Without realising it as I danced and sang along to Lil’ Kim’s lyrics at the age of thirteen, I had found my first feminist role model. An unlikely candidate perhaps for a Scottish Pakistani teenager, but at the time Lil’ Kim’s music perfectly encapsulated my feelings of gender-imprisoned rage, as well as delightfully shocking me with its audacity.
At that time, I had not long been dramatically freed from the terrifying misery experienced by all too many young girls and women living under strict regimes of Islamic domestic dictatorship. If I were asked to imagine the polar opposite of feminine propriety as imposed by my parents, I couldn’t have dreamt Lil’ Kim up. She got naked a lot. She rapped in graphic detail about sex, once to the background sound of a woman having a looooong, loud orgasm. And she did it all in public. In short, she didn’t give a fuck.
