to DMX Usher and Jay-Z. Jay-Z took her to the back of his Mercedes S55 Maybach, after he cast her in his video Hey Papi. He wore a condom and made her perform oral sex on him. A form of appreciation women were inclined to administer to rappers after they extended favours to them.
After the commercialisation of graphic hip hop videos, a plethora of girls had a premeditated ambition to become video vixens, because of the myriad of scantily clad women they watched gyrating in popular rap videos.
Karrine wrote her ingenious 2005 New York Times bestseller, Confessions of a Video Vixen, as a cautionary deterrent to girls, warning them of the misogyny within the hip hop industry, that inordinately stripped women of their dignity and withered their self-respect.
Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother
