Look, Mom! I got quoted in Essence!
Fierce!
I am sure my Mother will be tickled. We used to love reading Essence. As a kid, it was amazing to see a magazine that was for Black people that had Black models looking beautiful and talked about our lives. All-around Sensuality Guru Abiola Abrams does a column for them,(which is, apparently, cross-syndicated to Huffington Post!) and she quoted me in it.
I think Ms. Abrams’ response is spot-on. Fact is? This woman is in a situation where she is being emotionally abused beyond the limits of her consent. It is INSANELY effed up. I know love is powerful and shit but if someone I loved were THAT thick, that callous, and that dismissive about respecting my boundaries I’d be the fuck outtie and sue his ass for emotional abuse. I bet that would learn him something about buying people. No matter how far from the mainstream we might swim in order to fulfil our fantasies or explore kinky, twisted sex, we sure as hell had best be swimming in a stream of ongoing consent, assent and explicit permission. Otherwise…yeah. Straight fucked up. End of story.
It is still kinda funny to me to see my name cropping up with increasing frequency here and there in mainstream media news outlets. HOWEVER, this is a deeper and more subtle clue that the discussion of kink & BDSM is creeping toward a more nuanced level of discourse. It would be easy for a sex columnist – especially one writing for a magazine targeted towards the Black American demographic – to dismiss this whole situation as horrible and worthy of scorn. But the fact that Ms. Abrams saw the opportunity to disambiguate between sexualized racial play and what this woman’s husband is doing – which is non-con emotional abuse, IMO – isDEEPLY gratifying to see.
Go pervs!
I admire the reach your message is getting. Brava!
I am REALLY impressed at how journalists, writers, pundits and newsfolks are looking at us as sources and coming to us for intel rather than writing us off as freaks. It is, I think, a more subtle measure of how we are inching towards a reduction in knee-jerk demonization. At least I HOPE that is what it is :-D
Here’s to more nuanced conversations, sis! xo
I find it really interesting (ie. fucked-up) that all of that talk started up after they got married. Was he waiting for the opportunity to bust out the racism because he was afraid she wouldn’t marry him if he did it before?
I wondered that myself, then I saw her mention they were engaged within six months and then I had to chide myself for assuming they had premarital sex. Either dude didn’t have the opportunity to non-consensually verbally abuse his fiancee because they never got to that point before they got married or (more creepily) he deliberately waited until they were married to unleash the slurbeast.
What is kinda telling to me is that a savvy person into that kinda play would hedge his bets against having a partner who doesn’t like it. They’d negotiate, and, you know, get consent. Her descriptions of his behaviour smacks of an insensitive jerk who is quite possibly actually bigoted and racist, and uses this framework to disguise his troubling truths.
A fine line, for sure… but the most important one to draw, I feel, when you are playing on the edge with this kind of emotional dynamite.