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Its hard to work with women without having sex with them, says Rick Ross.

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Noted gentleman Rick Ross appeared on a New York radio show Monday morning to promote his new VH1 reality series Signed. In the series, he and two other hip-hop moguls will audition and develop aspiring artists, who will get the chance to sign with one of the three big dogs record labels.

Christina Cauterucci is a Slate staff writer.

When Im looking for an artist, Im really just looking for something Ive never seen, first and foremost, Ross told the Breakfast Club radio hosts on Monday. If its something thats unique, I feel thats something thats in demand. After that, I want to see that hunger.

But what if that unique, in-demand, hungry young artist is a woman? As Breakfast Club host Angela Yee pointed out, Rosss Maybach Music Group label has no female artists on its current roster and has only ever signed one, singer-songwriter Teedra Moses. Ross shared his well-thought-out reasoning with Yee. You know, I never did it because I always thought I would end up fucking the female rapper and fucking the business up, he said.

Thats awful, Yee replied.

Im so focused on my business. I got to be honest with you, Ross went on. You know, she looking good. Im spending so much money on her photo shoots. I got to fuck her couple times.

What a conscientious businessman! If you cannot interact with women without having sex with them and losing your focus on moneymaking, the responsible thing to do, Ross says, is avoid contact with women in the first place.

It is exhausting to imagine the life of a man who sees every female colleague and industry contemporary as a predestined sex partner. How do you have any time for artist development, business strategy, and radio-show appearances if youre constantly having sex, scheming about how to have sex, or being distracted by people who, because they are women, remind you of sex? How do you sit through dinner with a buddy and his sister? How do you handle meetings with female marketing executives and record distribution heads while maintaining a constant erection? How much does your life suck because you cant have any female friends?

Those are questions many posed to Vice President Mike Pence earlier this year, when it came out that the guy refuses to break bread alone with any women who arent his wife. The famously chaste n Catholic Pence initially comes off as the anti-Ross: The rappers promiscuity is as much a hallmark of his brand as the vice presidents condemnation of almost every type of sexual contact is a hallmark of his. One thinks you should almost never have sex, the other thinks yachtloads of sex is the way life was meant to be lived.

But these two men are a lot alike. Ross has women call him Daddy; Pence calls his wife Mother. Both are gatekeepers at the top of their respective industries. And both use their warped, semi-Biblical views of women as inevitable temptresses to keep non-men out of their inner circles. To Pence, all womenno matter how random or disinterestedrepresent potential detriment to his marriage. To Ross, they are poison to his business. Women already face significant structural barriers to advancement in politics and the music industry. Men like Ross and Pence, who explicitly limit their contact with women, codify sexist notions of women as sex objects who divert attention from the important work at hand. (See also: dress codes that force underage girls into bulkier clothing because their bodies are burdensome distractions for innocent, hardworking boys.)

Ross continued his Monday interview by asking Yee several times to reveal her legs to him, implying that he would have to have sex with her if she signed with his label, telling her he wants to see her twerk at an upcoming pool party, and posing for a photo while grabbing her hair and pretending to lick her face. If his goal was to keep distracting women out of the music industryor broadcast journalism, for that matterRoss can count this interview as a major win.

More:
What Do Rick Ross and Mike Pence Have in Common? An Inability to Platonically Interact With Distracting Women - Slate Magazine (blog)