Hannah Sung is a video journalist for The Globe and Mail.
An otherwise run-of-the-mill celebrity interview Britain's Sky News did with Snoop Dogg made headlines this week when Snoop acknowledged a "changed" attitude toward women.
It wasn't a tearful, momentous change of heart (in fact, he said, "I have no regrets"), but it becomes news when one considers the depth of the sexual objectification he has so breezily rapped in the past.
And while it's nice that Snoop has no regrets (a non-apology if I've ever heard one), I do.
Ten years ago, he unleashed a torrent of pimp talk on me when I was in my mid-20s and working as an on-air interviewer for MuchMusic.
I knew a question about the sexism of his lyrics had absolutely nowhere constructive to go in the context of a celebrity interview and yet I couldn't bring myself to ignore the opportunity, at least for the sake of raising the question on-camera. Snoop's answer was equally camera-centric. His chilled-out air hardened perceptibly. And he then let fly a seemingly never-ending stream of sexual innuendo.
At that point in my career, I was still green enough that my perceived job performance was all that mattered to me. Flipping the script was not in my world view.
"No thanks," I said, smiling to keep it light. I was silently willing him to stop talking, not because I was hurt by his words (embarrassment and remorse came later) but because the clock was running and I had a job to do.
I had asked my own questions but had multiple requests from producers back at the station who wanted Snoop Dogg bites to use in their own programming, chopping up the cache of his celebrity to sprinkle across a range of programs.
I made a split-second decision to just move on.
So I waited while he ran his mouth. It was a long wait and it's one of my biggest professional regrets. Instead of telling him where to go, or even walking out as an older and wiser version of myself might do, I let small-minded professional pressure get in the way and just sat there.
And then the stream of dirty talk was aired on the network in the credits of MuchNews. That was a female producer's call. I felt burned.
And now Snoop says he is over his sexist ways. He has a daughter (he did then, too) and mother and wife that he loves.
"Once I figured out there was room to grow and learn and to be a better person then I incorporated that in everything I was doing," he said.
I am all for people learning, and applaud that growth, but Snoop Dogg owes me an apology. He owes an apology to any fans whose lives were steeped in his misogyny, growing up memorizing his casually tossed-off, subhuman descriptors of women and sexual relationships. Young boys rapped along with him for years, learning how to become men. Women danced to his songs, willfully ignoring all the dropped-out words so that they didn't have to be the killjoys, pointing out the extremes of his bad behaviour.
Is Snoop to blame? Am I? (As a young viewer wrote in, "I thought Hannah Sung was a feminist, how could she let Snoop talk to her like that?"). What about everyone else? We all knew Snoop's lyrics and celebrated him anyway.
All those chart-topping hits were the soundtrack to millions of unfamous lives in which sexism doesn't serve to get anyone ahead. Not like it did for Snoop.
As for my embarrassing moment in time, shot pre-YouTube ubiquity, it was published online by MuchMusic just last year. The clip does not include my question about sexism. But it does include Snoop's dirty talk. So what does that say about us?