They're what male fantasies are made of: One brown-skinned sister, wearing painted-on jeans and four-inch stilettos, is as tall as a runway model but with an ample booty and sleepy almond-shaped eyes. Another woman is baby-doll petite with olive skin, long bleached-blonde curls and super-size cleavage bursting out of the tiny piece of fabric that is her top. A third is wearing a gold cutout bodysuit, heels and a micromini so short that she has to hold down its hem as she walks across the room. These girls, along with four other equally arresting women, are taking a break, lounging in the makeshift makeup area of a cavernous warehouse in a seed part of Los Angeles, around the corner from adult-video stores and stripper joints. They've been at this video shoot, starring rapper Fabolous, since eight in the morning. It's now 12 hours later, and the video's nowhere near done. The girls have had their hair straightened and curled, their makeup painted and repainted, and some of them have changed clothes three different times to suit the taste of Lil X, the director. The lensman behind countless Usher, Kanye West and Sean Paul videos, Lil X is a slight, unassuming man in his late twenties. To see him walk around the set filled with dozens of male crew and dozens more of the male hangers-on who always show up at video shoots, you'd never know he's in charge. But it's his job to make this video hot, which is to say sexy, and that's why he keeps sending the women back to get "sexier hair" and "sexier makeup" and the sort of clothes that will indicate the exact kind of sexiness these young women are supposed to represent. When they finally shoot a take, it goes like this. The music starts bumping, the camera rolls, and the girls all break into dance, rubbing their hips, shaking their hair, leaning their heads back and looking coyly at the camera. The director asks them to mouth the chorus and they all purse their shiny lips together, "Do do do do do do." This is the work of a video girl,

Back in the day, rappers used to rhyme just about anything: partying, Black pride, the Daisy Age, hustling, pimping, the irritating way parents just don't understand. From the sublime to the criminal to the mundane, it was all part of hip-hop and everyone had a place: gangsters, jokers, fast girls, tomboys and African queens. The art was as diverse as the people who produced it. But as hip-hop enters into its third decade, one icon has captured the imagination of the current crop of rappers as nothing has before. These days the pimp reigns supreme.

Pimp, pimping, pimp juice, pimp paraphernalia like goblets and canes, the pimp lifestyle, ethos and "code of honor" have permeated hip-hop culture and beyond. MTV airs a weekly show called Pimp My Ride, hosted by rapper Xzibit; Sony Pictures produced a feature-length animated flick, Lil' Pimp, with the voices of Ludacris and Lil' Kim, about a 9-year-old White boy who takes up pimping; 50 Cent calls himself a muthaf--in' P.I.M.P. and shoots up the charts to number one. And Nelly hits the shelves of convenience stores with his energy drink Pimp Juice.

In hip-hop, pimp is a signifier of charisma, power and wealth. Pimp is masculine flamboyance, tricked-out cars, one-of-a-kind 'gators, bejeweled goblets full of Cristal. Pimp is domination in the bedroom, respect on the streets, a romantic illusion of alpha-male greatness. Gangster, the archetype of choice a decade ago, is played out; now it's all about the pimp. But if rappers are recreating themselves in the image of a Mack, then what role are women left to fill?

Any fan can answer that. "Mostly in videos, the women are there to serve the men," says Morgan Crooks, 16, a high-school student from South Orange, New Jersey. Morgan watches music videos with the devotion most record companies long for. Videos are on while she does her homework, talks on the phone, eats her dinner. She watches in the morning when she's getting dressed and at night before she goes to bed. By her own estimation, some weeks BET and MTV are turned on more than 30 hours. "Sometimes it's just on to be on," she says. "I don't even think of it as watching TV really."

By logging as much time in front of the TV as some spend in a full-time job, Morgan has become an expert on hip-hop videos. "You have New York-style videos," she says, "with the high-class, skinny girls who look like models. They just stand there looking good. And there's this one 50 Cent video with women on leashes. Then you have videos from Down South, with half-naked rump shakers, and others where the guys sit in berber chairs, and the girls show up in tight pants and bend over, and their booties start jiggling. A lot of videos have girls just backing it up, like little hos."

Of course, every rapper who envisions himself as a pimp requires a bevy of willing females to bring the image to life. Round-the-way girls and African queens need not apply. Women here have one job only: to portray every shade and variation of a girl enthralled, enslaved by and beholden to a rapper--pimp. It's the ho show.

So You Wanna Be a Video Star

Tawny, 22, has appeared in music videos for the past five years. On the set of the Fabolous shoot, she has finished her close-up, and she wants to make one thing perfectly clear: "I am not," she says emphatically, "a video girl." If you ask Tawny, with her long straight hair and gravity-defying breasts, exactly what she does, she'll declare, "I'm an actress." To prove it, she'll rattle off a list of film credits that include John Singleton's Baby Boy and MGM's Beauty Shop starring Quean Latifah. "Video," she says, "is just where I got my start."

There are many reasons women choose to be in videos. They want to meet a famous rapper, have some fun, or catch a glimpse of themselves on television. Most of them go to open auditions they learn about from flyers passed out at nightclubs or online; usually they get cast as extras, people in a crowd scene. Extras make very little money, often no more than $100 for a 12-to-24-hour shoot. Sometimes extras don't get paid at all. But Tawny is a featured girl, handpicked by the director to appear in close-ups, dance with the artist, or just stand beside him. Featured girls get the most camera time, the hottest clothes and the best chance at a pictorial in an urban men's magazine like Smooth or the hip-hop magazine XXL, which runs a four-page spread every month called Eye Candy, about the latest video vixen to make men drool. Tawny won't say how much she's getting paid for the Fabolous shoot, but the most sought-after women--the ones some men in the industry call top-shelf bitches--can command as much as $3,000 a shoot.

Tawny has heard all the criticism about video girls. You can't be in this industry and not hear all the stories about the video ho--the hoochie--everyone loves to hate. But Tawny, for one, is really sick of it. Sure there are women, the groupies, who are totally unprofessional, like the girl Tawny saw rubbing an artist's penis right in the middle of a take; or the girl who disappeared into the artist's trailer and came out looking all disheveled. But these are the exceptions, she insists, the women who give everyone else a bad name. Most dancers are just working their hustle, trying to get to the next level of fame. Besides, Tawny says, there's a glaring double standard: Artists like Janet and Beyonce are allowed to parade in bikini tops and booty shorts and nobody says anything. But when aspiring actresses like Tawny dance in a skimpy outfit, everyone gets up in arms. "If video girls are being exploited, then every female artist who is out there being sexy should be blamed too. To me, it's all bulls---."

Tawny knows sex sells and as a general rule she doesn't mind showing her body as part of her job requirement. But, she admits, sometimes the director goes too far. "If it's lie by the pool in a bikini, fine," she says. "If it's wear a bikini and shake my ass in front of the artist while he sits in his car, then no. I won't do it." Some girls are not so discerning.

Porn for Beginners