Fedez, Tony Effe and Niky Savage: Stop Talking About Women As If They Were Objects

The dissing between Fedez, Niky Savage and Tony Effe is the trending topic on practically all social media: reels and TikToks follow one another at a frenetic pace with the most scathing rhymes that one addresses to the other. At this point it is of little interest to understand how it started because, as often happens in these cases, the reasons are rather trivial and even senseless compared to what they have caused, but it is interesting to see that the favorite theme (if not the only one) to mock one’s counterpart is always the same: women. The preferred yardstick for those who consider machismo their only weapon. It’s true that dissing, historically, are rhyming arguments in which being a bit cocky and allowing oneself vulgarity have always been the basis, but in this case they are the only topic on which the three seem to have something to say to each other.

Tony Effe, for example, opened his piece by saying that Niky Savage’s current partner, Roberta Carluccio (known on social media as roberryc), was “passed on” by him to other rappers until she reached her current boyfriend. The influencer rightly wanted to underline on TikTok how disheartening it is not only to be dragged into a matter that does not concern her for the sole reason of being “girlfriend of…”, therefore as a mere extension of her boyfriend, but also because her associations have been used to denigrate her and to consider her a sexual object that is “passed” from one rapper to another. Once again a woman, but above all her freedom and sexual resourcefulness are used not only to criticize her but also to belittle the presumed virility of the person next to her. In this obtuse and male chauvinistic logic, no one is saved: Roberryc is a bitc* (to use a term that appears continuously in this dissing), Niky Savage is a man who cannot be defined as such because his campaign has a sexual past too crowded in the value system of the true macho.

Niky Savage doesn’t do any better, using the stale but tried-and-tested weapon of sexual performance to defend himself. We would have preferred that, at least, he would have left his girlfriend aside and concentrated on something else, but Why would he ever miss the opportunity to brag to an audience of millions to defend his wounded male pride?

In this already rather depressing picture, Fedez has come forward with a bang, publishing his response piece to Tony Effe yesterday evening. And here too, we always return to talking about women: the former Dark Polo Gang insulted because he spent more “time waxing” than “doing Vittoria Ceretti”. Or, calling him a drug addict together with another person (Chiara Biasi) who for some unknown reason finds himself in the middle of a fight from which he is light years away. The result is that, between those who laugh at a rhyme by Tony Effe and one by Fede, Biasi finds herself inundated with comments on her pages that insult her.

This dissing, therefore, has nothing funny about it: it is rather demeaning and rather sad. We are in the presence of three adult men with successful careers and families behind them who, in order to put themselves in the pillory, know nothing else to do than talk about or, rather, denigrate the women who gravitate towards each of them. Women continued to be the obsession of these men who, crushed by this incessant desire to demonstrate their (toxic) masculinity, cannot help but fall into old, trite and offensive stereotypes. Wouldn’t it be better to limit these ridiculous skirmishes to decide who is the best of the Italian hip-hop scene to music?