Remy Ma has rejoined Mona Scott Young’s cult for another season of Love & Hip Hop: New York. The rapper was able to reactivate her fan base and add to its ranks when she joined the reality show cast in 2015, fresh off of a six-year prison stint that threatened to derail the progress that she had previously made in her career. For the past two seasons, fans got to watch Remy get re-acclimated to life on the outside, finally have a wedding ceremony, rebuild relationships with her family, experience a miscarriage, and dive headfirst back into the music industry. Season 8 of LHH: NY — the third one that Remy has appeared on — sees Remy’s attempt to maintain her footing in hip-hop and unite the women in the genre. As many of you know, it hasn’t been smooth sailing. She and rapper Nicki Minaj had a nasty beef early in 2017 that reached a head when Remy released a scathing diss track called “ShEther.” Watching Remy discuss both her goals to see female rappers working together and her beef with one of them in particular has some LHH: NY viewers calling it a contradiction.
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Several commenters on Twitter thought that Remy was beating a dead horse by subliminally referencing her haters and people trying to bring her down. “ShEther” was released in February, and by the time Nicki responded in March, Remy had been declared a winner, and much of the buzz died down. It’s likely that LHH: NY was filmed in the very near aftermath of the feud between the two women, and Remy’s comments simply provide a retrospective take on how she felt about it. The Kardashians do it all the time on Keeping Up with the Kardashians when they discuss the headlines they made months prior.
In the present moment, Nicki and Remy do not appear to have smoothed things over. They don’t seem like fast friends, and it’s likely that Nicki won’t be making any appearances in Remy’s squad. And that’s okay. It won’t make a girl gang of lady rappers any less magical that one lady rapper isn’t in it. Remy isn’t less committed to women’s empowerment because she has resolved an issue she has with an individual woman. Conflict is an inevitable part of what it means to be a human in a world with other humans. That conflict doesn’t have to be a barrier to Remy’s glow up, nor her efforts towards a greater good.
In what can only be described as an oversimplification of feminism, too many people believe that any interpersonal issues among women are antithetical to women’s liberation and cooperation. There are a few flaws in this line of thinking. The first one is that a belief or adherence to feminism means that women will only ever have good feelings about one another. A belief in feminism does not come with the naïveté that every single woman is friendly and nice. Nor does feminism require politeness all the time. Women are allowed to speak up, clap back, and make dis records if they think they’ve been wronged, even if the person who committed the infraction is a woman.