What Cardi B Taught Me About Gender Roles Surrounding Sexual Assault:

An Upsetting Comparison of Rape and Robbery

by Josie Messner

Recently, an Instagram video from three years ago of female rap icon Cardi B resurfaced, and
the contents incited some serious backlash on social media, specifically one of the more
opinion based platforms, twitter. In the video she says,

“N*ggas must’ve forgot, my n*gga, the shit that I did to muthafuckin’ survive. Like, I had to go strip. I had to go, ‘Oh yeah, you wanna f*ck me? Yeah, yeah, yeah—let’s go back to this hotel.’ And I drugged n*ggas up and I robbed them. That’s what I used to do. Nothing was muthafuckin’ handed to me, my n*gga. Nothing!”

Almost immediately, people jumped on one side or the other, and sent out tweets describing how they felt about the recent finding. On one side of the spectrum, people were either supporting her with, somewhat unhealthy, “death to the patriarchy” stances. Then there were others who called out for a “cancellation” of Cardi B saying what she did was simply messed up, which was reasonable since she did admit to drugging and robbing men who were trying to have sex with her. But then there was a group of people comparing Cardi B’s crime to the crimes committed by males like R Kelly and Bill Cosby, as well as Rick Ross when he rapped about drugging and raping a girl at a party in one of his songs. There was one specific tweet posted by a male that encapsulated this position, and it was the photo below that depicts on the top two quadrants a man drugging then raping a woman, and on the bottom two quadrants, a woman drugging then robbing a man, and the caption read, “I don’t see a difference between these two acts”.

It’s true that both circumstances are fundamentally wrong, but the actual crimes should not be paralleled on the basis of the physical and psychological consequences that accompany victims of sexual assault. Not to say that victims of robbery don’t experience serious impacts from being subject to crime, but in a report done by the U.S. Department of Justice on socio-emotional impacts of violent crime comparing impacts on victims of robbery and sexual assault, victims of sexual assault reported more severe distress after the event, as well as more problems with relationships, work and school than did victims of robbery. These statistics aren’t necessarily saying that rape is a worse crime than robbery, it's hard to rate them, but the study suggests it does have a more severe impact on the victim, which is one reason why what Cardi B did should not be held at equivalency with male assaultants like R Kelly and Bill Cosby, who have committed acts of sexual assault.

Looking more at why people would think of comparing these two acts also plays into serious gender dynamics that reflect the dismissal of things women are subject to in such masculine environments, like the rap industry, and something that gives insight into that is how rape is perceived by the public, specifically males. In 2014, a quantitative research study was done on 297 male college students looking at men’s perception of acquaintance rape, which is when someone is sexually assaulted by a non-stranger, and each participant was given nine stories describing a male-female acquaintance rape, then given a questionnaire that asked rate certain attributions of both the victim and perpetrator. The participants were also categorized based on their levels of sexism and perceptions of gender roles. A trend the conductors observed after the study was completed was that males who held more traditional gender roles, as well as males who feel that men and women are adversaries, “attributed greater victim culpability and victim pleasure, lower victim credibility, victim trauma, perpetrator culpability, and perpetrator guilt, and recommended shorter prison sentences” (Angelone 2015).

Applying these findings to the people on twitter who were comparing drugging and raping women to drugging and robbing men, it’s most likely those people hold similar ideas about gender roles as the men observed in the study and don’t apply as much weight to cases of rape. That’s also possibly why the feel the two acts differ, because, if they do reflect the men in the study, they don’t tend to show as much support or validity to victims of sexual assault. This allows them to make light of it in their minds enough to compare it to a case of robbery which simply doesn’t have the same psychological impacts. Looking at it from a conflict theorist perspective, one reason people delegitimize cases of sexual assault is to take power away from the victims and assign them less validity so it's harder for them to speak out about the problem, and that allows it to keep happening. And it’s also that some people might not be trying to outright promote sexual assault, but by looking at the 2014 study, the correlation between the support of traditional gender roles and low support of rape victims shows that by delegitimizing sexual assault, its taking power away from female victims and giving power to male assailants, which fits into the traditional concept of gender roles that “emphasize women as fragile, passive, submissive to men, and holding primary responsibility for maintaining the home” (Angelone 2015). So it might not only be a matter of supporting perpetrators of sexual assault, it's also supporting the application of traditional gender roles.

Luckily, sexual assault victims’ voices are being heard more and more, and society’s starting to move away from traditional gender roles, but despite both of those, people will still continue to compare Cardi B to R Kelly or Bill Cosby.

Angelone, D. J., Mitchell, D., & Grossi, L. (2015). Men’s Perceptions of an Acquaintance Rape: The Role of Relationship Length, Victim Resistance, and Gender Role Attitudes. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 30(13), 2278–2303.

Kai, Maiysha. (2019). #SurvivingCardiB? Predation Is a Genderless Crime, but Cardi B Drugging and Robbing Men Is Not Rape. The Glow Up.

Langton, Lynn., Truman, Jennifer. (2014). Socio-emotional Impact of Violent Crime. Bureau of Justice Statistics.