Black women’s bodies are so problematic, so fraught, when it comes to sex. While other parts of black women’s bodies, like our hair and butts and breasts, can be seen and slapped or pinched, it’s more of an effort for men to find their way to our pussies. When we were enslaved, however, it did not matter if our pussies were closed. Black women’s bodies have always been open territory, and our pussies would be opened by force and plundered until rubies were drawn. I wonder if “fast-tailed girl” is the terminology of the intergenerationally traumatized. Our visible bodies may already be sexualized without our consent, but if we can withhold sex or rob a man of the prospect of having sex, then somehow we will be “saved” from being a “fast-tailed girl.” But back then, our parents could do little to nothing at all to protect us. There was no withholding of sex. There was no prospect of being “saved” from anything.
But the fact is black girls are sexualized whether or not we withhold sex.
Why can’t we be wild? Because we are already wild. Why can’t we enjoy sex? Because we are already sexed without clothes ever having been peeled away from our bodies. Why can’t we be free? Because we were never free.
Immediately after moving to Harlem, I joined Tinder.
Kelvin and I went on two dates before he told me that I was looking for a serious commitment that he was not willing to give. There was Etienne, a Malian guy who stood at a staggering six feet, six inches; he tried to woo me with his alleged sexual prowess, but inevitably this scared me off, and I told him that we were better off friends. Leon, a wealthy, suave Nigerian guy who worked in marketing and boasted about his salary, wanted us to spend half of our date in his BMW. When I asked to spend time with him again—since he was attractive and successful—he told me he was busy and never left the door open to schedule anything in the future. All the while, I was writing more online, and this led me to meeting David.
David was a black investment banker with a strong penchant for African-American literature, and he contacted me through a Black Harlem GroupMe message because he wanted to discuss an article I’d recently written about gentrification. Because I had just moved to Harlem, and my friend circle mainly consisted of people from Princeton, I agreed. What I’d thought would be a short meeting at a local café turned into a two-hour-long stroll around the neighborhood, during which we talked about gentrification, blackness, street harassment, and Toni Morrison. I was impressed; I hadn’t expected an investment banker to revere—almost worship—Toni Morrison. He was able to quote lines from Sula and Paradise with ease. Our stroll culminated on my front stoop, where we exchanged numbers. I quickly willed myself to forget about him, trying hard not to fall too fast for a stranger—that is, until he reached out several hours later and hinted that he would love to see me again.
Our first real date took place at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. He asked me about my dreams and aspirations as we went through the aisles of new fiction and nonfiction. I didn’t have to hide any part of myself. Needless to say, I did fall hard for him, and that spiral of desire led to a crash landing. I was a frequent texter and David wasn’t, blaming his late responses on personal issues and exhaustion from work. I’d badger my girlfriends asking how to interpret his text messages, and whether his interest was still there. When we were spending time together, he was entirely engaged in the moment. But when we weren’t actively spending time together, I thought that I was dating myself. I desperately tried to hold on to our chemistry, waiting anxiously by my cell phone, but I knew he was steadily pulling away from me. We stopped talking altogether when he told me that he did not have it in him to be in a committed relationship. He was stressed out over his job, the prospect of going to law school, and the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister back in Texas. I didn’t hear from him for months until I was published on The New Yorker’s website and he congratulated me on my achievement.
Believing that, after the long silence, this meant that he was finally ready for me, I woke up at six o’clock on a spring morning to a text from him asking for me to call him as soon as possible. When I did, I soon discovered that he only wanted to be friends with me, although he left the option open for casual sex. I told him that wasn’t what I wanted; I yearned for love within a committed relationship.
“You sound like you’re falling into the trope of the overachieving black woman who has super high standards,” he said.
And I shattered all over again.
Although he later apologized—and I accepted that apology—I felt like a failure on a much larger level than I ever had before. Rejection wasn’t because I was too clingy, too outspoken, too aggressive, or too talkative. I was rejected because I was a black woman who was too successful. Somehow all my achievements that I had worked so hard to accrue seemed to be steadily whittling away my dating prospects.
In the beginning I thought that my anxiety about dating was mine, and mine alone, until I started paying more attention to popular culture and the ways black men fuel this dilemma. Tyler Perry has made millions off of characterizing successful black women as bitter, pretentious, single shrews who need a man to soften their behavior (see Daddy’s Little Girls), or who insult black men (see Madea in The Diary of a Mad Black Woman and I Can Do Bad All by Myself, and Angela in Why Did I Get Married?). This is not to say that these kinds of black women do not exist, but it is disappointing that Perry, one of the most visible black filmmakers of our generation, perpetuates these stereotypes. What is it about our goals that leads to our stigmatization? Is it because there is a deep-seated fear black women will outpace black men, and the only way to remind us of our place is to withhold love and affection? We may be accepted out there in the world with a good-paying job, but that world will never give us love because it wasn’t designed to. But when we return to the folds of our community and find that we are denigrated for the skills we used to survive, what else can we do but suppress ourselves just so we’ll have somebody?
Coined by Moya Bailey, and further developed by Trudy Hamilton of the now-defunct feminist blog Gradient Lair, the word “misogynoir” describes the hatred towards black women specifically manifested through American visual and popular culture. It is so rampant that to try to conceive of ways to eradicate it would be to pull the threads of society apart altogether. Leslie Jones’s continual harassment on Twitter for being a black woman in Ghostbusters is a prime example. Anytime you see an animalistic or masculine image of Michelle Obama, that’s misogynoir. Whenever black women’s lives are used as props to empower white women, such as the “phenomenon” of Miley Cyrus twerking or Lily Allen’s “satire” in the “Hard Out Here” video, that is misogynoir.
I don’t want to believe that David deliberately intended to hurt me, but at the same time he is too smart not to know what his statement meant. I wish I could have asked him why he hated me so much before emphasizing to him that, despite what he’s been told, I am not his enemy.
It felt like no matter what I did, whether I lived at my mother’s house in New Jersey or my apartment in New York, wrote in obscurity or heightened visibility, took initiative or became more submissive, my romantic life always floundered. And because David is black, his comment made me feel like I failed not only on a societal and gendered level, but also on an ethnocultural one, and this failure textured all my past dating experiences. What if I could not keep a man around long enough because I was a black woman who didn’t know her place? What if the modifier of being a black woman vacuumed all my other qualities away? It is an insecurity that I am constantly trying to tease out of my consciousness, but that is hard to do when you’re reminded of the statistics about black women’s marriageability, or lack thereof; every time your grandmother asks yet again if you’ve met anyone; when people crack jokes about why black women’s attitudes are the reason black men flock to white women.