Heterosexual Black feminists (and many darkskinned Black women in general) champion Jackie Aina is breaking beauty standards  by being a darkskinned Black women-despite the fact that she has almost perfect skin, has a beauty YouTube channel about makeup, often sports virgin hair that (literally) costs thousands of dollars, has blinding white teeth, and a “slim thick” body. My question is- is it still “changing beauty standards” if you’re only trying to move the goal posts to include yourself? 

Down here we have Carter the Body, a Black woman who is a personal trainer, wears her natural hair short, wears no makeup, no weaves lace fronts u parts 360 units ect. and challenges a thousands ideas of what it means to be a beautiful Black woman by simply being who she is- and yet I hardly EVER hear the same Black women who are always complaining about how unfair beauty standards are for Black women speak up and say her name. As a matter of fact, just so no one can claim they’ve never heard of her, I NEVER see gender-non conforming Black lesbians in the natural hair community, on any of these “breaking beauty standards” IGs or Facebook groups, and its no question in my mind as to why.

This is why I have a problem with Black heterosexual women who claim they want to “change” or “challenge” beauty standards. Its never been about changing beauty standards, just shifting the goal posts so that you can finally be labelled as beautiful- so you can finally see how it feels to get as many likes on IG and Tumblr as the lightskinned girls with long hair, so you can finally feel good about yourselves by amassing enough external validation. Ya’ll don’t give a fuck about all Black women- you only care about heterosexual Black women and never the Black lesbians, never the Black women who wear their natural hair without giving two fucks as to whether or not Black men find short/natural/4c hair attractive, never the women ya’ll call d*kes and are afraid to share the same public bathroom with. 

The same “pro Black” Black women never speak on behalf of Black lesbians. Ya’ll are so homophobic- so disgusted, disturbed by, and religiously AGAINST Black gay people that the sheer thought of having a woman like Carter as a role model for natural hair of breaking beauty standards or challenging the Black male gaze that you erase Black gender non-conforming lesbians from every community entirely. That’s how deeply unconscious your discomfort around Black lesbians goes

Ya’ll really don’t care about challenging beauty standards- you just want to lower the bar until you’re included 

Using sex as a means temporarily boost your sagging self-esteem is not “sex-positive”

Having sex with any man who calls you attractive, flatters you, or shows sexual interest in you regardless of whether or not you’re attracted to them is not ‘sex positive”

Sending nude pictures because you’re desperate for male attention and don’t feel confident unless man are constantly calling you pretty, sexy, hot, ect, is not ‘sex positive”

These are all glaring signs of low self-esteem and low self-worth and should be addressed and worked through. Stop championing these unhealthy coping mechanisms and teaching young women and girls that the only way to feel confident is through male attention and approval. 

Here is a free download of Self-Esteem for Dummies. 

Here is a free download of Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Dummies.

PSA: Why I Hate DD/lg

I can’t believe I actually had to make a goddamn PSA about this but fuck all- here goes.  TW for sexual assault, child abuse, grooming, rape, and child sexual abuse. 

I am so tired of you DD/lg kinksters in my inbox. Apologists- men and women- trying to justify their involvement in DD/lg to me, a victim of grooming and abuse, seeking to somehow change my opinion on BDSM and DD/lg in particular. 

You cry, moan, complain to me that its just a kink! A fetish! It’s just something you were drawn to, something that feels ‘right;. You proceed to tell me how happy it makes you to make your ‘Daddys’ happy, how empowering and feminist BDSM can be.

I was 16 years old when I was groomed by a man twice my age into  DD/lg.

A grown ass man telling a 16 year old that ‘Daddy’ is the only thing that makes him hard. A 35 year old man telling me how sexy it is when I suck my thumb. A grown ass man calling me his ‘little girl’. A grown man telling a 16 year old abuse survivor that the solution to her trauma was more abuse and more trauma.

Read that. Re-read it. Now read it over and over and over again until the reality of it is burned into your brain.

After reading this, after pouring out my story about the scars this left on my mind, the abuse and pain and humiliation not only I by hundreds of other victims of CSA and grooming have put forth, the only thing that you have to say to me is ‘But it’s just a kink-My Daddy would never sexualize an actual child!- It’s just a kink, a fetish-What people do in  private is no one else’s business’

Your Daddy would never sexualize an actual child? How do you know if one of your favorite ~*~*nymphet**~*~ photoshoots isn’t  actual child pornography?  But its okay to sexualize child-like things to you people, apparently. I ask- what about all the thousands of men who do and would sexualize a child? What about me? My story? About how a grown man had no problem sexualizing and grooming me? My story doesn’t matter to you, CSA survivor’s stories don’t matter to you, because its damaging to the image that you want to project of BDSM and DD/lg. The actual reality that there are quite a few men that do and will use BDSM and DD/lg to sexualize and and abuse young women and girls flies far over your heads, because you refuse to except the reality outside of the pastel pink ~fAIRYwORLD’ you’ve managed to create within Tumblr.

The only thing that matter’s to you is your ability to get yourselves off. 

How dare you come into my inbox and tell me I shouldn’t be angry at grown adults contributing to the sexualization of children? How much entitlement and audacity must you have to tell me that my story doesn’t matter because ‘Daddy’ is the only word that gets your boyfriend’s dick hard? That the suffering and anguish and abuse of GIRLS, of CHILDREN means nothing in the face of your desperate desire to orgasm?

You’re putting a dick before the abuse and trauma suffered by thousands of children, and have the audacity to call yourselves feminists.

And of course, the glorious kinkster excuse- its no one else’s business what we do in private. You’re not doing it in private though. Your disgusting shit is everywhere, even the most innocent of pastel blogs isn’t safe from DD/lg kink-o-sphere. Somehow, someway, any content that manages to exist outside the sexualization will inevitably be sexualized by DD/lg Tumblr. 

I’ve followed blogs that have to literally put ‘DD/lg blogs don’t follow me’ in the tags just so that kinksters stop harassing them. I’ve seen well known Japanese fashion blogs flat out say that posting pictures of them holding onto cute stuffed animals or wearing animal outfits was the worst thing they’ve ever done because DD/lg Tumblr managed to take over, rendering their inboxes full of disgusting men asking if their in the market for a ‘daddy dom’

I’m making this post because I am so enraged at the onslaught of messages that keep finding themselves in my inbox. There are women crying out in pain about their abuse and rape, and inbetween that there are women and men trying to tell me why its okay to plaster their renditions of child abuse all over Tumblr because cummies uwu

You don’t give a damn about me. You don’t care about CSA survivors, you don’t care about the actual abuse, rape, and trauma that women like me have to endure, the constant triggering I face whenever a seemingly innocent blog starts posting ‘nymphet’ ‘DD/lg’ bullshit that mimicks so accurately the abuse we face.

You care about your on ~nymphet~ blogs, saturated in your desire for male attention to the point where you’re willing to throw CSA survivors under the fucking bus if it means you’ll get to suck dick and satisfy your pedophile tendencies.

I don’t usually say  this to women, but stay the fuck out of my inbox, because I honest to Goddess despise you people. Get the fuck away from me, stop trying convince me that you’re desires to sexualize little girls is somehow organic and natural. Stop trying to win me over or win my favor, fucking stop it. 

I don’t want to hear shit from you people, triggering me every fucking day. Every.fucking.day. I have to see this shit, see my abuser’s face, and know that I will never be able to undo what he did to me.

Advocating for more and more ‘types’ of beauty isn’t destroying or challenging The Beauty Myth, its simply moving the goal posts. Beauty standards, by their very design, cannot and will not include all women as beautiful- that’s not what they were created to do. 

The entire point of beauty standards is to create a sort of ‘archetype’ of beauty based on qualities and characteristics that only a minority of women possess, (or require a significant amount of time and labor to achieve), then tell the majority of women that these qualities are what they should strive to achieve. What I don’t think a lot of women realize is that we’re not at the goal, we just moved the goalposts-which has created an  entirely new set of rules and standards, creating the opposite effect of what a lot of us originally intended.  For example:

If natural hair is to be considered ‘beautiful’, it must now meet this particular set of criteria- long, loosely curled, or super defined. The goalposts have been moved, making achieving ‘beautiful’ natural hair a laborous and time consuming process. This is why TWA isn’t considered as attractive as say, a perm-rod set, because in addition to a 4c afros association with Blackness and short hair’s association with masculinity, it is not as time consuming and tedious as, say, a woman with waist-length hair taking three hours to create a flexi-rod set. Femininity= time consuming, and the more time, money, and labor spent the more feminine we perceive a woman to be. Natural hair is only considered attractive if the amount of time, energy, labor, spent on it is equal to that of a weave, and even still, natural hair in its most basic form is not considered to many in the Black community as attractive as straight long hair or weave, creating this fucked up hierarchy of attractiveness. 

The solution, of course, is to do away with the concept of ‘beautiful’ hair and focus instead on healthy hair- yes, even in the natural hair community we should do away with the concept of beautiful hair. Healthy hair should always be prioritized, and as long as we continue to put emphasis on curl-loosening styles and length, then we find ourselves closer to falling into the hierarchy of natural hair, which says that looser curl patterns and long hair are better and more desirable than kinky, short hair. 

The solution is to get rid of beauty period, and instead focus on other qualities and characteristics, namely self-worth and confidence building. Instead of telling girls that they’re beautiful, why don’t we tell them instead that beauty doesn’t matter, that they are talented, strong, capable, outstanding, that they can achieve anything that they set their mind to? 

The concept of beauty has become so entangled with the concept of self-worth that I don’t even feel like we can separate the two, and it seems almost unfathomable for us to have one without the other. Its okay to be ugly, its okay to not be considered attractive. Black women do not have to be beautiful to be of worth. 

If you teach a little Black girl that she’s beautiful, you’re still telling her that beauty matters. She’s going to realize one day that while she might be beautiful that there’s an entire scale of beautiful and that on a scale of 1 to ten her dark skin, wide nose, and belly make her a 3, and that she’ll never obtain that perfect 10, but she’ll die trying because that;s what women are just supposed to do. If you teach her that her self-worth is not dependent on whether or not she’s attractive, then whether or not she’s considered attractive won’t have any bearing on her self-worth. 

Tackling the dehumanization of Black woman by making strict adherence to femininity the goal isn’t helping us, and its only becoming more and more obvious to me that it’s not the solution. We humanize ourselves when we confide in each other, when we create spaces centered on ourselves an our needs. We humanize ourselves when we speak our pains, when we create mirrors of each other in the forms of art and literature, when we provide opportunities for Black women to see themselves gazing back. We humanize ourselves when we laugh and dance, we humanize ourselves not by adhering to femininity, but by growing strong, by finding support in one another, by building strength while also allowing ourselves to be weak.

But we don’t like this method. We like goalposts. We like being considered more attractive than other women, we like the privilege femininity affords us and the ease of life it can provide. We’re willing to continue to engage in femininity, because we know what happens to those women who don’t, and we like being considered more attractive than that other girl.

Until a significant portion of Black women decide to abandon femininity, this plan won’t work. It won’t work because without enough Black woman to support each other, we’ll always be tempted to go back, because of the privilege and comfort femininity provides, if only socially.  Until we see enough gender non-conforming women reflected back at us, like a mirror, then femininity will always be the norm. 

Because eventually, somehow, somewhere, someone is going to tell that Black girl that she’d look better with a perm, and unless she has enough women to guide her and support her, enough women to help her fight against the beauty myth that screams at her from every source of media, every newspaper, magazine, commercial, and radio song, eventually she’s going to see that the closer she is to someone else’s beauty ideal, the more humanity she’s granted. 

@racefem

Because Internet is being dodgy and publishing messages I didn’t mean to publish, I won’t be answering any questions until I fix it. I don’t want to risk publishing your messages. I’ll try again tomorrow. 

I didn’t mean to publish that message and I deleted it. I am very sorry, it wasn’t my intention. 

bihectic this is the one I meant to send you 

bihectic its too early for this but here

PSA

If you send me a message via Tumblr, I want you to know that I read each and every message. 

I’m full of shit and incredibly inconsistent, so I can’t say what the fuck I’m going to do, other than answering messages