**TRIGGER WARNING** “I Say It’s All Good When It Really Ain’t:” Rape as Respectability?

On the flip side of this question is the implication(s) of what phrases like “rape me so good” suggest for black boys and black men? Upon asking my male students if they had been sat down and talked to about rape and rape prevention they shyly admitted they had not. When we talk about rape, it is often gendered and geared towards women without little consideration for (black) men. There is a need to tackle this issue, especially with folks like Too $hort telling little boys to sexually assault girls to get their attention. Indeed, it is MUCH bigger than Too $hort. Compound that with a young girl or woman casually claiming their willingness to be raped because “he fine?” What language is left when a girl or woman, supposedly asking for rape, “gets what she asked for?” Sex as validating men for discourse is a sharp dichotomy of sexual prowess as strength and sexual power as predatory. Real black men smash anything that moves. Real black men grind it out–all puns intended–until, as Rick Ross so eloquently puts it, “put his dick in the dirt.” Yet the limitations of this highly compressed sexual identity leaves little room to express the vulnerability and frequent trauma set as the foundation of this type of black masculinity. In what ways do we address the victim and victimizer? Taimak’s character on the rape awareness episode of A Different World immediately comes to mind because of his inability–and unwillingness–to address characterizations of sexual violence. How messy is it that “no means no” no longer suffices as a band-aid for a serious conversation about rape (prevention).

I am still working through this conversation and grappling with the haziness of rape discourse in not only the popular imagination but the imagination of our kids.  How is rape a pedagogical tool of sexual identity? Is the looseness of sexuality in current trends of American popular culture reflected in a similarly loosening anxiety surrounding rape?

Where they do that at?

R.N. Bradley is a doctoral candidate in African American Literature and Culture at Florida State University. Bradley’s current research interests include identity politics, African-American humor, late 20th and 21st century black popular culture and literature, and Hip Hop. Her dissertation investigates negotiations of whiteness in 21st century black consciousness using popular culture and literature.

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