I hoarded bodybuilding magazines and wasted nights diagramming routines which earned me more injuries than benefit. In the gym, I exercised to nausea, vomited and despised myself for being ill equipped for exercise regimens designed to market magazines.
The world has an appetite for our pain, and this is what I refuse. This is why I will never again decide to protect someone who harms me.
When we say we are committed to Black liberation it must be in service of sex workers’ autonomy. But they are never nuanced beings. The fight for sex worker liberation is the fight for all Black lives, and until that is prioritized, erasure and respectability politics will persist. In every industry.
With inadequate responses to CSA and little trust in police among people of color, relying on cops to address an issue like CSA is questionable, at best.
Black men’s “senseless” acts of violence are much more sophisticated in nature than both the liberal and conservative anti-abolition culture of poverty argument would have one believe.
Being a sexual minority puts pressure on gay men to connect sexually or romantically with the gay men who are most proximate to them.
In our efforts to resist this silencing, however, we must also consider the ways that others who are not public figures are implicated in these discussions
For those of us survivors whose bodies revolt, it’s not just that we are experiencing random medicalized dysfunctions. We are reacting to the toxicity surrounding us.
We’re tricked into believing that sex is about performance more than it is about connection, autonomy and consent. And the pressures of performance encourage men to consider hardness as our only option, means of expression, and source of intimacy.
State institutions such as the police, and child welfare services are often complicit in sexual violence enacted upon Black women and girls.
