First things first: we are not talking to Jamilah-come-lately. If you ain’t been boycottin’ R. Kelly since Aaliyah was 14, if you even needed to see the piss tapes to persuade you further, if Kevin Powell’s BK Nation petition was your entry into this conversation, you ain’t got the answers.
Second: if you’re trying to engage in an analysis of Black women’s sexuality, without acknowledging the role of pimp culture in your framing, you ain’t been doin’ the education.
‘Pimp culture’ is the umbrella under which we map the interlocking systems of oppression that create the material conditions under which Black women experience bodily and psychic harm. Vestiges of the gator-wearing, fur cape-lined pimp show up in our private and public spaces and we feel the brunt of his solid gold cane in our experiences of mass culture apparatuses. Pimp culture employs white supremacy, misogyny, racism, homophobia and the dogma of rugged individualism to physically and psychically undermine our sense of self, diminishing our capacity for self-determination.
Pimp culture is in line with other terms used in anti-violence discourse – sexual violence, culture of violence, rape culture. Yet, in the Black feminist tradition, we use the term to center the unique experiences of Black women and signal the specific forms of knowledge that we bring in understanding the depths of physical violence and psychic trauma on individual and societal levels.
Collectively, these forces show up as, for example, the vicious maligning of nine-year old Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis who was “jokingly” called a cunt by a major news media outlet. The sexualized verbal battery of a Black girl child, on the public stage, in her moment of glory, was an act of psychic aggression meant to humiliate Black girls and women, while underscoring that in pimp culture we are primed to be sexually exploited even in our most innocent moments. The language used was an attempt by pimp culture to turn a Black girl child out as a sexual spectacle, reminding those of us who are grown that we don’t own the mechanisms of our representation, nor do we have the allegiance of anyone in power who will ride for us.
Many of the comments on our first blog, “The Problem with BeyHive Bottom Bitch Feminism,” along with dialogues in the Twitterverse, support the idea that we should celebrate the presentation of sexual pleasure by Black women, especially when it’s done inside of marriage. In an effort to subvert the politics of respectability, some Black feminist hash-taggers have relied on strategic amnesia that discounts the reality of the material conditions of our sexual lives. To wit:
-
60% of all Black girls will experience sexual assault by the age of 18;
-
Black women comprise the highest group of new HIV infections, a rate 20 times as high as white women and 5 times that of Latinas;
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Black women die in pregnancy or childbirth at a rate 3-4 times that of white women due to lack of adequate sexual health services.
Whenever we consider Black women on stage, we also consider the auction block. When we think of public displays of Black female sexuality, Saartje Baartman isn’t far from our minds. When Black women voluntarily show “the actual inside[s] of [our] vagina” to an audience of strangers and peeping Toms, the torture of Anarcha Wescott takes center stage. Sexual violence is not a joke. We breathe these histories alongside our freedoms, which interrupt any fantasies of an ahistoric sexuality and make us suspicious and critical like a mutha.
Real Colored Girls are serving notice: game recognize game, and we are not here for corporate entities to consume our bodies, shit them out, repackage and sell them back to us as avatars for the music industrial complex. RCG are committed to defining healthy, loving, kinky, freaky, juicy, queer, bi and hetero sexualities for Black women. We are most concerned with publicly taking care of Black women’s sexuality by addressing historical and present trauma and arguing for the creation of a cultural environment in which it is safe for us to express ourselves sensually and sexually.
A cadre of Black feminists and Black women sympathizers (those who don’t proclaim to be feminist but ride for Black women) are calling for a “pleasure principle” that creates space in pop culture for Black women to express empowered sexualities. Any set of propositions that seeks to determine the fundamental basis for our sexual expression must consider the structural conditions under which said propositions are engineered. Pop cultural texts are produced inside of this context, and failing to acknowledge that in your analysis limits the work of dismantling the structures of pimp culture. Twerk it out.
Real Colored Girls encourages the communities of folk engaged in recent discussions about this work to move beyond Bey and consider what this moment has triggered around the presentation of Black female sexualities. Beyonce seems to have mastered the impossible, given the realities for most Black women in the U.S. – taking charge of her cultural production. Close reads of her recent and past work from writers Emily J. Lordi and Daphne Brooks invite us to consider the complex challenges for Black women artists. Even though Beyoncé is suspiciously sexy and joyfully raunchy, it would take a contortionist to situate her performances as a safe & empowered representation of Black women’s sexualities. Beyonce is a product of the hip hop generation – she woke up like that. In contracting with pop culture to distribute feminism, have we diluted the struggle of our Black feminist foremothers? For RCG, this is about the political economy of culture – how global corporate structures are not the context for transformative revolutionary action, and we shouldn’t look to them for our politics.
Our dream is for a revolution for Black women and our sexualities. As Mother bell exhorts, living out this dream requires us to do,
…the critical project of openly interrogating and exploring representations of black female sexuality as they appear everywhere, especially in popular culture.
Real Colored Girls are willing to ride for our radical politic, while acknowledging our privileges as artists and academics. We promote an oppositional consciousness that imagines radical spaces for sexual expression – physical, virtual and spiritual – which is risky and not without sacrifice. We call upon the lives and recorded texts of womanists and Black feminists as scripture and theory in the flesh.
Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Michele Wallace, Harriet Tubman, Patricia Hill Collins, Sojourner Truth, M. Jacqui Alexander, Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, et. al.
bell hooks cautions that Black women,
…haven’t as a group really carved out different ways to live our lives.
This is an amazing opportunity to do this work. In the spirit of loving Black women, we invite interventions that construct a post-capitalist imagination in which to dream ourselves whole.
#RealColoredGirls
#PimpCulture
Photo Credits: Bridge to Freedom Foundation; Trey Anthony
Real Colored Girls 
[…] Ratchet Me This: How Do We Ride For Pleasure In a Pimp Culture?. […]
Reblogged this on Tahsin Thoughts and commented:
A powerful article on the marginalization of women of color through “pimp culture” and how to acknowledge it.
[…] Read the provocative analysis here: https://realcoloredgirls.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/ratchet-me-this-how-do-we-ride-for-pleasure-in-a-pi… […]
So are you saying that there’s no space for healthy, generative black female pleasure in mainstream culture? That in order to find pleasure in mainstream culture I either have to subvert and transgress, or pleasure myself outside the view of mainstream culture? Are there any black women, whose work ordinary black women have easy access to, performing pleasure and exploring sexuality outside of “pimp culture”?
I would love to hear an answer to this question. I would also love folks like hooks to write more about sexual pleasure….
This is my concern exactly. I’m interested in the answer. The analysis is on point but what happens a lot of times in our hyper consciousness is that we forget about the actual practice. In theory our analysis make sense but on the ground, with real women it doesn’t translate. How do we honor our sisters while checking our intellectual privilege at the doorstep and listen to what THEY’RE feeling.
I might not completely understand your question, but the sad truth is there is unfortunately little space left where globlal big corporations (who dictate mainstream society) do not control or co-opt, the human experience, especially in the US, but they are there!
If you look to our own families, and communities you see the roots of our creativity and cultural and art and sexual expression through our own art before they are co-opted and used for corporate gain and our oppression. Many people are members of strong healthy families and communities where their own identity is supported and flourished –as individuals and communities. From there you see the roots of what is destined to be co-opted by “mainstream society” and deftly turned back against us to oppress us and rob us of our money. Like the food that is killing us (pop and processed foods; I work in food sovereignty and justice activism.) .global corporations study and manipulate us through carefully crafted scientifically researched methods to addict us –to food–which kills and maims us–diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, etc etc and pop culture–which continues our psychological and other oppression. We are psychologically and physically so ill, we cannot object much less fight. They get rich and what do their children watch and eat? Not what ours do?
(They must oppress to keep us unaware and subjugate–for them to keep their power over us and their power. That is how I experience this. (Artists like Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson are used and thrown away–like soiled tissue paper. You seen what happened to MJ; I would predict similarly for other artists who lose themselves in this corporate morass. (How long will it be that Blue Ivy is another Lindsey Lohan and gets a nose job? etc etc. What looks good in the short run cannot last when people have to sell their souls. We are all too familiar with the tragic stories of childhood stars….of any race or gender. Beyonce may look good today…but there is a price to pay for being owned by these ginormous corporations. In any case, we will see. I just can;t imagine anyone like her who was so lost her racial and other identity will last and thrive. Has anyone discussed how “white” she looks? and the whole isues of colroism and lookism with regard to Black women worldwide? We cannot ignore this and its implication. Why do you have to be white to succeed in the music industry etc etc or any aspect of mainstream society?)
But to get back to your question, I actually found the beginning of my sexual expression and liberation in Cuba through dance. (I am Black but my mom “knew’ the key to success of her offspring was to get them to compete in the white, corporate dominated world and she taught is all the skills to do so without understanding what she was doing. She rejected Black culture in our community and her family. (as well as other things.)
( It was only from my father that I learned some of the most important things in life, but not soon enough. I had a bout of major depression in my mid 30’s which caused me to seek myself out–the real me–not the one that I and my mom had worked so hard for me to manufacture to be “successful.” Consequently, I never learned to dance like my neighbors and cousins cause that was being “too Black.” etc etc, but the truth came home for me eventually. Sadly, my brother who bought even more into this than I and crashed midlife as well and is still constructing his humanity. It was horrible but both of us are becoming better people who cherish our Black as well as other cultural heritages. )
Now Cuba is not completely dismantled for oppression, but there are some things that never happened in Cuba. One of my initial experiences in Cuba was going to a book festival where people were still singing in Yoruba (after 500 years) The youth were out and dancing in very sensual ways and I found my freedom bit by bit–I would say I found my Blackness–my ability to let go and let my soul,my sensuality let go and do before I thought. It wasn;t about money or fame or selling or buyin; it was bout being free and expressing myself, celebrating my sensuality and sexuality as part of the human experience for its own sake. It was beautiful; it was very very pleasurable which for me makes life worth living, but it was not this big global corporate masturbation of sexuality; it was simple sincere sensuality and the joy of sensuality and sex. no more but no less either.
We need to create it ourselves (simple sexual pleasure and its expression through art) as humans have done for centuries and protect it from co-optation and recognize it as co-optation when it is, e.g. in the forms of Beyonce and other commercialized puppets of the “corporatocracy”–which is controlling our minds and thoughts such that we cannot identify our own simple separate sexual pleasure from prostitution for gain and power in essence. .Just like waht we do when these mega stars perform to pimp Coke and other poisons in our communites and families to our children.
Soon, they will be suppressing all our authentic expression of what it means to be human women–the joy of being a woman or girl, the joy of sex and our sexuality and sensuality. It is a simple pleasure. and has nothing to do with Beyonce–which from where I sit– is all about mind manipulation for power, control and domination and power, not about sensual, sexual pleasure–which has nothing to do with money but is just simply a basic part of being human. . It is not galmorous; you don;t need straight hair or white skin to enjoy it and money need not change hands.
I have also lived in Africa, both North and Sub Saharan, which has a complicated experience with sexuality, gender and feminism and global imperialism, corporate domination, but in parts this a lot of authentic sexual expression and it is beautiful–that is for enjoyment for part of life not for exploitation and making money.. I have been traveling here since 1978 and I have seen that and African hospitality change as Western, corporate domination expands globally.
.
Dat’s all.
I guess I would say I see Beyonce as a victim and I show compassion for her and try to raise her consciousness all the while recognizing the lie and oppression that she is being used to perpetuate and the system of which she is a part. I have compassion for her and for all humanity which I believe is on the wrong path. I predict she will, like so many mega stars, have some type of very public breakdown as well as “Blue Ivy.” If Beyonce survives apparently unscathed, Blue Ivy will be a mess is my prediction, unless they are able to raise her in some normal way…..
I might not completely understand your question, but the sad truth is there is unfortunately little space left where globlal big corporations (who dictate mainstream society) do not control or co-opt, the human experience, especially in the US, but they are there!
If you look to our own families, and communities you see the roots of our creativity and cultural and art and sexual expression through our own art before they are co-opted and used for corporate gain and our oppression. Many people are members of strong healthy families and communities where their own identity is supported and flourished –as individuals and communities. From there you see the roots of what is destined to be co-opted by “mainstream society” and deftly turned back against us to oppress us and rob us of our money. Like the food that is killing us (pop and processed foods; I work in food sovereignty and justice activism.) .global corporations study and manipulate us through carefully crafted scientifically researched methods to addict us –to food–which kills and maims us–diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, etc etc and pop culture–which continues our psychological and other oppression. We are psychologically and physically so ill, we cannot object much less fight. They get rich and what do their children watch and eat? Not what ours do?
(They must oppress to keep us unaware and subjugate–for them to keep their power over us and their power. That is how I experience this. (Artists like Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson are used and thrown away–like soiled tissue paper. You seen what happened to MJ; I would predict similarly for other artists who lose themselves in this corporate morass. (How long will it be that Blue Ivy is another Lindsey Lohan and gets a nose job? etc etc. What looks good in the short run cannot last when people have to sell their souls. We are all too familiar with the tragic stories of childhood stars….of any race or gender. Beyonce may look good today…but there is a price to pay for being owned by these ginormous corporations. In any case, we will see. I just can;t imagine anyone like her who was so lost her racial and other identity will last and thrive. Has anyone discussed how “white” she looks? and the whole isues of colroism and lookism with regard to Black women worldwide? We cannot ignore this and its implication. Why do you have to be white to succeed in the music industry etc etc or any aspect of mainstream society?)
But to get back to your question, I actually found the beginning of my sexual expression and liberation in Cuba through dance. (I am Black but my mom “knew’ the key to success of her offspring was to get them to compete in the white, corporate dominated world and she taught is all the skills to do so without understanding what she was doing. She rejected Black culture in our community and her family. (as well as other things.)
( It was only from my father that I learned some of the most important things in life, but not soon enough. I had a bout of major depression in my mid 30′s which caused me to seek myself out–the real me–not the one that I and my mom had worked so hard for me to manufacture to be “successful.” Consequently, I never learned to dance like my neighbors and cousins cause that was being “too Black.” etc etc, but the truth came home for me eventually. Sadly, my brother who bought even more into this than I and crashed midlife as well and is still constructing his humanity. It was horrible but both of us are becoming better people who cherish our Black as well as other cultural heritages. )
Now Cuba is not completely dismantled for oppression, but there are some things that never happened in Cuba. One of my initial experiences in Cuba was going to a book festival where people were still singing in Yoruba (after 500 years) The youth were out and dancing in very sensual ways and I found my freedom bit by bit–I would say I found my Blackness–my ability to let go and let my soul,my sensuality let go and do before I thought. It wasn;t about money or fame or selling or buyin; it was bout being free and expressing myself, celebrating my sensuality and sexuality as part of the human experience for its own sake. It was beautiful; it was very very pleasurable which for me makes life worth living, but it was not this big global corporate masturbation of sexuality; it was simple sincere sensuality and the joy of sensuality and sex. no more but no less either.
We need to create it ourselves (simple sexual pleasure and its expression through art) as humans have done for centuries and protect it from co-optation and recognize it as co-optation when it is, e.g. in the forms of Beyonce and other commercialized puppets of the “corporatocracy”–which is controlling our minds and thoughts such that we cannot identify our own simple separate sexual pleasure from prostitution for gain and power in essence. .Just like waht we do when these mega stars perform to pimp Coke and other poisons in our communites and families to our children.
Soon, they will be suppressing all our authentic expression of what it means to be human women–the joy of being a woman or girl, the joy of sex and our sexuality and sensuality. It is a simple pleasure. and has nothing to do with Beyonce–which from where I sit– is all about mind manipulation for power, control and domination and power, not about sensual, sexual pleasure–which has nothing to do with money but is just simply a basic part of being human. . It is not galmorous; you don;t need straight hair or white skin to enjoy it and money need not change hands.
I have also lived in Africa, both North and Sub Saharan, which has a complicated experience with sexuality, gender and feminism and global imperialism, corporate domination, but in parts this a lot of authentic sexual expression and it is beautiful–that is for enjoyment for part of life not for exploitation and making money.. I have been traveling here since 1978 and I have seen that and African hospitality change as Western, corporate domination expands globally.
Interesting essay. (But please don’t call The Onion a “major news media outlet.”)
Men are the key to turning things around for sisters. You see a girl with a real father (or two moms) at home, chances are she’s going to be strong, smart and confident. I’m not saying single women can’t do that too, but a single woman who’s endured shit her whole life sure has a hella lot harder time bringing up the next generation.
It’s time for the men to step up and support.
Black women have been doing the majority of the work for too long. We need to raise our standards for who qualifies as a “good man,” and who is qualfied to get in our beds. I think the lesbians may have already figured it out.
Hi sis; I used to hang with the lesbian community and they model domination behavior and exploitation in their communities as well from physical to emotional abuse. I was shocked to see women beating other women and using other women for money. Apparently you don;t have to be a man to behave in this way. There is no community in which our human behavior does not need to be dismantled for oppression–both in reality and its artistic and expression. So I am not sure what lesbians have figure out except that they prefer other women over men.
Now let the Church say Amen!
So good I had to come back again. I would include in revolutionary imagining the lives and experiences of our Black Transgender sisters. Homicides against Transgender are the highest ever and half of those are Black sister. hohttp://www.avp.org/storage/documents/2012_mr_ncavp_hvreport.pdf
Also, the use of the term “Real Colored Girls” implies that all those who don’t agree or stand by your analysis are in turn not real women of color and that says a lot to me, since we’re talking about the nuances.
This “essay” ignores the fact that black women are hyper-sexualized from jump so whether black women are fully clothed and do not display their sexuality, they will be seen and regarded as as hypersexualized she-beasts (which is how those little girls R. Kelly was fucking aren’t seen as victims, but in their rightful place as little black girls — well, women, since they were denied their girlhood).
Your aversion to public displays of black female sexuality seems to be rooted in some politics of respectability and that you can’t see a black woman’s deliberate expression of her sexuality as removed from what happened to Saraa Bartman seems to be more of a personal problem than what ever it is that this essay was trying to discuss.
^This. The clothing (or lack of clothing) that black women wear is not causing our being seen as ‘hyper-sexual’. Our ‘hyper-sexuality’ has been historically and socially constructed and is not based on any reality. So, all of the focus on what famous black women wear or how it impacts representations of black female sexuality seems entirely misdirected. And if we focus on the reality of the HISTORICAL/MYTHICAL/SOCIAL construction of our “hyper-sexuality”, we’d see that comparing Baartman to Beyonce is only relevant insofar as the WHITE mainstream public responses to their bodies were similarly fucked up and that’s about it. We can’t blame Baartman for invoking that response. .. and we can’t blame Beyonce for invoking that response. There is nothing either could/can do to deflect that response. Neither woman was/is inviting “hyper-sexuality” in the way we are discussing it. Beyond that, I think it is wholly inappropriate to compare the two women unless you want to make a superficial point.
Brilliant powerful uncompromising commitment to anit oppression work. Some are more comfortable being oppressed-perhaps most of us. Thank you for raising our awareness to our own oppression and fighting for our liberation even when we did not know we needed it!!!! Keep up the brilliant truth work .
I might not completely understand your question, but the sad truth is there is unfortunately little space left where globlal big corporations (who dictate mainstream society) do not control or co-opt, the human experience, especially in the US, but they are there!
If you look to our own families, and communities you see the roots of our creativity and cultural and art and sexual expression through our own art before they are co-opted and used for corporate gain and our oppression. Many people are members of strong healthy families and communities where their own identity is supported and flourished –as individuals and communities. From there you see the roots of what is destined to be co-opted by “mainstream society” and deftly turned back against us to oppress us and rob us of our money. Like the food that is killing us (pop and processed foods; I work in food sovereignty and justice activism.) .global corporations study and manipulate us through carefully crafted scientifically researched methods to addict us –to food–which kills and maims us–diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, etc etc and pop culture–which continues our psychological and other oppression. We are psychologically and physically so ill, we cannot object much less fight. They get rich and what do their children watch and eat? Not what ours do?
(They must oppress to keep us unaware and subjugate–for them to keep their power over us and their power. That is how I experience this. (Artists like Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson are used and thrown away–like soiled tissue paper. You seen what happened to MJ; I would predict similarly for other artists who lose themselves in this corporate morass. (How long will it be that Blue Ivy is another Lindsey Lohan and gets a nose job? etc etc. What looks good in the short run cannot last when people have to sell their souls. We are all too familiar with the tragic stories of childhood stars….of any race or gender. Beyonce may look good today…but there is a price to pay for being owned by these ginormous corporations. In any case, we will see. I just can;t imagine anyone like her who was so lost her racial and other identity will last and thrive. Has anyone discussed how “white” she looks? and the whole isues of colroism and lookism with regard to Black women worldwide? We cannot ignore this and its implication. Why do you have to be white to succeed in the music industry etc etc or any aspect of mainstream society?)
But to get back to your question, I actually found the beginning of my sexual expression and liberation in Cuba through dance. (I am Black but my mom “knew’ the key to success of her offspring was to get them to compete in the white, corporate dominated world and she taught is all the skills to do so without understanding what she was doing. She rejected Black culture in our community and her family. (as well as other things.)
( It was only from my father that I learned some of the most important things in life, but not soon enough. I had a bout of major depression in my mid 30′s which caused me to seek myself out–the real me–not the one that I and my mom had worked so hard for me to manufacture to be “successful.” Consequently, I never learned to dance like my neighbors and cousins cause that was being “too Black.” etc etc, but the truth came home for me eventually. Sadly, my brother who bought even more into this than I and crashed midlife as well and is still constructing his humanity. It was horrible but both of us are becoming better people who cherish our Black as well as other cultural heritages. )
Now Cuba is not completely dismantled for oppression, but there are some things that never happened in Cuba. One of my initial experiences in Cuba was going to a book festival where people were still singing in Yoruba (after 500 years) The youth were out and dancing in very sensual ways and I found my freedom bit by bit–I would say I found my Blackness–my ability to let go and let my soul,my sensuality let go and do before I thought. It wasn;t about money or fame or selling or buyin; it was bout being free and expressing myself, celebrating my sensuality and sexuality as part of the human experience for its own sake. It was beautiful; it was very very pleasurable which for me makes life worth living, but it was not this big global corporate masturbation of sexuality; it was simple sincere sensuality and the joy of sensuality and sex. no more but no less either.
We need to create it ourselves (simple sexual pleasure and its expression through art) as humans have done for centuries and protect it from co-optation and recognize it as co-optation when it is, e.g. in the forms of Beyonce and other commercialized puppets of the “corporatocracy”–which is controlling our minds and thoughts such that we cannot identify our own simple separate sexual pleasure from prostitution for gain and power in essence. .Just like waht we do when these mega stars perform to pimp Coke and other poisons in our communites and families to our children.
Soon, they will be suppressing all our authentic expression of what it means to be human women–the joy of being a woman or girl, the joy of sex and our sexuality and sensuality. It is a simple pleasure. and has nothing to do with Beyonce–which from where I sit– is all about mind manipulation for power, control and domination and power, not about sensual, sexual pleasure–which has nothing to do with money but is just simply a basic part of being human. . It is not galmorous; you don;t need straight hair or white skin to enjoy it and money need not change hands.
I have also lived in Africa, both North and Sub Saharan, which has a complicated experience with sexuality, gender and feminism and global imperialism, corporate domination, but in parts this a lot of authentic sexual expression and it is beautiful–that is for enjoyment for part of life not for exploitation and making money.. I have been traveling here since 1978 and I have seen that and African hospitality change as Western, corporate domination expands globally.
[…] Colored Girls’s most recent post, “Ratchet Me This: How Do We Ride for Pleasure in a Pimp Culture?”, deconstructs the “interlocking systems of oppression that create the material conditions under […]
Thanks for this post! It actually inspired me to further write about black feminism issues on my blog (I’m fully aware I’m not of African Descent or a woman, but issues are still issues.)
Here’s an article about music that EMPOWERS and DEFENDS the honor of black women i wrote
http://tahsinthoughts.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/la-rebelion-defending-la-negra/