By Arturo R. García

Nobody said Sofía Vergara was sleeping with producers after Modern Family won a Golden Globe Sunday. Not with producers, anyway.

As you can see in the vid above, the joke starts around the 20-second mark, when Vergara, speaking Spanish, is mock-pulled by castmate Julie Bowen. At that point she announces that, because the Globes are an international award, her group’s acceptance speech for the Best Comedy/Musical Television Series would be done in Spanish and English. Which got laughs because, you know, Spanish. Or something.

Then the bit truly kicks off, with executive producer Steven Levitan “translating.” After they both thank the Hollywood Foreign Press, and Vergara thanks ABC Entertainment head Paul Lee and Disney CEO Bob Iger – was she thanking them for canceling Work It? One can only hope. But I digress – Levitan tells the audience she’s thanking the show’s writers, “who are so funny and so sexy.”

Then, Vergara thanks 20th Century Fox chairmen Dana Walden and Gary Newman, while Levitan continues, “Film actresses, please do them a favor at the parties tonight and give them your numbers.” Vergara thanks the whole production team, Levitan says, “They may look pasty and nervous and out of shape, but they’re the greatest lovers I’ve ever had.” With a rather sour look on her face, Vergara thanks the audience and presenters Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, and wishes everyone goodnight. Levitan, ever classy in front of his younger cast members, closes with, “Seriously.”

So there. Doesn’t that sound so much better in context?

As if that wasn’t enough, this remark by Vergara’s castmate Jesse Tyler Ferguson made E!’s list of “Great Quotes From The Red Carpet”:

Sofia’s always a lot of fun because she is really like her character, I mean she messes up English all the time. She has no idea. Like, she calls stewardesses on the plane “plane waiters.”

While it’s admirable for the cast and producers to publicly defending its gay characters, directing this kind of humor at Vergara – not at her character – in such a public setting undercuts that good will. Vergara’s television career started, let’s not forget, as a presenter on the Univisión travel show Fuera De Serie, years before that network became a power player in U.S. television circles. She’s played Mama Morton in a Broadway production of Chicago. And this year she will become the new face of CoverGirl cosmetics. By any measure, her professional journey deserves some respect on what’s supposed to be one of her industry’s biggest stages. Or would that be too Modern for this “family” to consider? It’s telling that Bowen was spared Levitan’s “jokes.” And it’s becoming more apparent – Vergara can do better than this. Let’s hope she does sometime soon.

By Guest Contributor Rachael Kay Albers, cross-posted from Latina Fatale

It is after midnight and I’m in a taxi on the way back to my barrio, mouthing the lyrics to a song on the radio that I’m proud to know the lyrics of when, suddenly, I stop (fake) singing. Spanish is my second language and memorizing song lyrics doesn’t come as easily to me as it does in English—if I can successfully sing along to a song in a café or on the radio, I wave the useless ability like a flag. But, as I silently croon in my cab tonight, I realize that, in my quest to hone my dual language lip syncing abilities, I have paid absolutely zero attention to the content of the lyrics I’m not singing.

The song on my cabbie’s radio is “Lamento Boliviano,” (Bolivian Lament). You may know it for its famous chorus:

Y yo estoy aquí
borracho y loco
y mi corazón idiota
siempre brillará
y yo te amaré
te amaré por siempre

(And I am here
drunk and crazy
and my stupid heart
will always shine
and I will love you
I will love you forever)

As I listen carefully to the lyrics, I imagine the scene being described: a drunk, desperate man declaring his undying love to his wronged mujer after saying, in earlier lyrics, that he feels there is a volcano of rage inside of him. I have lived this scene. The drunk, desperate man “in love” is not nearly as romantic as the Enanitos Verdes — the Argentinean rock band that croons “Lamento Boliviano” — make him seem. He can be, in fact, quite dangerous, especially when he says he has an, um, “volcano” inside of him.

Ugh — sexist lyrics glamorizing alcoholism and violence in Spanish, too? I think, dumbly. How has the thought never occurred to me before? I mean, what did I expect from the music that just happened to be playing the many times I have been fondled or — I’ll just say it — humped on various dance floors across Mexico? Hip hop gets the rap in the United States for violent, misogynistic lyrics with country music coming in at second place—both deservingly. But, what about the music I’m listening to in Latin America?

I decide to survey the music I have been deafly enjoying for the last few years, focusing on salsa, bachata, and reggaeton— genres I enjoy socially as well as for lip syncing purposes. I learn that salsa, a descendant of Cuban son, developed in the 1960s in the Latino barrios of New York City as an expression of the urban working class experience. Bachata was coming of age at the same time in the Dominican Republic—music many say was born out of the frustrations of Rafael Trujillo’s oppressed masses. Reggaeton, largely influenced by hip hop, developed later in Panama and, like salsa and bachata, the music has political roots, as well. Many feminists theorize that the emphasis on salsa, bachata, and reggaeton’s role in Pan-American working class resistance has obscured the genres’ treatment of women.

Working class resistance or not, under a microscope, the songs ooze sex—the ruling class sponsored kind that either idealizes or demonizes women while simultaneously objectifying them. Females across these genres are cast in three main roles:

• The young, virgin fruit, ripe to be plucked—by the song’s protagonist, of course
• The experienced seductress who drives the song’s protagonist to sexual desperation
• The deceptive, transgressing bitch who wrongfully broke the protagonist’s heart

She is usually anonymous— unnamed— and identified only by her physical characteristics and/or sexual desirability. That, or her wickeness and sexual impurity, as in the “scorned lover” songs so popular in bachata. In all cases, she is the victim of pre-meditated violence on the part of the protagonist, who vows in his lyrics either to use her sexually or abuse her violently.

For example, take these bachata lyrics: “Sabes que soy tu dueño / Y que vengo prendi’o’” (You know I’m your owner / And that I’m inflamed) and later “Yo vengo a partir brazos / A rescatar lo mío” (I’ve come here to break arms / To reclaim what’s mine). Or what about the salsa song “Cuando fuiste mujer”? “Conmigo aprendiste a querer y a saber de la vida / Y a fuerzas de tantas caricias tu cuerpo formé” (With me you learned to love and to know about life / And I molded your body with the power of my caresses). I’ll spare you the stuff about trembling and “moaning love.” Still, reggaeton is worse. Here’s one of my favorites: “If you wan’ me to take you, you must taste my yogurt.” I’m pretty sure someone has yelled that one at me in the street. And there are hundreds more like it.

You may be wondering what all the fuss is about, anyway. After all, if I wasn’t paying attention to the content of these songs before, why bother now? And if I am so unhappy with salsa, bachata, and reggaeton, why don’t I just stop listening? No one is forcing me to lip sync these lyrics.

The thing is, what first caught my attention about the lyrics of “Lamento Boliviano” was their eerie familiarity. The angry, drunk, amor-stricken man at one’s door is not a musical folktale, but a reality, both in the Americas and across the world—and it is one that I have lived. Popular music informs and reflects how we see ourselves and relate to one another as a society. That a music’s lyrics are violent and misogynistic is troubling and telling in a time when man on woman violence is so prevalent in the places where it is popular. I could easily go back to ignoring the content of the songs I listen to—in Mexico or any country—but I would be ignoring key landmarks on the worldscape of oppression.

In “Así Son’: Salsa Music, Female Narratives and Gender (De)Construction in Puerto Rico,” Frances R. Aparicio writes about “the underlying connections between sexuality and listening to popular music,” especially in countries like Puerto Rico — or Mexico! — where music and dancing are so influential in the years when a young person is constructing his or her sexual identity. The same was true in the suburb of Chicago where I grew up listening to pop, rock, and country music—not without their own elements of machismo. I still remember the lyrics of the Dave Matthews Band song I was dancing to when I met the first boy I ever “loved” (at the wise age of fourteen): “Crash Into Me,” with its closing line, “Hike up your skirt a little more and show the world to me.” Listening to that song on repeat over the course of my adolescence, I imagined myself as that elusive love interest, tempting men with my mysteries, hoping they would, as Dave insinuated, unlock some earth-shattering secret with our sexual intimacy. And sometimes I still feel that way! Looking back, there’s no denying that the Dave Matthews Band — and many similar bands — had a hand in shaping my early sexual self.

Connecting my experiences to those of my Latina sisters, I have to think that many of my tocallas were similarly influenced by the music they have been listening—and dancing—to since adolescence. What songs do young women who grow up with salsa, bachata, and reggateon listen to on repeat? I wonder. Which images influence their social and sexual formation? I think, remembering the female figures they have to choose from—the ripe, young virgin; the experienced seductress; and the deceptive, transgressing bitch. (They are a busy bunch, well represented in popular music, literature, art, and theater spanning centuries of cultural history). How can women resist the roles carved out for them by patriarchal pop culture? I ask myself.

In the conclusion of “Así Son,” Aparicio, while critical of the violent, chauvinist attitudes expressed in salsa music, urges readers like me not to despair—that Latina women have become active participants in the way gender is constructed in their cultures and they do this by engaging with chauvinist song lyrics and reflecting upon them, privately and publicly. Lise Waxer’s essay “Las Caleñas Son Como Las Flores: The Rise of All-Women Salsa Bands in Colombia” examines this deconstruction in action as Colombian women shatter the glass ceiling of the music industry and seize salsa as their own in orquestas femeninas, directly engaging in the cultural conversation on gender and sexuality. Indeed, wasn’t my own lyrical awakening during “Lamento Boliviano” an example of “reading” music and simultaneously deconstructing the gendered language within?

But, is dialogue and deconstruction enough to drown out the macho male voices on the radio, in the bar, or at a party, singing about sexism in all its glory? Pumping millions of dollars into the ongoing North American campaign against misogyny in hip hop hasn’t stopped rappers from portraying women as high-end prostitutes or punching bags. From that angle, all this dialogue ends up looking like lip syncing. If feminists really want to make some noise, they’re going to need to write new music. Come on, ladies! Let’s sway to the sound of women organizing to overthrow the patriarchal system that is all but thanked in misogynist musicians’ liner notes. Let’s write the lyrics to our own liberation. Then, and only then, can the human race truly begin to make beautiful music.

Top image courtesy of vdrg danceschool

By Guest Contributor Spectra

Wait a minute, not all lesbians in movies are white, rich or middle-class with no bills to pay? You mean “life” doesn’t get put on pause so that all gay people can experience the thrill of coming out at summer camp? And, there are other LGBT issues worth talking about besides marriage? Gasp! And Hallelujah for Spike Lee protégé Dee Rees’ Pariah, a film women of color (and other marginalized groups) can truly relate to.

On the surface, Pariah is a coming of age story about an African-American lesbian, Alike (pronounced “Ah-LEE-kay”) in Brooklyn. But dig deeper, and you’ll see a smart and layered tackling of gender, sexuality, religion, and even class — an essential layer of complexity needed to accurately portray the diverse experiences of queer people of color, long been absent from mainstream LGBT films. Rather than depicting homophobia as the only kind of oppression experienced by the LGBT community, Pariah’s world is a varied socio-cultural landscape in motion featuring an all-POC cast, led by Nigerian actress Adepero Oduye’s performance as 17-year old Alike.

Pariah’s urban setting almost eliminates the need to discuss race at all (or, as in popular case of experiencing race through white characters, explain it). The audience is plopped, un-apologetically, right in the middle of a story filled with black characters, making way for intersectional observations about class and gender roles within the story’s cultural context.

SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

The film opens with an unfocused, low-level street shots of baggy jeans, dangling belt chains, hard-soled shoes, and the dirty streets of Brooklyn. We hear the sound of women socializing, and then some unexpected song lyrics: All you ladies pop your p-ssy like this. We’re immediately placed in the scene of a nightclub, in front of a stripper who is somehow managing to slide up the pole, and slapped in the face by Rees’ over-the-top interpretation of coming of age as a young lesbian of color: loud club music, a hyper-sexualized social environment, a group of tomboys (“studs”, “butches”, “aggressives”) throwing money at a stripper in a bothersome (yet, admittedly, amusing) re-enactment of heterosexual masculinity, while a small voice in our heads may be wondering if we’re supposed to be down with all of this.

But just as we are beginning to question what we’re doing in the theater, we meet Alike and see that her world is upside down, too, literally. The frame is rotated upright to reveal a slender Alike, dressed awkwardly in a wide-striped, oversized polo, black do-rag, and fitted lid, staring at the pulsating pelvis of the stripper, and doing so with a confused, yet curious expression on her face.

Her discomfort is made even more apparent when we meet her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), a huskier and much more aggressive tomboy (who claims to “get more p-ssy than yo’ daddy”), acting as Alike’s enthusiastic chaperone in this bizarre rite of passage. Clad in a dressed in a red lid and popped-collar track jacket, Laura embodies masculinity more confidently; after she finally gives up trying to get Alike to talk to “get that punani“, she proceeds to grind with a heteronormatively feminine (“high femme”) black lesbian in a gender-polarized mating dance.

For her part, as Alike heads home on the bus alone, we see her vulnerability exposed under fluorescent lights: she begins to slowly strip herself of the masculine lesbian identity she’s hiding from her family. She pulls back the lid and do-rag to put her natural hair (twisties) in a ponytail, takes off the over-sized polo to reveal a fitted tank top hidden underneath, and finally, puts a pair of earrings back in a heart-breaking act of gender conformity.

Despite the nuanced depiction of gender and class, Pariah doesn’t hit us over the head with analysis: the characters don’t explain why they each dress differently (urban streetwear to preppy to chic, and more), why they are of different financial circumstances, or why their accents are different; they just are. Alike, for instance, is evidently a “softer” tomboy as described by some girls at her high school. She’s also an aspiring writer, and (most likely due to the part of the city in which she was raised) has very different diction from Laura, whose vernacular is filled with slang, curse words, and the N-word as a term of endearment. In turn, Laura’s friends behave in a manner that’s very similar to cisgendered masculinity: they wear all men’s clothing, drink beer, play poker, and (of course) have beautiful girls sit on their laps as trophies. Yes, lesbians can be sexist too, but Dee Rees’ thoughtful character development steers the screenplay away from the danger of telling a single story.

In the past, the dominant movie narrative that existed for lesbians on screen presented, for many, depicted an unrealistic social context: all lesbians are white and heteronormatively feminine (AKA “lipstick lesbians” like Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly in Bound), they have sex by making a performance of moaning the same way the women in straight porno films do (too many to name, but the most annoying sex scene for me comes from indie flick Chloe — an extended makeout session, really?). Meanwhile, no one seems to have any money problems as they can throw huge weddings they don’t even show up to (Imagine Me and You, the infamous L Word non-wedding) and 2-dimensional side characters with no real lives of their own, exist simply to react (whether negatively or positively) to the “lesbian” issue (a la the saintly and unfortunate husband archetype in The Hours).

In many of these films, homophobia (besides the expected relationship drama) was often presented as the singular obstacle to the main characters’ happiness. Thus, the combination of the aforementioned archetypal elements and the perpetuation of single-issue hurdles for LGBT characters, for me, wove together a series of feel-good lezzie flicks that all said the same thing: “Please leave these two pretty and privileged white girls who just want to fall in love and live happily ever after in their color-blind world (which, by the way, contains no people of color) alone, okay?”

Considering what the film industry was like even just a decade ago, most people would concede that in the face of Hollywood’s focus on hegemonic straight relationships, movies that featured gay or lesbian characters at all were pushing the envelope. Indeed, many of us queer women were thrilled when The L Word came out. After all, it was on Showtime — widely accessible to our straight friends, who we eagerly organized viewing parties with so we could watch them experience what our lives as lesbians were like, sort of.

We didn’t all wear high heels and runway dresses; the lesbians at the clubs I went to certainly didn’t sport that level of Hollywood glam. Many of us were puzzled by the main characters’ financial means to spend lavish amounts of money eating out at fancy restaurants, throwing parties in LA mansions, and getting married, but we tuned in every week to follow the lives of a group of rich white feminine lesbians, because there weren’t any other alternatives, and sitting through a film with gay characters was a sure way to test a reaction from your friends before you came out. The false sense of reality gave us hope that if we were to come out to our friends, decided to live our lives openly as gay people, life would remain relatively normal. We’d have girlfriends, get married (that’s what all gay people want to do, right?), adopt children, experience the occasional awkward family dinner, but ultimately, live happily ever after.

This is what sets Pariah apart from (white) singular-narrative LGBT films; it debunks the myth that life begins and ends between the point of self-acceptance, and a wedding.

The movie’s skillful orchestration of empathic story-telling and strong performances enables us to move beyond the scope of Gay and Lesbian 101 to tackle other kinds of oppression, including the further marginalization of LGBT people of color. Alike’s family lives comfortably, allowing her to spend most of her time socializing and pursuing her interest in the arts. But Laura, who is the same age as Alike, was forced to drop out of high school when her mother kicked her out, and works overtime to help her sister (who she lives with) pay the bills while studying for her GED. Through Laura’s narrative, the audience is given a glimpse into the experience of many LGBT youths, who are forced to seek refuge and community outside of their families, who risk being homeless for being themselves, yet, must keep on.

It’s a sad observation, but then again isn’t it high time that gay films which grab major distributor attention do more than just perpetuate extremely tragic or fairytale conclusions to a now-engaged and curious public, and present LGBT stories in all their diverse manifestations, which does include the narratives of people of color, working class people, homeless youth, and sometimes, people who are all of the above? It’s not wonder that Pariah — along with peer releases Circumstance and Gunhill Road — has received critical acclaim for its much-needed exploration of LGBT people of color living life at the intersection of many types of oppression.

But don’t get it twisted. Pariah is definitely not a sob story. In fact, the movie is filled with timely and endearing moments of humor and awkwardness that make the hold-no-punches backdrop easier to swallow; the familiar sibling banter that ensues when Alike’s younger (and brattier) sister threatens to tell on her for having a “gross” flesh-colored dildo, a cringe-ful dinner table scene during which her parents describe how they “hung out on prom night”, and Alike’s frequent and ill-timed giggles spells whenever she’s around the girl she likes. The film’s strong undercurrent of family and relationships guarantees that there is something in it for everyone (no need to fear the discomfort of watching a lesbian sex scene with your parents either — she keeps it PG).

Dee Rees has created a motion picture that the larger LGBT community can be proud of, and in which people of color can see themselves carefully and sensitively projected. She may be the black lesbian Tyler Perry (in a good way). Let’s hope we see more of her.

MTV ruined my mom’s hope for the Good Black Life for me, she said: Black husband, Black children, Black neighborhood. All because of the pretty white boys dancing and singing before my eyes as my hormones coursed through my adolescent body.

She was right…sort of.

I’ve had lovers of various hues in my life, but my long-term partners were white—including my ex-husband. I just knew that my love life would not be monoracial. Duran Duran and Adam Ant simply sealed that fate.

When I tried to find advice to help guide me on that path—my mom certainly didn’t and couldn’t help, since she dated and married only Black men—I read Essence. No help there:  while I was dating the rainbow, Essence touted various admonitions on how to achieve the Good Black Life, including the Kente cloth-themed wedding. The advice and articles about interracial dating treated those relationships as, at best, aberrations.

Cosmo? Glamour? Beyond some “general” advice on “how to catch a man,” it was some variation of planning romantic evenings and Kegel exercises.

The first publications about interracial relationships—this was the Multiculti Late 80s and 90s–treated them as cure-alls for personal and institutional racism. I knew better than that, so that literature didn’t quite interest me. And I walked the other way — more like ran across the street and screamed down the alley — when Shahrazad Ali’s pro-intimate partner violence tome Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman became the dating manual and coffeeklatch topic du jour for Black women in the US. Nope, definitely not for me.

When I finally discovered Racialicious a few years ago, I finally found someplace that talked about dating and race, especially interracial dating, that wasn’t full of foolishness. About a couple of years the R ran a post about the racial implications–and racist assumptions–of dating-advice books. And we did a breakdown of how race and racism worked in the online-dating world. And, of course, we ran a series on interracial dating as a response to Essence trying to position them as the Next Cure-All for the Black Woman’s Marriage Crisis.

My biggest takeaway from all of this is—surprise, surprise—the media and some people in our communities deeply participate in the Dating Economics of Not OK. Part of that economy is advertising that having color is not OK, unless you’re planning to date and mate intraracially. (The logic: you’re all the same race, so you two should relate, right?) The realities are infinitely more intricate, but intricate doesn’t sell too well.

So, I’m hoping that Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s book, Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life becomes a best-seller. Because she not only takes inventory of all those dating-advice books cluttering bookshelves and e-reader lists, she also takes that rarest of inventory: an anti-racist feminist inventory of the whole dating industrial complex.

Mukhopadhyay reminds the reader throughout her book that these books consistently erase those who are not cisgender and heterosexual  and able-bodied and middle-class. She also says that the dating industrial complex is also rather unkind to cisgender men–all of this because they’re trafficking in narrow stereotypes based on gender binaries. And if we believe in some sort of feminism? Well, Mukhopadhyay analyzes, these books try to make that belief the reason why we’re not getting laid, let alone married. We, to paraphrase DuBois, are the 21^st century problem to be solved because, so says this literature, we dare to exist–sometimes caring about being in relationships and sometimes not.

Her take, for example, on how these books—along with communities and porn—and their net effects on dating and race:

The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often stigmatized and shames this same group of people. Women of color and poor women are blamed for their inability to keep their legs closed and for having too many children. For marginalized groups of women, sex is not linked to pleasure and freedom; it is demonized and used as an example of all the ways in which these women lack self-control. As a result, a lot of conversation around sexual freedom discount the experience of people of color, failing to take into account how much sexual freedom is assumed to hinge on a woman’s privilege—be it because of her race, economic status, or social standing.

Of course, not all women of color are sexualized in the same way. For example, while black women are considered lascivious, always consenting and out of control, Latina[s] are considered exotic or overly sensual and Asian women are considered childish and prude. These particular stereotypes are reinforced through popular culture and pornography (just Google respectively “Asian women,” “black women,” or “Latina women” and then “women” and see what comes up). The common thread here is that nonwhite women’s sexuality is seen as outside the norm of white heterosexuality. It’s therefore something to uniquely desired, manipulated, exploited or controlled. Within this rather toxic climate, being a woman of color who’s in touch with her sexuality is an act of resistance. Pushing past the negative media depictions and still finding a healthy, healing, erotic, and functional sexuality is no small feat.

I have often felt trapped between discourses of sexuality. If I’m overtly sexual, I’m a threat to what it means to be a good, pious South Asian lady and to the white norms of sexuality. As a result, when I am sexual, I am confronting my ethnic community and the norms of white sexuality. Finding a more authentic sexuality that’s just me means pushing past what is considered the appropriate way for me to be sexual based on my race, ethnicity, and gender. This has meant a lot of experimentation, sometimes playing up how “bad” I am or being tremendously secretive about my sexual transgressions (well, clearly not after this book). And it meant sifting through partners and figuring out which ones are a little too obsessed with my being Indian.”

Then Mukhopadhyay breaks out a list on spotting an exoticizer.

Yes. She. Does.

But that’s what she does throughout her book…and that’s what I thoroughly love about Outdated. It’s a great, intricate mix of feminist thought, media literacy, and a couple of tips for dating while feminist (of color) from your you-ain’t-never-lied friend who’s that romantic realist. Mukhopadhyay lets you know that whomever you date—if you even want to do that—is perfectly OK.

Image credit: Feministing

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

The way our society talks about black women and marriage–from the daily paper to the pulpit to movies and self-help books–is flawed, sexist and damaging. When black women tell their own stories, a more thoughtful truth emerges.

I am working on a project juxtaposing the authentic experiences of African American women with the tragic common narrative about black women and marriage — a narrative that narrows lives, turns black female successes into failures and unfairly burdens us alone with responsibility for the success of black male/female relationships, black families and the black community. My goal is that my efforts will result in a published book.

I am currently working to identify black women to have frank discussions about how they navigate relationships, sexuality, singleness, marriage and divorce. If you, or someone you know, is willing to be a part of this effort, please contact me at Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

Some things to know:

I am interested in interviewing black women of all ages, backgrounds, geographic locations and experiences. One goal of my effort is to illuminate the lives of women often erased in discussions of the black marriage rate, including married women, divorced women, women who don’t wish to marry, lesbian women, women in interracial relationships and others.

Subjects should be willing to participate in multiple one-on-one interviews both in person and through technology. Initial interviews will be conducted by phone in November. While I will not require an inordinate amount of time from interviewees, I will need to interact with them enough to understand their stories, experiences and perspectives.

Elements of participants’ stories, including quotes, will be included in a published work, written by me. Women have the option of being referred to by their full, real names; first names only or a pseudonym.

Beyond the ABC specials, “think like a man” romantic advice tomes and panic-inducing women’s magazine articles, exist the real stories of black women—too often told from another perspective and voice. Everyone is talking about black women and marriage. I want to talk back.

Please help by responding to and sharing this call for participants through your networks. Please direct questions about this project to Tamara@BackTalkBook.com.

For the maelstrom Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa caused by publishing on Psychology Today‘s blog a “study” he contended would “prove” that not only Black women are unattractive but we’re deluded for believing otherwise, his place of employment, the London School of Economics (LSE) placed him on publishing and teaching probation for a year.

From Times Higher Education:

The LSE has now published the findings of an internal investigation into the affair, ruling that Dr Kanazawa had “brought the school into disrepute” and barring him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.

In addition to the 12-month ban, he will not teach any compulsory courses this academic year.

Kanazawa issued a very belated fauxpology for his “research.”

In a letter to Judith Rees, director of the LSE, Dr Kanazawa says he “deeply regrets” the “unintended consequences” of the blog and accepts it was an “error” to publish it.

“In retrospect, I should have been more careful in selecting the title and the language that I used to express my ideas,” he writes.

“In the aftermath of its publication, and from all the criticisms that I have received, I have learned that some of my arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence.”

He adds: “In my blog post, I did not give due consideration to my approach to the interpretation of the data and my use of language.”

Yes, Psychology Today fired Kanazawa after Color of Change and many other people online and offline pressured the company to do so. And students from LSE agitated for his firing. However, considering that he’s obfuscating–and failing to apologize for–the fact that he used his science skills on a piece that helps perpetuate engendered racism–and that he has pulled this fooliganery before–a year really isn’t enough.

Related posts:

Voices: The Satoshi Kanazawa Study

H/t to Taja for the update!

“Slave Earrings” are in Vogue. Literally. According to the Italian fashion outlet, “Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops.”

Emphasis mine, ridiculousness… all theirs.

Two weeks ago, Vogue Italia found itself under a deluge of criticism for declaring “Slave Earrings” in fashion. Originally, they thought to qualify the name they gave them. “If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.” Does it go on to declare “necklaces with detachable chains,” “hillbilly slingbacks,” and “Holocaust tattoos” in fashion? None of that is me, by the way, this is taken from the 21 pages of comments, nearly all chiding the wording choice in English and in Italian.

Allow me to fill you in on the latest: Vogue Italia gave an apology earlier last week that was more like an “Oops!” than anything. The style bible’s editor, Franca Sozzani released a statement Monday that said, “We apologise for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English.” Again, emphasis mine, but let’s be honest, the emphasis should have been theirs. They continued, “The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into ‘ethnical style earrings.’ Again, we are sorry about this mistake which we have just amended in the website.”

From the myriad of complaints, tweets, and articles that has inspired this fashion nightmare, it was pointed out the word “ethnic” translates to “etnico” and slave is “schiavo” in Italian. Completely dissimilar words.  So obviously, Sozzani’s statement needs to be taken with a… grain of salt. My thought is, in the surprise this wording… mistake… caused, they had to say something. Like equate ethnicity to slavery. Oops! I think Iman said it best to Style Bistro: “Slave does not make it ethnic. Mind you, it’s not lost in translation–the word slave, we know what it is. They might as well have called them n***** earrings.” Snap. We should know by now that it’s best not to anger Iman. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson would be none too pleased, either.

Really, these earrings do originate from the time of slavery, however… let me throw out an example. Right now, I’m wearing a Calvin Klein buckled leather bracelet. I am not wearing a Calvin Klein shackle cuff. See the difference, Franca? I know this all may be confusing, but maybe the word should have been edited out before released to the public, as editors are wont to do. And what if, (and this is completely hypothetical of course) the model on the site was black?

Now do you see why that term shouldn’t have ever, ever, ever have been used? I felt wrong even cutting and pasting another face into this. Imagine how we feel knowing that you wrote, edited, approved, coded, and posted the article without even so much as a “Uh… guys?”

As of last Wednesday evening, the post holds a message saying, nay, shouting:

“WE’VE DECIDED TO REMOVE THE ARTICLE FROM THE SITE TO PROVE OUR GOOD FAITH AND TO SHOW IT WASN’T OUR INTENTION TO INSULT ANYONE”

Now, there’s a real apology. I think.

I so want to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, this isn’t their first language. Ignore the fact that it appeared in Italian as well. But, this is the same team that came up with mainstream fashion’s first all black issue. And they also started Vogue Black, even though I side-eye the name a little bit. I was talking to Sexual Correspondent Andrea Plaid about this, and she bought up something rather interesting:

“Vogue Italia is doing the post-racial mulitple-oppression sell: under the guise of thinking they’re being all ‘We did the Black Issue, so we’re cool in doing this’ using the myriad of oppressions of women of color to sell some damn gold-tone hoop earrings named after…WoCs’ oppression! And that oppression, in many cases, melded sexual oppression (Antebellum US, the Japanese and Korean “comfort women,” etc.) This, coming from the magazine whose brand is all about the sexy framed as stylishness.”

Though they may not deserve it, as a gesture of good faith, I took a peek around Vogue Italia’s trends section. Maybe this was just a one-off terrible mistake. And I found another post about… Jungle Bracelets. My first inclination was to shout “Why!?!” But, false alarm, as I read, there was nothing really- “…manchettes in python for a night marked by tribal rhythms,” huh? “Turn your evenings into “jungle nights” characterized by tribal music, wild dancing and a bit of aesthetic rebellion,” you say?

Less malevolent, sure. But I’m uncomfortable anyway, and while relatively tame, is this something to be angry about? Maybe. But, to be honest, should I be bracing myself for racism on their website now? Slave Ethnic Earrings should be completely gone from the site as that “gesture of good faith.” As of Wednesday afternoon, the Ethnic Earrings post is still up, complete with the slide show.

It shouldn’t be, so let’s all just face the fuc— I mean facts. Face the facts. I’m sorry, it was a really bad translation. But I caught myself.

Image credit: Vogue Italia and Joseph Lamour

Katie Price, also known as Jordan, is a British TV personality and former model. I’m Australian, so I can’t claim to know much about her. The one solid thing I came into this piece knowing is that she is the subject of a lot of ire in the way only British tabloids can produce. Her eldest child, ten-year-old Harvey, was fathered by a former Trinidad and Tobago football player called Dwight Yorke, and is blind and autistic. You can see how this is going to go already.

In December 2010, a comedian called Frankie Boyle performed a routine on the UK’s Channel 4 poking fun at Katie Price through Harvey. It was pretty awful in a number of ways, but the bit I want to focus on is the following joke, which refers to Katie’s former relationship with Alex Reid: “I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter: she needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.”

This isn’t the first joke about Harvey, even if it is the first one calling him a sexual predator, and it certainly isn’t the first about Katie. Harvey is so much in the spotlight as part and parcel of the usual potshots at his mother, whose sexualised image is the subject of a lot of media ire. He’s also a prominent subject simply because, fat, disabled, and black as he is, Harvey is far from the kind of “celebrity baby” the tabloid public like to fuss over and photograph.

I never thought I’d link to the likes of the Daily Mail, but that’s where Katie wrote a response to this, in her 30 June piece promoting her show Katie: Standing Up for Harvey. I’m really uncomfortable with this piece on a number of levels, particularly in that it’s promoting yet another campaign “on behalf of” disabled people, run by a parent, rather than, you know, in support of the activism we disabled folks do ourselves, thanks. In any case, from the piece:

“Imagine if the reason Boyle gave for saying Harvey was capable of raping me was not because of his disability but because he is black. People would understand how discriminatory that is. It is just as discriminatory when the joke is based on someone’s disability.”

Sad to say, lots of people can and do make that kind of joke. I’m not as sure as Katie that we can entirely separate out Harvey’s disability from his blackness here. Even though the focus is on his being disabled, there’s a silent and potent message about the scary black man. This joke was made in a context in which black male sexuality is seen as inherently threatening and violent. So uncontrollably so, in fact, that one’s own mother might be subject to the sexual violence one mindlessly inflicts. That idea of mindless aggression positions a marginalised and vulnerable person as the true threat, and it’s an idea that is common to both how blackness and disability are figured. And, on top of that, he’s just a kid, and he’s being sexualised in a really horrific way. Harvey, as a young black man of nine, is being subjected to a multiple whammy here, and, while his race didn’t explicitly come up, only one referent was necessary to spark a set of associations.

There’s a lot more to that joke. Katie needs a big strong (possibly white; I’m not sure of Reid’s identity) saviour to protect her from the scary black guy? Really? More than that, Katie Price is a survivor of sexual violence, and here her relationship with one of the people she loves best in the world is being painted with that. That’s completely unacceptable. You don’t get to use the relationship between a mother and son to inflict racist, ableist, horrible rubbish on them in the name of satirising celebrity. They’re human beings.

According to Mark Sweney at The Guardian, “The Channel 4 chief executive, David Abraham, has admitted that he personally signed off” on the joke. “We obviously recognise that in that particular case a piece of humour that was contextualised in the programme late at night was then passed on in the media and out of context and did cause a reaction we had not intended,” said Abraham. I don’t think there’s a context that makes that right, buddy.

(Image Credit: The Sun)

America [Ferrara’s] exclusion from the list is probably the most shocking and disappointing of the three snubs. This year, the Honduran actress, a past Emmy winner for Best Actress in a Comedy Series (Ugly Betty), joined CBS’ critically acclaimed drama, The Good Wife in the role of Natalie Flores, a college student born in Mexico, whose illegal-immigrant status put the brakes on her college career and her dream of becoming a State’s attorney. Poignant and ripped from the headlines (the debate over the DREAM Act still rages on), America’s performance on the show shattered misconceptions about what it means to be an undocumented worker in America. Natalie was a smart, educated, articulate, goal-oriented, English-speaking Latina who didn’t rely on her sexual prowess to get ahead.

“[Natalie] is sort of the anti-stereotype of what people imagine when they hear those labels,” America has said of her character. Was that anti-stereotype confusing to Academy voters who are mostly White males? Possibly.

Then there’s Sara Ramirez. You would think that after she stole the show in the Grey’s Anatomy musical episode this year—bringing tears to our eyes and music to our ears—Sara would get some Emmy love. Sadly, it seems the Mexican-American actress’s Callie Torres—a Lesbian orthopedic surgeon—could not move voters quite the way Sandra Oh has in previous years for what is arguably a better performance. Sara’s Callie isn’t overly sexual, she is soft-spoken and she’s a doctor—not a housewife or a maid.

“We still have the maids and the gardeners and the heavy accents,” Ramirez told Latina earlier this year. “I’m not against someone with an accent—that exists. So I’m not against that being portrayed on TV—but there are so many people who are Latino who don’t have accents, who don’t clean houses, who aren’t servicing others in the ways that we’ve grown used to seeing,” she said. “We’re now doctors, we are now lawyers, we are now doing a lot more in the world.”

And speaking of doing a lot more in the world, we also have to wonder if the Emmys didn’t know what to make of Lauren Velez—who has been playing the boss of a Miami police department on the Showtime hit Dexter for five seasons. Is Laguerta, a strong Latina who is uncompromising and brutal when need be, not the kind of “Latina” they like to see on television?

- From “Do the Emmy Awards Only Reward Latina Stereotypes?,” by Lee Hernandez

Ah True Blood. We hate that we love you. This week’s roundtable – featuring Amber Jones, Alea Adigweme, Jordan St.John, myself and Kendra Pettis – had quite a bit to say on the usual suspects. Laffyette’s growing Orientalism and our mistrust of Jesus; more speculation about Tara’s boo thang; a few cackles about poor, paranoid Arlene (who, may in fact be right); and the evolving Jessica-Hoyt saga. But what shocked us all is how much time we spent talking about Sookie – who has recently realized her privileged status is in danger after her year long absence.

Latoya: Let’s focus on Sookie for the second. What themes do we see emerging with her, considering the last few seasons, she had at least some autonomy
Alea: I think she’s beginning to realize that her options are few. She’s come back from Faerie Land to find her one refuge gone. She’s fair game now.
Latoya: @Alea – It’s interesting how quickly she fell out of favor.
Jordan:She seems to be fighting for it more than she ever has but now has even less control between the fairies, bill and eric
Alea: @LP: I think people are sick of her shit.
Amber: She also doesn’t completely understand what she is or what could be at stake. It seems as if for the first time she’s coming to terms with the fact that she doesn’t know everything.

Kendra: re ownership: I was thinking about her ‘light’ from last season, which we now know is her blood. But given the southern metaphors that are popping up, the obvious comparison is towards her virtue/white womanhood like we discussed last week.
Alea: Yes! The purity of her blood falls right into that.
Latoya: @Kendra – Oooh. So you think she gave away too much of her “virtue”?
Amber: That also falls right in line with ownership and protection.
Jordan: I find it interesting that for her there is this one drop thing going with her blood… she is a small part fairy but people can tell, it has become the defining thing about her
Latoya: But she’s only as valuable as her blood.
Amber: Which is apparently extremely valuable.
Jordan: That is true… it is her currency.
Kendra: Potentially… she’s given up that virtue, and maybe with that the autonomy. Because now the men are buzzing around her to protect/keep what’s left. (Assuming that Alcide will be playing that white knight role)

Latoya: …Sookie, please realize nobody loves you
Alea: HA!!!
Kendra: Sookie’s suddenly realising she’s not as free as she thought and apparently it’s not sitting well on her shoulders…
Alea: Welcome to what everyone else has to deal with, Sook.
Jordan: Sookie seems like she’s finally smartening up although going to one man for help from another…not exactly enlightened.
Latoya: You know, there’s a kept woman analogy to be made here…
Latoya: but I’m distracted by Bill’s sudden [punk era in Britain] flashback.

Amber: @Alea lol. maybe it’s all the power going to his head. He finally feels like he should flaunt it.
Alea: Yes.
Alea: Umm…..Spike, much?
Latoya: Please note – Bill, you are not Spike, and you are not pulling this off.
Kendra: LOL

Jordan: Bill certainly seems to have reclaimed his southern roots in his evil turn.. he seems more modern in the past than he does at the plantation
Latoya: True – he looked almost young for a second
Kendra: re: kept woman… I’m not sure I would completely label her as that yet. She’s always been somewhat self sufficient– always has her man, sure, but she also had a job and a house. I really don’t think she’s going to give up that easily. She’s no Bella.
Latoya: @Kendra – I think she is. Her life is kind of at the whim of other [people's] grace.
Jordan: Eric has become the new Bill… old school paternalistic… I will make the decision and Sookie will come around…
Amber: Making himself right at home.
Latoya: @Jordan – Just like Jacob from Twilight
Amber: @Latoya …and Edward from Twilight. I think they both were pretty paternalistic. Remember when Edward removed Bella’s truck engine? A bit much?
Alea: @Jordan: Exactly.
Latoya: @Amber, yep, same dynamic
Alea: Aaaaaand Tara’s back into caretaking mode.
Jordan: indeed
Latoya: sigh
Alea: Damn.
Latoya: …yep, Sookie is really standing in for the kept woman! Why’d [Pam] have to sell [being possessed by Eric by saying he is] handsome and rich.
Jordan: there is an interesting ownership thread here… curious to see how they resolve it. Will she end up having to be owned to be safe?
Latoya : “He pulls good string?” Did she just infer…
Alea: Yes, she did, LP. Pam, in all her glamorous glory, is almost like a model for what can happen to those Eric takes under his wing.
Kendra: @Jordan/Alea As opposed to Jessica, who seems to be chafing against the housewife/monogamous relationship thread she’s got going with Hoyt
Jordan: indeed… jessica is literally locked in the house all day

Alea: Where she is right now reminds me of the desire that wealthy white men had for octoroons back in, like, 19th[?] century Louisiana. Ah, Wikipedia told me that they were called Quadroon Balls.
Latoya: @Alea – Fascinating – so what does Welter say happens to women seen as untrue? Do they get treated like Tara?
Alea: Sure do.
Alea: The problem with Welter, I think, is that she doesn’t spend any time talking about women of color or working class white women, but, yeah, shitty things happen to women who are not “true.” Usually rape, poverty, and death.
Jordan: interesting… very tara
Kendra: Until now, Tara had been receiving two of the three
Jordan: I wonder what this means about Tara’s choice of a woman?
Latoya: ‘And that’s the thing. Tara represents everything Sookie is not, from the light/dark distinction on…
Amber: Therein lies Sookie’s dilemma–submit to ownership and be “protected” or risk the consequences of being “untrue.”
Jordan: I read a novel set during that time – Island beneath the Sea…couldn’t put that book down
Latoya: @Amber – with Tara being the “unrapeable” embodiment of how that happens.
Amber: @ LP Yes. Tara becomes the tangible manifestation of “the Other,” the unfeminine–not worthy of protection. Really, the only one who consistently protects Tara is Laffy, which happened again tonight.

…

Latoya: Pam basically gave Sook the “what you need to do is find yourself a good man” speech.
Alea: Yes. Which is her way of trying to do Sookie a favor.
Kendra: And I genuinely tihink that she believes that Eric is that good man– she does care for him.
Alea: Her cold, little eyes just light up.
Amber: Lol
Latoya: Which, in a southern context, is interesting to me. My mom wasn’t in that school of thought, but lots of my friends got that speech – find a good enough man that will take care of your needs, and that’s the best you can ask for.
Amber: Mmmhmmm…the “take what you can get” spiel. Smh.
Kendra: It certainly fits in with the whole theme of the episode.
Latoya: Which I guess goes back to a central conflict in the series: Can you truly love someone that feeds on you?
Alea: And can they ever really love you if you’re just food?
Amber: @Alea. I think that’s the bigger question. Especially when you think about vampires’ relationships (romantic and otherwise) to humans in the context of possession and ownership.
Alea: I think that vampires have the capacity for something resembling human love.
Kendra: Jessica and Hoyt are the best way to look at that question.
Alea: Yes.
Amber: It’ll be interesting to see how Hoyt reacts to Jessica drinking others’ blood though.
Latoya: Right
Kendra: Not well, I’m guess. Hoyt has human reactions. Jessica only thinks she can, while new instincts override it all. She’s got that teen puppy love idea still, but it’s at odds with the rest of her.
Alea: I was talking about gay marriage in NY with a few of my cousins today — I’m at my family reunion in St. Vincent — and they quickly got around to “we, as straight people, are failing half the time, but if y’all want it, good luck.” Jessica and Hoyt are having the same types of ish that humans have in traditional relationships. I love that!

[Latoya's note - Gavankar's nationality is American; she was born in Illinois.]

Alea: Because there are no Native actresses looking for work?
Amber: Fail, indeed.
Latoya: Do we need to look up this shapeshifter legend? Or did they explain it correctly?
Kendra: I’m going to read again– the thing is, different tribes have different explanations. I can already tell it’s been boiled down. I guess that’s to be expected because, again… it might be HBO, but it’s still TV.
Alea: I was looking at Wikipedia, not a definitive source, I know, but it seems more complex than the show said.
Kendra: I was wondering if by telling the story, Luna was implying that she was different than the rest of them… not your typical shifter.
Amber: I think so. She’s the only one who was able to turn into another human being. The others in the group didn’t know it was possible.
Alea: @Amber: ditto. And that shifting is something acknowledged by her culture, even if it is acknowledged negatively, makes her distinct from the others. More experienced [for lack of a better word]?
Alea: I wonder if she had encounters with other shifters inside of her family.
Kendra: That would make sense… we know it’s genetic
Amber: Or if she’s told anyone in her family. She spoke of shifting as if it were taboo.
Alea: Yeah. Do you think that parts of it — like turning into people — can be taught?
Kendra: I took away that maybe members of her family blamed her for her mother’s death?
Alea: Yes. And that her mother was also a shifter?
Amber Jones: Hmmm…definitely a possibility. Are you thinking she may teach the others in the group (i.e. Sam) how to shift into another person?
Alea: Yes. I think that part of her “opening up” to Sam will include the sharing of the cultural knowledge that she has about shifting.

Jordan: What do we think about the fact that most of the empowered women vamps don’t do guys? nan, pam, queen…
Alea: Pam wears her scary on her sleeve, but Nan is completely ruthless.
Latoya: (I heart 80s Nan – now, where’s 80s Pam?)
Alea: Interesting point, Jordan.
Kendra: I’d actually assumed all three to be bisexual, but now that I think about it… that’s interesting.
Jordan: i think that they may have been with guys but here, there aren’t a lot of confident, strong women in hetero relationships. i may be forgetting some but it just struck me when I saw nan.
Alea: Yeah, there’s no doubt that they’ve definitely had sexual relations with men at some point in their lives, but the preference for female sexual partners could hint at the fact that men, for those three, are simply thought to be business partners, bosses, or tools to gain power.
Kendra: I would ask if it’s maybe the power-lesbian [butch?] stereotype?
Amber: That is really interesting. Especially when you throw new empowered Tara into the mix (even though she’s human).
Amber: @Kendra, that’s the vibe I’m kind of getting, but I’m still trying to feel it out in Tara’s case.
Kendra: I’m hesitant to say butch, because I feel like aside from Tara they ALL fit the “lipstick lesbian” mold.
Alea: Yes. Super femme.
Amber Jones: Agreed.
Latoya: Tara kinda fits [the lipstick lesbian mold] too…
Kendra: ….I want to talk about this woman once we know more about her…

Kendra: Can I say that I’m glad that everyone is pointing out how quickly Laffy’s gotten into the Wiccan thing? It’s all reminding me of those phases that girls go through in middle school after a little too much Buffy and Charmed.
Amber: @ Kendra. Yes! It’s very reminiscent of “The Craft.” Let’s just hope this one ends a little better.
Latoya: Seriously
Alea: Her convo with Jessica is much different from the one she had with Pam, if you consider that they’re both protégés of men who were or are after Sookie.
Alea: But, yeah, <>.
Alea: Given that that’s what introduced me to Paganism, I won’t hate too, too much.

Amber Jones: Excited for panther Jason!
Alea: Pam, swoon swoon swoon, every time. I’m the biggest fangirl. Her clothes are killer. [/geeking out]
Kendra: Ack, we didn’t touch on Lesbian Power Vamps– quick theory: Is Ball saying something about death and female sexuality and reproduction? They (Pam, Queen, Nan) can’t reproduce anymore, thus don’t technically need men for that sexual aspect, thus go for… women? (there is a longer explanation/discussion in there somewhere)
Alea: I think you’re on to something, Kendra.
Amber: Very interesting, Kendra.
Kendra: I’m sure they’ll continue through the season, but with Jessica’s straying as well (Jessica/Pam, maybe?), it makes me wonder.
Latoya: @kendra – Could be. Or perhaps, the women of Bon Temps realized that their best option is a guy with PTSD…and he’s taken.
Alea: Absolutely. Nan, Jessica, and Pam are saying *something* about the relationship between [the death of] fertility and the utility of men.
Alea: @LP: lol!
Alea: Terry <3
Kendra: @LP LOL. Granted, I’d choose Terry anyway
Amber: @LP Bahahaha. Sad truth.
Alea: I wonder if Nan’s maker was a man.
Kendra: Gooood point. All the others have been…
Latoya: @Alea – ooh, good question. Male makers = lesbian vamps?
Alea: Quite possibly.
Amber Jones: Ooooo…great observation.
Kendra: Oh! And let’s think about Tara– her (almost) maker was male…
Alea: Ah ha!
Alea: Yes!!
Kendra: And she did ingest a lot of his blood. Who knows.
Amber Jones: Whoa.
Alea: Kendra, you’re an effing genius.
Kendra: Hahaha, ty ty.

By Guest Contributor Anurag, cross-posted from (Gaysi)

When queer women are first coming out or becoming involved in the mainstream queer community they are often becoming subject to misogyny and objectification at the hands of other queer women. However, in a lot of cases queer women are bred into a heteronormative lesbian culture where they feel they should be the misogynists, although they probably don’t recognize it as such.

White queer women often feel subject to this objectification and misogyny in the queer community. However, South Asian queer women and other queer women of color have a level of exoticism, or some may experience it as tokenization, that we have to deal with that most white women do not.

This misogyny that exists among queer women is the result of misogyny by heterosexual men, which is set as the norm. Misogyny in the heterosexual community plays out as men’s both overt and covert disrespect for women. Their attitudes and behaviors may affect their relationships. Furthermore, this is created by a larger culture in which women are disrespected and degraded, especially in the media.

Misogyny that is prevalent in heterosexual spaces pervades and spreads into queer spaces, where queer people become objectified on a daily basis in personal interactions. Queer women may feel that it is not the same disrespect since they are both women. However, there is still the possibility for the same power dynamics between people of the same gender, whether in a relationship or otherwise. Queer women often degrade other queer women emotionally, physically and sexually.

This same process happens with exoticism; the queer community replicates a version of exoticism from heterosexual communities. Exoticism in heterosexual communities has been a contributing factor in violence against South Asian women such as human trafficking. South Asian queer women are also objectified by this idea of South Asian women as an exotic, foreign endeavor to be sought.

While South Asian queer women are exoticized, objectified and oversexualized, they may feel a tie to their culture of origin, which may result in feelings of guilt. South Asian queer women may already feel a sense of guilt from being queer, identifying as queer, and exploring their sexuality. As South Asian queer women explore their sexualities in an environment that is viewing them as hypersexual, exotic beings, they may feel flattered, disturbed, and/or confused. To be hypersexualized for coming from a culture that is often experienced as sexually conservative can be confusing.

However, South Asian women inside and outside of the queer community undoubtedly feel that they have sexualities that are not always out of their hands. Furthermore, South Asian queer women are not always the passive objects of misogyny.

This discussion of exoticism is not to discount legitimate feelings of sexual empowerment that South Asian women may feel when exploring their queer sexualities. South Asian queer women often feel that they have positive experiences in the queer community, free of exoticism where they can enjoy, celebrate and explore their sexuality. Some times, in regards to sexuality, there is a freedom that South Asian women feel they could not find until they came into their queer selves.

Simultaneously, while vulnerable to exoticism, South Asian queer women may also perpetuate the misogyny in the queer community. South Asian queer women may not always have the power to be able to exoticize South Asians in a way that is detrimental, however they can have the power to objectify queer women.

South Asian queer women do not have one assigned role in any discussion of sexuality. Freedom, repression, power, control and so on; these words all have relevance in any discussion of sexuality regarding South Asian queer women. This shows that women can not solely be described as powerful or weak in discourse surrounding sexuality. When it comes to misogyny and exoticism among queer women, it can be said that South Asian queer women are often in a complex tug of war.

I had a great Twitter conversation yesterday with @AndreaPlaid, @AnnaHolmes and @Amaditalks. We were talking about Julie Klausner’s recent post on Jezebel, “Don’t fear the dowager: a valentine to maturity.” Klausner’s post, lamenting the trend of grown women adopting childish personas, is sort of a companion to all the similar pieces about modern men living in a state of perpetual boyhood. She writes:

There’s so much ukulele playing now, it’s deafening. So much cotton candy, so many bunny rabbits and whoopie pies and craft fairs and kitten emphera, and grown women wearing converse sneakers with mini skirts. So many fucking birds.

Girls get tattoos that they will never be able to grow into. Women with master’s degrees who are searching for life partners, list “rainbows, Girl Scout cookies, and laughing a lot” under “interests, on their Match.com profiles. Read more…

The Klausner article generated a ton of push back on Jezebel. I suspect because the manic pixie dream girl persona is “in” right now and everyone wants to feel like they choose their own choices. In this case, that means that some women want to believe that their predilection for rompers and kittens and baby voices reflects their individual personalities and not some trend toward retro, non-threatening femaleness. But no one chooses their choices in a vacuum and certainly it means something that so many women seem to be finding this super-girlish, childish part of their personalities at the same time, while Katy Perry’s sex and candy persona is tearing up the charts and actual little girls are being bombarded with pink, purple, princesses, tulle and sparkles.

Zooey Deschanel is the poster girl for this sort of womanhood. Frankly, I find a 30-something woman with a website called Hello Giggles and a penchant for tweets about kittens a little off-putting, as I would a grown man with a website called Girls Have Cooties and a Twitter feed about Matchbox cars. But then we find creepy in a man the kind of childishness we fetishize in women.

I also find it worth noting that the persona that Klausner writes about is bound by class and race. The cult of domesticity defined idealized womanhood centuries ago–and that definition included both perpetual childhood and whiteness. The wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women. We can be strong women, aggressive women, promiscuous women…we can do Bonet bohemian and Earth Mother (as Andrea pointed out), but never carefree and childish. Even black girls are too often viewed as worldly women and not innocents.

Also, the affectations of the manic pixie are read differently on black women. A streak of pink in the hair goes from quirky and youthful to “ghetto” on a black body. Thrift store clothing leads to a host of class assumptions.

Am I wrong about this? Is there a black Zooey? A manic pixie Latina? Is this a persona that women of color can inhabit?

Photo and image credits: What Tami Said

**TRIGGER WARNING**

I recognize the women in this preview: these women were me when I was growing up. The kids at my mostly black Catholic school called me just about every black-related perjorative ever since 3rd grade, letting me know and telling others within my earshot that I was physically inferior solely because I was dark-skinned. I even remember a boy in my 7th grade class drew a picture of me being nothing more than a solid black square. Even though the same kids voted me 8th grade class president…I was still considered in their estimation an ugly (vis-a-vis my skin tone) girl. Even had the only boy who was my boyfriend (we were in 8th grade) dump me for a lighter-skinned and younger girl, to the mocking laughter of the lighter-skinned students.

My mom—a dark-skinned African American herself—told me something that didn’t make any sense through my woundedness: “You know those light-skinned girls people think are pretty in school? Wait ‘til you’re grown and see where you’re at and where they’re at.” Added to this was my mom’s constant admonition to “get an education.” Well, sure enough, what my mom said came to pass. I’ve had photographers approach me and ask to photograph me. I had lovers of various hues—even had a husband. (He was white.) And women of various hues, races, and ethnicities have given me love on the streets, at the job, and at workshops.

I’m not sure how—or even if—some of the women in the clip worked through the pain some black people have inflicted on them. But, instead of the usual devolving, derailing, and erasing conversations of “that’s happened to me, too, though I’m a lighter-skinned black person!” (that’s a thread for another post) or “it wasn’t me! I’m a down black person!” (will be met with an exasperated eyeroll)…it would be a really good thing to simply listen to these women’s truths, as uncomfortable–sometimes, as implicating–as they may be.

Transcript after the jump.

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Voiceover: Rise, dark girls.

Interviewee #1: I can remember being in the bathtub, asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin could be lighter. And so that I can escape the feeling that I had about not being as beautiful, being as acceptable, as lovable.

Interviewee #2: If we’re all just hanging out and a dark-skinned girl walked by, [some would say], “oh, she’s pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” And I’m like, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Interviewee #3: I’d used to wish that I would wake up one day lighter or would wash my face and think that it would change. I thought it was dirt and would try to clean it off but it wouldn’t.

Interviewee #4: Just doing something small as standing in front of class to do show-n-tell, I wouldn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone. I would hold my doll really tight because I knew my toy loved me even if they didn’t.

Interviewee #5: “Here comes Blackie”…”here comes Tar Baby”…I remember one in particular: they’d say, “You stayed in the oven too long.” And that was really hurtful.

Interviewee #6: And they would do it every single day without let-up: on the playground, in the classroom, in the cafeteria. Constantly you got it, so I really didn’t have a high self-esteem.

Interviewee #7: It was so damaging. It made us feel like we were unwanted, that we were less than…

Interviewee #8: My mother and her friend, we were driving somewhere. And she bragging on me: “My daughter is beautiful. She’s got great eyeleashes; she’s got the cheekbones; she’s got great lips.” And she’s going on, and she adds,”Can you imagine if she had any lightness in her skin at all? She’d be gorgeous!” And just that last little part…all that pride I had about, you know, her bragging on me, just dissipated. Just dissipated. And I think that that moment I really became aware.”

Questioner: Show me the smart child. Why is she the smart child?

Child: Because she’s white.

Questioner: OK. Show me the dumb child. And why is she the dumb child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the ugly child. And why is she the ugly child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the good-looking child. Why is she good-looking?

Child: Because she’s light-skinned.

Interviewee #9: I think I remember most saying, you know, if I have a little girl, I just…I didn’t want her to be dark.

(Chokes back tears)

I remember saying that. I didn’t want her to be dark like me.

Interviewee #1: When you’re around so many people that you trust, you know, just because you’re looking at another black person, and you’re thinking, “I’m black, you’re black. They’re not going to have anything derogatory to say about me.” But when you live so many years with people having certain judgments relative to your skin tone, you start to believe it.

Interviewee #10: A friend of mine had a baby. It was my first time seeing the baby. The baby was beautiful. [The friend ] said, “Gurl, I’m so glad she didn’t come out dark!” and when she said it, it felt like a dagger, like someone took a dagger and stuck it in my heart because I was used to expecting hearing things like that from other races. But this was someone I considered to be my sister.

Interviewee #11: Skin color amongst the black community is a huge issue in our time

Voiceover: This is not a phenomenon, It’s just the reality in the black culture.

Interviewee #12: I believe we didn’t like ourselves. Sure, it started in slavery, but we kept the vicious cycle going.

Man on the street: I mean, you know, dark-skinned women…I really don’t like dark-skinned women. They look funny beside me. So, you know, I’d rather not date a dark-skinned woman.

Off-camera interviewer: You’d rather [date] a light-skinned girl?

Man on the Street: Yeah. Light-skinned pretty girl. Long hair.

Interviewee #10: My experience with Black men is I’m exotic, I’m beautiful…they’re fascinated by me—behind closed doors. But when it came to dating, coming to the front door and taking me out in public? Doesn’t happen.

Interviewee #1: The darker you are, it’s more of a sexual approach. It’s more of a relationship-without-much-meaning sort of approach more than I-could-get-married-to-that-woman-and-have-a-few-kids.

Interviewee #7: All my lighter friends had those boyfriends. They were always seen together. But if someone wanted to date me, it was “I’ll meet you after school.” It was more of a hidden thing. Nobody ever just wanted to be with you.

Intervierwee #5: There’ve been places I’ve gone that there are just a lot of whites, and they would tell me, “You have such beautiful skin! Is that your hair? Did you dye it? Is that your natural hair?” It’s really questionable to me that they think I’m so beautiful and my own people don’t see any beauty in me at all?

Interviewee #13: I was once on CNN, debating the whole controversy about Beyonce ‘s L’Oreal ad. When a picture of her in motion was placed against a picture of her in print, everyone said there’s no way that they didn’t lighten her skin. And I don’t want to believe that that’s still happening in this day and age.

Man #1: And she’s got that good hair, too.

Man #2: You like what?

Man #1: I like girls with that light complexion.

Man #2: You’re a moron.

Man #1: I can’t help it.

Man #2: What? Being a moron?

Man #1: Yeah, that too.

Interviewee #14: Several years ago, I had decided I wanted to, umm, wear a ‘fro. I remember one young lady said to me if she ever had hair look like that, she’s had to cover it. I said to her, “Well, if you take the perm out of your hair, that’s exactly what it looks like.” And she said she’s never seen her natural hair because, from when she was small, her momma had always put something in it.

Young woman: It doesn’t look clean, I feel like. It looks, like, nasty almost. If you just roll out of bed and your hair is nappy, it’s, like, the most disgusting, most unclean thing.

Interviewee #11: I’ve had issues with having longer hair since a small child. And it did come from black kids.

Interviewee #1: Being in school, there was just such a separation among girls who were lighter-skinned and girls who were darker-skinned

Interviewee #15: It was really bad in junior high school. With Nair, I knew people who threw bowls of it in their hair just to take it. So, yeah, we were separated, and it caused a lot of friction among children. Which now, as an adult, just seems stupid to me.

Interviewee #16: The racism we have as a people, among ourselves, is a direct backlash of slavery. The “house niggers” versus the “field niggers.” The paper-bag rule: if you’re darker than a paper bag, the whole thing. We as a people were so disenfranchised that we adopted some of that. A lot of that.

Interviewee #17: I think the problems within the black community has to do more with our lack of unity. We really don’t see each other as being part of the community, partly because we don’t have a language or have something tangible besides our skin color to say, “I am a part of you. You are a part of me.” In the black community it’s, “No, I’m not black! I’m Caribbean,” or ‘No! I’m not black! I’m Haitian.” No, you’re black.

Interviewee #9: Rise, dark girls. Rise.

(Music)

Yes, these women in the clip remind me of myself, where I could have gone mentally (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) if I didn’t have the mom I have. Watching this clip made me want to loan my mom to each and every one of them so they could hear her intervening message and wipe their tears. Moms may even update her advice: “And I’m going to tell you what I just told my own daughter: look at the First Lady and tell me that a dark-skinned woman is unattractive and unloveable.” I may even send Moms over to the house of Interviewee #8’s mom to verbally whup her ass.

At the same time, as I told sex blogger/filmmaker Arielle Loren in our Facebook conversation about the preview, I feel a bit skeeved by the clip. Even though the conversation about shadeism and its particular effects on darker-hued black women is needed, it also plays on the “pitiful, unloveable dusky Negress” trope that can be emotionally exploitive for the participants and for the viewers…and seems to be a new spin on the “unattractive and unmarriable black woman” trope that’s been on the uptick for a minute. As Arielle said in the thread, “While I don’t want to shake the finger at something “positive,” if the director still is in the editing process…It’s important to also show dark girls who were empowered and managed to build strong self-esteem despite the overwhelming negative opinions of our community and society at large.” I responded, “ But what you’re saying makes me wonder if 1) the doc makers (Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry) even interviewed anyone with an “empowered” perspective or 2) when this clip was edited for the ‘ad campaign’ the thought was ‘let’s use the trope of the ‘unloveable, pitiable dusky Negress’ to get the buzz going and, eventually, to get people to watch it.”

But again, this is a preview. According to the Vimeo page, the film won’t be released until Fall or Winter 2011. I think this film is participating in a conversation that’s so necessary—if, for no one else, for the women in the documentary and for quite a few darker-skinned black women carrying and maybe destructively acting from this wound. But, as we say in these parts, Black people—and that definitely includes Black women—aren’t a monolith. So, I hope this film presents more sides to this issue, more and varied voices of dark-skinned black women to speak about this hurtful issue. And that this clip will be re-edited to reflect those women’s experiences.

If need be, I’ll happily volunteer my mom and me.

Photo credits: Courtesy of Andrea (AJ) Plaid

Not that I know of anyway – no one’s said that to me in my face. I don’t even know if I’ve been called a harlot or a whore or any other synonym for a loose promiscuous woman.

People don’t often tend to associate me with sexuality, at least when they just see me and don’t really know about what I get up to. “Unattractive” or “ugly” would probably be more common insults, asides from “you Bangla”.

But the biggest reason though is because I spent all my life in a society and culture where people didn’t even talk about sexuality. That thing about how women are sexualised in society through ads and media and all that? Not where I came from! You were meant to be pure, innocent, untouched, sweet…”sweet” was actually a word that got used a hell of a lot as a compliment, come to think of it.

If you wanted to denote someone as slutty, trashy, harlot-like, you know what you’d call them?

Sexy.

Yes, that trait people in the rest of the world spend tons of hours and dollars achieving? That buzzword in company mission statements? That marketing aim? Undesirable. You’d get it in a sneer from your school classmate, that admonition from your boss, that behind-the-back bitching from the neighbours – all for wearing a tank top or having your hair out or putting a strut in your walk. People knew that in some contexts it was meant to be positive, which made the word a double-edged sword; if you accepted the word as a compliment, you were proving how degrading you are, and deserved the insult.

Here’s an example of how intense it could get: Sometime in the mid 90s, some lad mag classed Malaysian pop superstar Siti Nurhaliza as one of their sexiest women. Now Siti is massive popularity-wise – when Britney Spears first got started people were trying to match up their potential careers! She’s likely still going and won’t stop for a while. So she’s a very big deal in Malaysia – even if you don’t follow her music (pop-Malay-folk ish) you still followed her career one way or another.

She had to release a press statement declaring: “I’m not sexy!”

The Western-eduated folk found that amusing and pointless, but the “sexy” declaration was really a potential career-breaker for Siti. She was the epitome of Malay femininity, which meant she was supposed to be well-mannered, poised, clean, polite, family-friendly. Accepting any level of “sexy” inferred that she was a wild child, a rabble-rouser, loose morals, had no respect for culture or elders, no shame or dignity. And that just would not do.

Shame and dignity. Two words that get used a lot to suppress sexuality.

As I mentioned, there’s not a lot happening in Malaysia sexuality-wise (which is a bit surprising considering birth control is over-the-counter and apparently Malaysian abortion laws are a lot more liberal than some American cities) or even physically (PE is a joke). No one will talk about it, plans to introduce a sex ed curriculum keep getting stalled, and if you want to ask the only answer you get is “don’t think about it”. How are you going to learn anything about good consent or owning your bodies or good vs bad touch if you weren’t treated as someone with a body to begin with? You were just a brain, there to get good grades, don’t worry about the rest of you.

That was certainly my experience – I had to get my sex ed from books and CD ROMs and the Internet, and somehow I managed to get enough to know that it could lead to unwanted pregnancies or STDs, was messy and icky, and my paranoia made me feel that I would be that rare 0.01% who’d get sick & pregnant even with a condom AND birth control AND a lesbian or something strange like that, so I ended up going asexual most of my life. What’s the worry anyway – there’s the rest of the world!

Then I got Mark The Boyfriend and suddenly got to find out for myself what the big deal was. And it was great! Physicality was awesome! A few years later, after finishing uni and dealing with some personal changes, I found the space and courage to really take on my sexuality – andboy what a ride that’s been! I found a love for eroticism in performance (art is my kink!), embraced the display and enjoyment of my body, spent time reconsidering and reconciling the differing (sometimes conflicting) paradigms I learnt about sex, love, relationships, intimacy, friendships. There were down times too – being assaulted, having hearts broken, still not being completely capable to communicate what I would like without holding myself back nor imposing myself on others, not feeling strong enough to speak up for my own boundaries because I’m so used to “be accommodating!”.

All of that I’ve had to do pretty much on my own – not completely alone, because there were the burlesque classes and the lovers and the discussion groups and the art directors and so on. But I did have to build my own definitions of sex and intimacy and relationships and so on, having not found too many that resonated with me and my experiences. And yet I could not find support from the culture of my origins, from myfamily.

“Don’t you have any shame?!”
“Why are you giving up your dignity!?”
“Why does Mark let you do this?!”
“Can’t you change your passions and give this up?”
“Why are you bringing shame onto the family?”

It’s never just me. What I do affects my family, my culture, my background. I am seen as a representative, a synedoche, a microcosm. Even if my parents have been long dead I’ll likely still have my actions be considered as that of XYZ’s Daughter, rather than that of my own agency.

And it is this self-same agency that has led me to passionately embrace causes like SlutWalk. The agency that marks the fact that my body is my business, that it’s not owned by or representative of anyone else, that I have every right to seek & build support for my body my way.

I do have a sexuality, I do have physicality, I am sexy damnit. And that is not a shameful thing, that is not a loss of dignity. It’s reclaiming ownership of what is rightly mine from the start – and making a stand to assert that no one has the right to abuse, insult, malign, harm, or attack anyone AT ALL, including me, for making our own damn bodily choices. Even if they are the slut-version of Voldemort. Even if they are “cheap STD-infected hookers”. Even if they’re not sexy. Even if they are sexy.

No ifs, no buts, just NO.

My body, my business.

Image credit: yegslutwalk

When we embrace our curvy bodies, we’re told we’re fat. When we accept our thin frames, we’re accused of lazy or bad cooks. We’ve been charged with nursing and caring for  the children of our white employers from Antebellum times through today, but we’re constantly being portrayed as bad mothers. We put a weave in our  hair trying conform to a beauty standard that has nothing to do with us and we’re still called “nappy-headed hoes”. When we go to school, get degrees and a career, we’re “un-marry-able”. If we work and have kids early instead of going to school, same thing happens. When we or others decide to celebrate us, white women scream out “REVERSE RACISM” but we have to comb through 50-11 magazines with white women on every page to find ONE with a Black woman on the cover. We bare it all in a video or keep condoms in our nightstands and we’re called  sluts. We dedicate ourselves to The Church or are decidedly single and we’re prudes or “bitter”. All too often, we are forced to choose our race over our gender or risk feeling the wrath of our Brothers, despite having to live with the realities of both. From Saartjie Baartman aka “Venus Hottentot” to Satoshi Kanazawa’s “scientific” study claiming Black women being less physically attractive than EVERYBODY else, we’ve been studied like freaks of nature instead of just regarded as human beings with the same value as all others.

We’re pretty much damned if we do, damned if we don’t. So, the stereotype of “The Angry Black Woman” is rooted in a very visceral truth. We’re tired of this shyt. Stop telling us to stop getting upset. Stop telling us to not be mad despite having to deal with this crap  ALL THE TIME. Why are we supposed to put up with this reckless disregard for our humanity with a smile on our face? Because we’re women? Because we’re Black? Please, miss me with that bull. We are HUMAN first. This anger is righteous and all ignoring it and the causes of it will do is create a dyspeptic breeding ground for spiritual, psychological, social and physical dis-ease.

–Excerpted from “The Matriarchal Legacy of The Black Woman’s Anger”

Photo Credit: Lynette’s Two Cents

ETA: Please note, we got an email from NYMag saying they want us to take down this post. I pushed back asking them about their definition of fair use, and we are working it out. So if you access this post over the weekend, and it has changed, that’s what happened. I’m going to go through and prune it down a bit – good faith and all that – but we are still going to run the other pieces on Monday, regardless of what actually ends up in this space. – LDP

Earlier this week, readers Elton and Tomi alerted us to this front page New York Magazine piece called “Paper Tigers,” by Wesley Yang. It is remarkable in that it’s one of the broadest examinations of Asian American identity to be prominently placed in a mainstream outlet. The article made a huge impact – on Facebook alone, it was liked by 31,000 people. However, reading the piece left a lot of questions to be answered, and for every “hell yeah!” there was an equal *head desk*.

We’re putting together a reaction post from our friends and contributors, but in the meantime, please set aside the time to read all of Yang’s article.

To start you off, here are some points that jumped out at me.

The Good

• Yang’s discussion of Asian American invisibility in face of stereotype: “A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality.”
• The frank discussion of Thomas Epenshade’s work, which calculated how Asians generally must score higher on the SAT than white applicants to have the same chance at admission.
• The disparity between Asian American representation in higher education and under-representation in the board room. (We’ve covered this before, under the title of the bamboo ceiling.)

The Interesting, but Questionable

• Yang looks at the bamboo ceiling, but attributes it mostly to unconscious bias, not actual racism.
• The absolute absence of Asian American female perspectives, despite the higher rates of suicide for Asian American women.

The WTF

• Yang appears to have a love/hate relationship with being Asian-American; using the term “banana or twinkie to self identify and saying he’s “devoid of Asian characteristics.”
• The piece challenges some stereotypes, but reinforces others, perhaps because of the divided feel of the narrative.
• Yang quotes JT Tran, the Asian American pick up artist, who essentially says Asian American (heterosexual men) should pick up white women in order to…well, it’s not exactly clear how Tran thinks that is going to fix the school/boardroom gap.

Stay tuned for more perspectives from our APIA contributors.

Yep, I–along with sexpert and Racialicious booster Twanna Hines–will talk about sexing it up and street harrassment at the Museum of Sex in NYC tomorrow .  (Yes, we have a museum devoted to sex in NYC. Pick up your jaw. )  If you’re in the city, please come…no pun intended!

The Right to be Sexy in the Bedroom and on the Street!
The Museum of Sex
233 5th Avenue, 27th Street
New York, NY
7:30-9:30pm
(Suggested Donation $10)

We have a right to look as sexy as we want, with no repercussions! When our bodies and sexuality meet activism, we can take back control and turn victimization on its head.

Join us on April 21st for a screening of The Line at the Museum of Sex’s subterranean locale. Sip elderflower cocktails at the sleek Laboratory/Bar space and join a post-film discussion with sultry panelists discussing sexuality rights and activism. Panelists include Emily May of Hollaback! Twanna Hines of Funky Brown Chick, Andrea Plaid of Racialicious, Tara Ellison of Third Wave Foundation and NOLOSE, and Nancy Schwartzman, director of The Line.

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Your Panelists

Nancy Schwartzman is the director and producer of documentary films The Line (2009) and xoxosms (April 2011 release), as well as the director of The Line Campaign, a multimedia campaign to promote sex-positive dialogue about relationships, sex, and consent.

Emily May is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Hollaback!, a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology, fighting against the notion that street harassment is culturally acceptable.

Twanna Hines is is a Manhattan-based writer and sexual & reproductive health / rights advocate, hailed as one of “the internet’s sultriest sharers” by the Village Voice, details about her rendezvous have been printed in Glamour magazine and she has made media appearances including on CNN, NPR and Gawker.com

Andrea (AJ) Plaid has the distinction of being the first Sexual Correspondent for Racialicious, the award-winning blog on race and pop culture. Her work on race, gender, sex, and sexualities has appeared at Change.org, Bitch, and Library Journal and her posts have been republished at Penthouse.com, Colorlines, BlogHer, and New American Media. Andrea’s writing also appears in the just-published anthology Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee. She has been quoted in Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. She has lectured at John Jay College of Criminology as well as participated in Harvard’s Feminist Coming Out Day 2011 as a guest panelist. She also owns an eco-friendly safer-sex kit company, Freak Kits. Andrea lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Tara Ellison is the Deputy Director of the Third Wave Foundation and a board member of NOLOSE, a fat queer and trans organization. Among other types of activism and advocacy, Tara has also been blogging about things like race, class, gender, activism, sex, and sexuality for a decade.

Photo Credit: High Street Heels

Aside from the fact that Ashley Judd has no clue about Hip-Hop as an art form and a culture, her comment shows an underlying prejudice towards black men. She says that Snoop and Diddy’s participation in YouthAIDS raised a red flag for her. If she knew anything about Hip-Hop or maybe even had a conversation with either one of these men, she’d know that neither condone rape or create violent music (at least not in the last decade), both are intelligent and savvy media moguls, and both are fathers (each has a least one daughter). So why wouldn’t they use their star power and influence to spread the message to young people, and especially the Hip-Hop community, about the importance of HIV/AIDS prevention? Shouldn’t they be lauded? If their music is so sexually irresponsible, isn’t it a good thing that they are talking about safe sex considering that HIV/AIDS transmission rates are so much higher among African-Americans?

I have looked closely at the feedback I have received about those two paragraphs, and absolutely see your points, and I fully capitulate to your rightness, and again humbly offer my heartfelt amends for not having been able to see the fault in my writing, and not having anticipated it would be painful for so many. Crucial words are missing that could have made a giant difference. It should have read: “Some hip-hop, and some rap, is abusive. Some of it is part of the contemporary soundtrack misogyny (which, of course, is multi-sonic). Some of it promotes the rape culture so pervasive in our world…..” Also, I, ideally, would have anticipated that some folks would see only representations of those two paragraphs, and not be familiar with the whole book, my work, and my message. I should have been clear in them that I include hip-hop and rap as part of a much larger problem. It is beyond unfortunate that I am talking about some, for example, of Snoop Dogs’ lyrics, an assumption has been spread I was talking about every single artist in both genres. That is false and distorted. Here, I am again aware that it would be impossible for me to get this “exactly right.” Some will find fault, no matter how careful I am, no matter what my intentions.

“Why don’t we [help] end rape culture instead of getting mad that we’re getting called out on it?”

“[I]t’s clear those who fight against reproductive choice for women of color know nothing of why women choose abortion Rather than create fake concern for a community these people have never set foot in, Life Always should spend their energies helping us address the reasons why women decide to choose abortion.  The procedures we help fund are because out community is among the least likely to have regular access to healthcare, family planning and comprehensive sex education.  Our services exist because our women are among the most likely to be victims of sexual assault…

“Women have a legal right to access abortion services and should not be shamed regarding the personal choices they make.  Abortion is a personal decision, not a political discussion.  We will not be moved moved by this anti-choice attempt to hijack our communities.”

~~Chicago Abortion Fund‘s Executive Director Gaylon Alcaraz

If you want to let Life Always know how you feel about their billboard, you can sign a petition here.

Photo credit: groundswellfund.org

As soon-to-be-former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace packs her stuff and leaves the university due to fear for her life, I’ve watched how some people and the press reacted to her.  As Colorlines and other blogs noted, combating her anti-Asian racism with life-threatening misogyny really wasn’t the best social-justice idea:

Nor combatting racial stereotypes with…racialized sexual stereotypes:

and

Or even having a “yeah, you’re racist, but I’d still fuck ya” vibe, a la the guitar-strumming crooner, in an otherwise witty comeback song:

As blogger and GRITtv ‘s senior writer/web manager Sarah Jaffe said, the move of some Asian American men who “stereotypically not seen as sex objects, putting the white woman in her proper place AS sex object or, ‘Shut up bitch, you’re just there to be fucked’ in essence…”–which the Black woman expounds on in her clip–is just a kyriarchal pile-on.

I do believe is Wallace could have been criticized in terms of one of the most taboo—yet most needed—conversations: white female privilege.

Of course, when this phrase is put into the public square of ideas, quite a few white women, both feminist and non, will storm in with their vociferous exceptionalizing  to this privilege—more specifically, how their individual selves are the exceptions to this because of mitigating identities and circumstances: they aren’t able-bodied; they don’t fit the blonde-and-blue phenotype; they aren’t slender and/or or buxom; they are poor or come from poverty; they are not educated and/or hipsters; they are in interracial relationships; so on and so forth.  Usually, the exceptionalizing derails the conversation into silence.  But for a person without that privilege, especially if the privilege is based on that person’s degradation or erasure, the mitigated advantage is still an advantage.  The mitigation(s) shape(s) the privilege as that of gradation, not kind. 

But, as Audre Lorde said, silence doesn’t protect … in this case, the privilege getting read.

So, if I had to unpack the White Female Privilege, it would look something like this (and I’m citing and paraphrasing heavily from Alienation, Peggy McIntosh, Mary Dee Wenniger, Nsenga Burton, and ballgame, and this list isn’t exhaustive):

• Can benefit from their association with white men as a wife, daughter, sibling, and mother.
• Have all their faults and flaws into perfect imperfections.
• Easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring women like them.
• Can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer any communications without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of their race.
• When told about our national language or about “civilization,” they are shown the people of their color made it what it was.
• Can turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go online and see people of their race widely represented.
• Can remain oblivious of the language and of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in their culture any penalty.
• Are feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.
• Can use the “sheer fear of tears” to their advantage. (Sarah Jaffe calls this “White Lady Tears.”)
• Are not compelled by the rules of their gender to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
• Are allowed to be vulnerable, playful, and “soft” without calling their worthiness as a member of their race being called into question.
• Are seen as the embodiments of value and purity and, due to their phenotypes (especially if it’s close(r) to the blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal), be considered worthy of protection—including having nations go to war over this purity and piety–and instantly become the objects of universal desire.
• They are seen as the default and the ideal embodiment of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness.  This idea(l) is replicated, despite the efforts of visual diversity, in all form of media, from paintings to plays to porn.

But don’t just take my word for it. As a couple of people pointed out on Tumblr a while ago:

we here on tumblr have found every single way imaginable to admire white girls. soft white girls, fat white girls, dreadlocked white girls, naked white girls, bicycling white girls, hairy white girls, clean white girls, white girls in shower, white girls catching butterflies, white girls cooking, white girls cooking naked, white girls with babies, white girls with kittehs, white girls with tats, white girls in catholic school girl dresses, white girls with hippy clothes….what fucking other ways in heavens green earth and jesus can we find to admire white girls?

… and yet i still see a whole lot of “admire my hotness” white girl shit. and a whole lot of it involves white girls appropriating ish and acting innocent while doing it.

Or, in Wallace’s case, post a virulently anti-Asian rant (complete with her “innocent” claims of having hometraining and how her rant isn’t about her “Asian friends”) on YouTube then fauxpologize with some nonsense about “not knowing what possessed her to do it.” To that, I’ll say here what I said in a comment section regarding this: “At some point, even the Devil would roll up and say, ‘That one’s on you, homie.’”

And what’s on her is her unchallenged white female privilege.  To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.”  Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.”  I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.”   (She found out quite differently.)

Combine all this with, at the time, what Wallace may have perceived as having a platform for more of her racist views due to her newfound “internet fame” with her first clip and the revealed bikini photos—her father admitted on his Facebook page that she was creating a vlog of similar rants–probably reinforced something Arturo observed about the photos: “After all, there’s a certain sector who’s perfectly willing to forgive/accept her views because she’s ‘hot.’”  Again, Wallace found out quite differently, with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block speaking against it in a video as well as in an email along with other people responding to it with sometimes life-threatening viciousness.

At this point, though, this particular saga seems over: even though UCLA stated Wallace was within her free-speech rights as a student, she is gone.  But that doesn’t mean that white female privilege left with her.

Image courtesy of You Offend Me, You Offend My Family