I have had the same kind of song on repeat for weeks, and I want to take you inside what it has been teaching me.
TwoTees chanting I’m not your bitch no more. Sexyy Red saying plainly that she don’t wanna be saved. “Nacho,” where she grins that we gone have some fun and there’s a whole lot of y’all on the team. If you only half-listen, they sound like songs about sex, and I half-listened too, at first. But play them again, close, the way you would study anything you suspected was smarter than it first let on, and a different sentence surfaces under each one. The account is mine. Access is something I grant, not something I owe. I can close it, and I have. These are not songs about how much sex a woman is having. They are songs about ownership. And the fact that we are trained to hear ownership from a woman and call it filth — that is the thing I want to turn over in the light with you.
To do it, I need to introduce you to a poet.
Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian writer who called herself a warrior poet and earned the title — she wrote straight through the cancer that eventually took her, clear-eyed the whole way. In 1978 she gave a talk called “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” and it is one of those pieces of thinking that quietly rearranges the furniture in your head. Her central idea sounds strange on first contact: the erotic is not sex. Sex is one room it lives in, not the whole house. The erotic, she says, is a lifeforce — the deep yes in you, a source of power and of knowledge, the part of you that recognizes truth before your reasoning mind can catch up. And then she names what was done to it. The erotic, she writes, “has been misnamed by men and used against women” — shrunk down and handed back to us as the pornographic, which she defines not as too much feeling but as the counterfeit of it: sensation with nothing real underneath.
Stay with that word, misnamed, because it is going to do all the work. I am going to walk you around it three times, from three sides, because I have found that once you see it from all three you cannot stop seeing it anywhere. This is the first pass. Today we look at the erotic turned inward — the version you use to build a self.
Begin with the trap, and notice that it is always set as a choice. You can be pure, or you can be nasty. Covered, or guilty. A good girl who hides, or a bad one who got what she asked for. Two doors — pick one. It is the oldest either/or in the building, and here is what is worth noticing about every either/or: it is a room with only the two exits someone else painted on the wall. Lorde’s erotic is the door they did not paint. It is the third fact the whole binary exists to keep you from seeing — that your yes is power, and that it was yours before anyone offered you the other two.
Watch how that plays out in something as small as a photograph.
When I make an image of myself that I find beautiful — and I do, because beauty is how I have learned to recognize the divine in my own body — I am performing a quiet act. I am looking at myself and naming what I see holy. That look is a gaze, and it is mine. But here is the part I keep turning over, because it is fascinating in the way true things often are: the world has only ever been issued the one gaze. The man’s. The one that studies a body like mine in order to price it or to take it. And a world fluent in only one gaze cannot read the other. So it watches me regard myself with love and can only translate the image into thirst. It meets the erotic and files it, on reflex, as the pornographic. The misnaming, happening live, in my own comments.
I learned the same thing up close — not from strangers this time, but from a man I was seeing — and I want to tell it carefully, because the lesson is not that he was a villain. The lesson is what he revealed, which is far more useful than a villain anyway.
We were, by his own insistence, undefined; he had told me at length that he wanted no commitment and no label, and as someone exploring polyamory, I took him at his word. One evening he proposed, quite reasonably to his own mind, that he be allowed to approve which of my tops I wore when he was not with me. There was one in particular — a top I had already worn out in public, where my nipple kept slipping free — that he let me know I would not be wearing again in his absence. For my protection. Because a body dressed like that, he explained, invites bad things.
I got curious before I got angry, which I recommend, because the curiosity is where the lesson lives. I asked him to walk me through the mechanism — to say out loud why editing what I wore counted as protection, and by what right a man who wanted no claim on me had a say in it at all. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He grew angry, said he should not have to explain why I ought to respect him in how I dressed, and closed the conversation. I have come to recognize that closing as a specific event: the particular silence that falls when a man I had been treating as a peer discovers that I was supposed to be treating him as an authority.
Then, on a separate day, a smaller thing. He belched — constantly, everywhere, a whole way of being in a body — and I mentioned, lightly, that it wasn’t attractive. He experienced that as an assault: me limiting his self-expression, he told me.
Here is where it became genuinely interesting to me. The same man who wished to hold editorial control over my wardrobe could not survive the sentence belching is unattractive. His expression was sacred; mine was a security matter. And when I asked him to account for the difference, there was no account — only the anger, which I have learned to read not as temper but as the sound a worldview makes when it is asked to inspect itself and finds it cannot. It landed harder for me than it might for you, because I am gender non-conforming, and what I put on my body is not decoration. It is the difference between a morning I recognize myself and a morning I do not. He believed he was adjusting an outfit. He was reaching into the one room that is mine.
What stays with me is the confidence of it — that a man who had declined to be anything official to me still assumed a vote in what I did with my body. Not from cruelty. From a reflex so old it no longer feels like a belief: that a fem’s choices are shared jurisdiction. My body, I have had to learn to say, is not a town hall. There is no vote. I have taken, a little drily, to calling it the dictatorship of me — not arrogance, simply the fact that the governance of this body is closed to new members.
And that is the turn I want to make, because the disguise the whole mechanism wears is the word care. Let me protect you. Let me save you. It’s for your own good. Study the offer and you find two assumptions folded inside it. The first: that protection, from a man, arrives with a price — access, obedience in how you carry yourself — because we do not guard what we do not believe we own. The second, quieter: that you are safer managed than free. That the danger lives out there, in the street, in the neckline, and never in here, in the house where the managing happens. The women in those songs know the arithmetic I have had to learn the slow way — that the people who have hurt me most never called to me from a corner. They took me to dinner.
So when Sexyy Red says she does not want to be saved, I no longer hear defiance. I hear a correction. And the better question — the one we skip when we are busy being scandalized — is what she is answering. You do not get a chorus of women singing I am mine, the access is closed out of thin air. You get it as the reply to a very long question. The explicitness is not the wound. It is the body healing out loud.
So here is the first of my three passes at the misnaming, offered plainly, one student to another. Do not hide from your own erotic — and hear that I mean the power, not the sex. The deep yes you were taught to distrust. Because the hiding was always the real transaction. Every offer to protect me was, underneath, a request that I dim: wear the other top, lower the voice, hand over the pen, be kept safe from the largest version of myself. Protection that requires you to shrink is not protection. It is a cage, handed over gently, by someone who calls the handing love.
I grew up on Khia and Lil’ Kim — people the culture agreed were too much, too loud with their wanting. Everyone assumed the lesson a young fem takes from them is to give herself away. It was never that. What they taught me is the only thing I am really trying to teach you, about the one room no one else gets to enter and rearrange.
I am mine. To give, if and when I choose.
Everything else is just someone hoping you never find the third door.
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