(pictures that are not safe for work are in post, please be cautious! For the rest of this series, see here.)
…I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t live in fear of walking alone at night because I need night walks as much as I need food and water. I need the cool air and the sleeping houses, I need the shadows and the fat spiders up in the arches of the old bridges. I figure it’s a toss-up between possible rape and eternal house arrest, another nice double bind for me to negotiate my way through. River By Davka published in Make/Shift
I love the darkness of the world–I love it especially when it’s the middle of the dog days of summer, and overwhelming heat fades into a just right coolness that bathes and reinvigorates tired skin. I’ve remained awake well into the early morning hours just so I can get a moment of relief, so I can find a smile and a cool hand on my forehead.
But if the darkness is where I find relief, the light, the sun, is where I battle on…
It’s been dark and gray in Michigan for days, for weeks. On my walk, I jump over huge puddles of melted snow only to land in wet, shit like mud that covers my boots. Big loose clumps of snow fall around me and on me like long wet rain drops.
And as I walk, I imagine a different world….
When I started blogging on tumblr, I was very excited to see the huge amounts of erotic smutz all over it. I am not much of a fan of porn, but the art of erotica is something I really enjoy. I DM’d everybody telling them all about my wonderful discovery–hooray, beautiful erotic images coming at me a mile a minute! How beautiful, how sexy!
But then the excitement of newness wore off, and as all us lit crit chicks so often do, critical analysis time set in.
Why were all these women frolicking in the sun, literally becoming one with nature–white?
Is it because the porn world (even erotica!) is racist? Or is it because women of color relaxing in the sun (rather than working) is so far beyond the realm of imagination of most people, it just never occurred to anybody to take pictures of women of color outside?
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves
of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself…~Walt Whitman
There is no historical memory of sexual joy, of frolicking, of good old fucking, while out in the open air for women of color. While Walt wrote about the lusty rudeness of a beautiful tree, Native women were negotiating extermination policies that were intimately linked to their sexual and reproductive capabilities. Black women were fighting off Masters, living for years in molded attacks rather than subject themselves to rape.
And from that we get where we are today: Latinas, Chicanas and black women fighting men off in pantie fields by wearing heavy clothes and covering their faces with what I can only imagine are stifling hot bandanas. Native women sitting on top of piles of depleted uranium.
So many bodies devastated.
This is the outdoors that I identify with. It terrifies me to see this picture, even as it brings peace and comfort. I want to look like that when I am dead. I want flowers to come from my body. I want to nurture the worms and the shit mud and be a place for the snow to rest.
But…not yet. Please not yet.
The prayer of a woman of color.
Please not yet…
pazenlavida @bfp could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush? ::daydreaming::
Right now, I am alive, and I miss the burn of the sun on my arms, on my hips, on my open thighs. I miss a feeling I’ve never had before. I miss that feeling for my daughter, who last summer, refused to go outside without her shirt on any more. I wish I was in Europe or South America, where at least on beaches, it make sense that women are topless. I wish there was some place in the world where, at least in the imagination, it makes sense for women of color to open every part of her body, from the tips of her nipples to the inner layers of her vuvla, to the sun.
I wish that there were Take Back the Night marches for the daytime.
This was one of the few smutz pictures I could find of a woman of color outside that wasn’t dependent on tired animal fetish stereotypes (aka The Black Tiger Woman). And even as this woman is not an animal, she can’t escape the reality of brownness in a white supremacist world–white women interact not with the camera or the viewer–but with the sun, with flowers, with fields, with memories. Their ties to reality are minimal. That woman in the top picture may have a job at a grocery mart, but you’d never guess it. She (and the women who look like her) gets at least one moment in time where the only thing that exists is her pleasure and the world.
The woman of color in her picture, however, gets a quick night of servicing the camera after she has spent all damn day servicing the needs of non-tipping mother fuckers that probably grabbed her ass and leered at her tits.
Which is not to say that I think that every single picture in the entire world of women of color getting it off or being sexual in the outdoors is racist trash or problematic–I’m sure that every person reading this can direct me to 20 lovely pictures of women of color outdoors in all sorts of marvelous angles and positions. What I’m getting at here is that the daytime is not any safer for women than the night time is–that sexual safety and joy exists in pictures for some of us and for others of us, we don’t even get that. That for some of us, an outdoors that is sexualized and beautiful only exists in so far that menial labor can be connected to that space.
And I miss the sunshine…
I imagine this woman with this joy surrounded by blue sky, her skin bare, uncurling like a cat in the sun after a long winter locked up under clothes…
you got me rockin and a’reelin….
To the queer community in the U.S., who has made a fabulous reputation of embracing the slutty whore in us all by doing exactly what I am talking about here–bringing the slut out of the darkness of the night and into the glory of a sun soaked march–I say a thank you and offer profound admiration.
But I do wish it didn’t make me cringe with horror to imagine parades of slutty sun worshipers marching down the tulip lined streets of Holland Michigan. As if the two worlds are so far apart, in different rooms of Dante’s hell.
I can’t believe that Michigan and liberation are so far apart, I can’t believe they are separate worlds…I simply refuse to accept that my world will always be simultaneously so monitored and so unsafe.
could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush?
Can you imagine it?
Can you?
Can you smell the wind that mixes sun and bush together?
Can you see the glory of your lover, of yourself, through the brilliance of the morning sun?
Do you feel safe?
- Share
February 24th, 2009 at 3:20 pm #
Ohhhhhhhh BFP….
This post…
speechless.
I’ll return when words do.
February 24th, 2009 at 5:25 pm #
Wow.
I’m not a fan of porn either and always felt that undercut my own queer radical possibilities.
I’m going to spend more time outside and not take any California sun for granted anymore. Find power and prayer in a world of my making.
Maybe I’ll take off my socks. I think butches like the winter months because it’s another excuse no one will question to pile on more clothes.
Thanks for this.
February 24th, 2009 at 7:40 pm #
Beautiful
February 24th, 2009 at 7:43 pm #
Why were all these women frolicking in the sun, literally becoming one with nature–white?
I went through the same thing, and one day I saw a black woman in one of these pictures and it hit me that, omg, where the hell are all the WOC in these pictures?
Ever since then I’ve become interested in finding cool and/or sexy pictures of WOC. Mostly I’ve been using them as signature banners at a website but I should post them at Tumblr too…
Another thing I’ve wondered is, I love the Hippie Goddess site, which are “porn” I guess? Some are just really cool pictures of naked women who are hairy. I found some women on there who look like Latinas, but not a single Black or Asian or Middle Eastern woman. I have to wonder why that is. Are “hippies” really always white? :\
February 24th, 2009 at 7:51 pm #
Oh yah, the picture of the flower covered woman and death… When my grandmother was dying we were gathered around her and praying for her and I had a very similar vision of the Earth coming up and swallowing her up… It was scary a little bit and made me really sad, but it did seem really peaceful…
February 24th, 2009 at 11:27 pm #
This is awesome. Thanks so much for this.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:16 am #
one of the best feelings i’ve experienced in the past few months; lying on a beach in cali with my girls (in NOVEMBER) with no tops on. we said, we deserve this! our titties deserve this! the sun on our bare skin felt so beautiful.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:24 am #
Just a small word about Native women from a Native friend of mine: they don’t want to be photographed naked. From their perspective in the existing porn theatre they would be stooping down to a another level of objectification by whites. Native women were sold as slaves specifically for the purpose of sex, hence the term squaw (which actually means crotch). They have no desire to entertain or be the object of entertainment for white men ever again.
February 25th, 2009 at 12:05 pm #
Sequoia–I hear what you’re saying, and I’m certainly not encouraging all women of color to go out and do naked shots so that white men can ogle them. I’m saying quite the opposite, in fact–that there’s a lot of reasons that women of color in general don’t feel safe in broad daylight with only their skin to protect them.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:25 pm #
My view would be more conservative but because of my Native heritage it makes sense not to objectify my body this way to please others. I have a body, its sacred in a society that would love to do otherwise with it. I stand strong as a Native woman and respect the sacred boundaries of my body.
I am one that finds porn bothersome, some find it liberating but I still find in objectifying. Its not a safe place and as a healer it is not good because it messes with your balance and harmony within body and spirit.
I have felt my best in the middle of the forest whether nude or fully clothed. Never feel safe to be myself in the concrete jungle and capitalistic hodgepodge of metro regions.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:35 pm #
clothes of the mind…
Symbolically, sunshine has been valued as a source of freedom, escapism, and youth while night has been birthed for money, work, and dissection. There needs to be a marraige between night and day in our minds, in our bodies.
I have come to curse the man-made night and love my own night(with or without the sun rising) because there I am not possessed by external hands opening up my mind.
Opening up…
Luddie
February 25th, 2009 at 2:50 pm #
Incredible post!
February 25th, 2009 at 3:05 pm #
Thank you
February 25th, 2009 at 3:31 pm #
I found many images I think you would like of women of color enjoying nature and posted them on my blog.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:33 pm #
Cecelia–I hear what you’re saying–I’m not a big fan of porn–there is some of it that I like, but on the whole–meh. But for me, it’s not so much that I see it as objectifying, but more that I see it the way Raquefella talked about up there–that i don’t see *me* and it’s just SO restrictive. But at the same time, I know that many people find it liberating specifically because it brings their personal desires out of the “ewww” closet and legitimizes their needs. Which is good.
But having said all that, what I just want to make it clear here, what I’m talking about is SO not–hooray, let’s get all the women we possibly can into porn, rah rah running around naked for men to look at!
What I’m talking about is for ourselves. Like Nadia said–letting our titties just rest and bathe and enjoy the sun. If we can’t even imagine it, how can we make it happen? So I’m not saying, i want everybody in porn, I’m saying, i want everybody to have the *freedom* to sit on a rock in the sun, butt naked, and feel safe, relaxed, joyful, without worrying that boundaries will be violated or that white men will get off.
Which, in the end, it doesn’t matter if we like porn or not, that’s not the question–the question is how can we get to THAT world–the world of safety, golden sun, relaxation, and sun baked titties???
February 26th, 2009 at 7:20 am #
Davka linked to you and she was absolutely right when she said that you are amazing. Some of the pictures are really great. How beautiful we are, our skin is, when we shake ourselves free of the binds that sexist/racist culture has thrown over us.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:53 am #
While I read this I had memories of my time at the March for Women’s Lives. I was with many women of Color as we waited with our signs to walk. As we moved with the group, we ran into several white women who were topless and/or had placed NOW stickers or other stickers about “women’s” rights on their breasts to cover their nipples and areolas.
The women I was with became so upset and saddened that in this space, when we had a similar agenda, it was thrown in our faces that their bodies are protected more than ours even/especially here.
I had a similar experience as Nadia for my 30th birthday on a beach and it was glorious! As a fat woman of Color there was also an added level of “our bodies deserve this.” I think for these reasons (and so many others) I love the work of Laura Aguilar.
February 26th, 2009 at 9:27 am #
@bianca–as another fat woman of color, I am *totally* envious of you (and nadia)–My body is literally *aching* right now to get these clothes off and sit out in the sun–to feel warm everywhere–to kill the winter moss and cleans the pores…I want that. and I am SO glad that you (and nadia) got that!!!!
February 26th, 2009 at 11:02 am #
yes, the freedom to lay out in the sun and be baked by it and be free- the native women who don’t want to be ogled by white men- this is exactly the point- they have been robbed of the right to be naked in the sun by a history of hypersexualization, assault, rape, stigmatization, etc at the hands of white supremacist patriarchal society. they don’t have the levity of choice that we white women do in choosing porn or erotica or casual nakedness in the sun- the choice, if it comes at all, come after a lot of mindfucked thinking and doublethinking required to deconstruct all the shit before the choice can be made.
like my orgasms. a man can just have one so easily, but i must first battle a bloodsucking pantheon of demons produced by a patriarchal culture that has tried to destroy my natural ecstasy.. a girl can’t just fuck and feel good- she has to first be torn from her body by all the images she was assaulted with early on and she wonders, “do i look like them?” “does this make me dirty?”
the need to battle like this before a choice is the absence of privilege. the conversation is not about pro porn or anti porn.
bfp you are brilliant.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:20 pm #
Beautiful, well written post.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:34 am #
Ahhh, this post. I am stuck in my chair. I am a white woman and I’ve never realized these things you write about. I’ve never acknowledged this loss. It never made it through the bubble I was born with and remains with me, no matter how blurry i feel the lines of my “whiteness” are, no matter what my class.
God damn. This piece makes my heart hurt with the realization of so many things you wrote.
I will speak out about this now.
Sometimes I feel that if our sisters can’t enjoy something that we can, that we shouldn’t engage in it ourselves because it creates the illusion that this “anonymous” woman is all women. Thank you for this piece. great writing.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:45 am #
Sequoia, i read your post and I think it is telling that these photos come from Australia, and BFP spoke about location. You seem to be missing the points.
Also, your comments are BACKLASH.
don’t make this about you.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:44 pm #
Beautifully articulated.
I also understand Sequoia’s initial posting & agree.
There are many things I don’t understand, nature is so simple & so pure, women seem quite frequently to be in harmony with this. Men have done so much to damage both the power & nature of women & to oppress one another, most of the things that mentioned in the comments reflect this, I don’t know why women are suffering in this way & why we have to discuss our sexuality in this way when all that is natural and good is evident.
What is this about? Is there a ‘love’ post on this subject that can create the kind of lofty awareness that the above article did?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:05 pm #
hm. not really sure what your asking iwawoman.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:28 pm #
It’s a question that I find hard to articulate but I think I finally got it answered today. I’ve been ‘calling out’ for the answer: “somebody please help me to understand before I loose my faith in man & my sense of liberation about female sexuality”, today I spoke to one socioligist and his active feminist girlfriend and I think it created some sense of relief.
Some of the comments on here have been about the rights or wrongs of pornography and how people feel about it. I think there is a natural joy in experiencing something beautiful and sensual and sexual and many images reflect that beauty & create that joy, where the discomfort lies I think at times is when images reflect oppression & a vulgarity that comes from the need to controll. The media feeds us with many conflicting thoughts on these things & this creates a conflict between something we know should probably be fine but is sometimes represented in a way that makes us uncomfortable because of the more negative associations.
I don’t want to get too philosophical here but I think that may be why the whole double oppression thing exists in us women of colour. I’m not sure that as a women of colour I would really think of it that way but there may a subconscious awareness of it.
Apart from that, I just wanted to say mainly that it was a well written and thought out article and that the images and layout captured managed to capture a lot.
March 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am #
Good piece of work. Well written with beautiful pictures.