There's a lot more to being a DJ than rockin' a crowd on the dance floor. You have to scour the flea markets for hard-to-get vinyl, keep up-to-date on new releases, put together signature mixes and somehow establish your own recognizable brand.

There's also, says veteran DJ Beverly Bond, the delicate task -- particularly if you're a female spinner -- of learning how to tiptoe through the gender-politics minefield lurking beneath those jumpy musical sounds you play. Like, how do you balance your own aversion to misogynist lyrics with your audience's demand for the hot new beat of the moment, whether it's insulting to women or not?

"As a DJ, you're right in the line of fire with a lot of these media messages," says Bond, one of the 2011 The Root 100 honorees, who created the nonprofit educational organization Black Girls Rock! five years ago to combat negative images of black girls and women in the media. After more than a decade as a celebrity DJ, Bond has been through all of the ins and outs as a party spinner, earning a reputation as a master of the craft.

Back when she was first getting started with clients like Sarah Jessica Parker, Alicia Keys and others, Bond became acutely attuned to those "media messages." "Naturally, as a DJ, you pay a lot more attention to the lyrical content in the music," she says.

Treatment of women as the subject of various male artists' lyrics? Not so good. There was, for example, that segment of the entertainment industry that persistently referred to women as "hos" and "bitches." There were gratuitous references to specific women's anatomy. And there was an assumption that women should sit in the backseat and keep quiet. And some of the attitudes were coming from women themselves, Bond says.

There's a kind of Stockholm syndrome at work here, Bond suggests. "A lot of girls are almost co-signing the negativity," she says.

The condescension, the insulting language and the casual objectification of women all started to gnaw at Bond until she started Black Girls Rock! At first, it was just a T-shirt that you could buy on Bond's website. "But this was bigger than a T-shirt," she says.