On the Virtue of Acknowledged Dependence

In the midst of claims that rap music demeans women, we have the song, "Independent Feat," which sings the praises of the independent woman:

I N D E P E N D E N T
Do you know what that mean?
She got her own house
She got her own car [I wish this song were about me]
Two jobs; work hard [okay, not so much]; You a bad broad

The music video shows women sitting in a lecture class (atypical, I must admit, for a rap video) and a women president--the first African-American woman president, according to the video. And the message of the video is, even these women can be sexy, and perhaps even more sexy than other women, since they don't have to be taken care of. There is a degree of respect in the song.

It is not necessarily the respect of competence, however, but rather the respect of independence, as the title indicates--you can do your thing, and I can do my thing, and we can still have sex at the end of the day.


I'm all for working women, and I'm all for men esteeming that, and this song goes a certain distance toward this end. The end of women's work (or for that matter, men's work) ought not be manicured toenails and matching clothes, but rather a contribution to a society that isn't composed of autonomous, independent, individuals, but of persons seeking both their own good and the good of the community (in a condition of acknowledged dependence) together. The praise of the independence of woman sung by a man (who is probably doing this because he thinks this is what women want) speaks to the disintegration of the family as an integral whole (not through women working, but rather through the glorification of the aspect of this work that separates rather than unites). This disintegration of the family as a cohesive whole could easily, then, be extended to the political community. Now rather than being composed of families, participating together in the life of the polis, we participate as "predicate-less persons"--persons choosing to ignore our religious, ethnic, gendered commitments and interact at some lowest common denominator level that leaves out things that are essential to us as persons.