While members of the general public continue to pretend having sex with entertainer Nicki Minaj’s wax statue at Madame Tussauds Museum—thus validating the warnings of Azealia Banks—the museum announced that it will provide extra security for its apparent Ode to Venus Hottentot.
https://twitter.com/AZEALIABANKS/status/631349263134384128
https://twitter.com/AZEALIABANKS/status/631352334296035328
Let’s pull together three data points to understand if Team Madame Tussaud had any idea that the seeds they planted in the Minaj figure would yield the fruit of sex act poses.
The Museum chose to create a statue of a barely-dressed Minaj, positioned on her hands and knees, as displayed in the rapper’s “Anaconda” music video.
The museum’s statue debut announcement specifically identified the statue pose as “provocative.”
Further, the same museum announcement encouraged visitors to “take pictures, touch and get up close” with the statue, as with the case of all figures in the Madame Tussauds collection.
Therefore, the museum was fully aware that it created a curvy, busty figure in an all-fours sex pose—and then asked you to interact with it.
Okay, I’m not a fan of wax figures or blow-up dolls, and any sex act I choose to do will happen with a human, and not be made available for Instagram consumption.
And because I’m no a fan of wax museum figures, Madame Tussauds can’t count on me to rep the denominator in that knucklehead-visitor ratio.
But for some reason, the museum didn’t think for a second that members of the numerator would roll up to the Minaj statue and do something like this:
I put a filter on the photo to dull some of the impact.
And while the real-life Minaj appears to be completely cool with the statue, allow me to ask a question I’m sure is on the minds of other women: why should one of the most influential people in modern show business, particularly a woman, be portrayed in such a submissive manner? And doesn’t such a portrayal work against the aspirations of women to be viewed as equals?
And this is where I can’t keep the Saartjie Baartman references away from this discussion. Like Baartman, Minaj’s entire body has now turned into community property for gawking, fondling or worse—except Baartman never have a wax double for a buffer.
The history of Black women being sexually objectified across media channels over the years only makes Madame Tussauds’ latest act a symptom of a broader racial paradigm that’s overdue for erasure…
song currently stuck in my head: “there goes the neighborhood” – harriet tubman
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