Depathologizing Black women’s sexuality should involve acknowledging Black women’s capacity to affirm their sexuality for and between themselves.
A piano and the light sizzle of a hi-hat open up “Say Yes” by Floetry, and if I have on my earphones and close my eyes before the bass comes in a few seconds later, I can feel it thump behind my eyelids and in the back of my throat as Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart begin to sing about butterflies and “loving you” and wondering if “I can be with you for the night?” As the song goes on, breathy “baby’s” and “yes’s” turn into a collection of “ooh’s,” “mm’s,” and “right there’s”—because “you make me so, so, so”—that climax into a moment with Ambrosius that is something between scatting and moaning, not able to be pinned down as either but existing beyond the limits of words like both. And it is the unbounded space crafted by this vocality, and moments like it across Black women’s music, that I think emphasizes how crucial it is to nurture an interior Black female sexuality.
Black women’s sexuality and eroticism are typically framed as existing solely (or primarily) externally. Let American popular culture tell it, Black women are either too “sexually deviant” (Miller-Young 2014:4), “hypermaternal” (Kwate and Threadcraft 2015:213), or “too assertive…[to be] submissive” (Hill Collins 2000:78) enough for sex or to be sexy, with class, skin color, hair texture, body shape, style of dress, and age often working as means through which to sort us between the three.
Before we have had the chance to explore what our bodies can do and feel, Black girls are told to cover up when male family members are coming over, or are called “fast” when they attract what is seen as excess attention from boys their age. Black women elders often push a puritanicalness that is meant as a protective measure, but tends to arrest the development of Black girls’ understandings of sex and sexuality for themselves. And Black women have tried for as long as these “controlling images” (Hill Collins 2000:69) have existed to combat them and the ways they seep into community care work aimed toward Black women and girls, in attempts at convincing other folks that our sexuality is not up for public scrutiny, and when it is, it is usually family business.
I do not think it is completely fruitless to place energy in this direction; in fact, there is a harm reduction quality to it. However, as Black feminist scholars like bell hooks (1992), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), and Mireille Miller-Young (2014) explain, the roots of these controlling images run too deep and too wide (and are too profitable) to be eradicated by simply managing the overgrowth.
Placing the lion’s share of our efforts toward convincing other folks of our sexual agency centers the people who have been refusing that agency, and the structures of power used to do it, rather than the Black women whose sexual agency is being refused. What should be fostered alongside efforts toward depathologizing Black women’s sexuality is Black women’s capacity to affirm our sexuality for and between ourselves. I think a pathway centered on homoerotic intimacy, particularly one bolstered by music, can work towards that.
My use of homoerotic follows Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as “the sensual…those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared” (Lorde 2020). Here, homoerotic intimacy does not only mean sexual attraction between Black women but includes a shared sense of sensuality, of being and feeling in the world, between Black women that can be called upon by attending to the sexual.
Someplace between being seen as too much and being categorized as a joke, Black women’s desire is always already seemingly inconsequential, especially when it is self-produced. It is a tale as old as this country, and a tall order to rectify. Although I will always hold out hope that this can change, we are not there now. So, the work cannot just be about convincing folks that Black women’s sexuality does not begin and end with the tropes they have been taught to believe.
In music and music listening, this homoerotic intimacy can emerge through the creation of opportunities to feel the music through the body. Not just as the biological processes of hearing, but as somatic responses that our bodies have to things that signal sexual and non-sexual arousal, like goosebumps or feeling horny.
We can have somatic responses to sexual lyrical content in music; a good storyteller knows how to tell a narrative in ways that invigorate or manufacture moments of embodied pleasure. However, in this case, the pleasure is linked to the narrative and would more than likely elicit the same response if told the same way by someone else.
When a listener gets aroused by the “moans, groans, and [vocal] shudders” (moore 2021:191) in a song, that response is the consequence of having a direct line to another person’s experience of pleasure, even if it is played up for the sake of the music. Neither is more meaningful than the other, but it is the human-to-human connection of the latter when Black women are involved that facilitates a closing of the distance that has been manufactured between Black women and the collective development of our sexuality.
When we meet Ambrosius in the space she creates with her sounds of pleasure at the end of “Say Yes,” she invites us to share the moment with her as equal partners rather than receivers of a feeling already past. And because the song is mostly genderless outside of a single “him” right at the beginning, we can slip on the “you” that Floetry invites to “open up,” “feel,” “rest,” and let them “undress you, baby.” When we arrive with Ambrosius at the end of the song, what we get in exchange for accepting their invitation toward vulnerability and intimacy is the chance to bear witness to another Black woman’s expressions of an equally vulnerable and intimate need to desire and be desired.
There is room to view this moment at the end as orgasmic, if we follow the increasing presence of moans, vocal quivers, breathiness, and incomplete lines in the song and read them as a move from initiation (“I been watching you for a while…we can take that step to see, mm / If this is really gonna be”) to fully making love (“I always knew you could be mine / I recognize the butterflies inside me, mm / sense is gonna be made tonight, tonight”).
A subversive act in itself, this moment creates an opportunity for us to connect to our own erotic desires and desiring, regardless of whether the song turns us on or not. If we are aroused, then that arousal is not only an organic response (as much as something can be when it is sold to us) to being on the receiving end of something pleasurable, but it is also a reminder that we can feel and author a pleasure crafted for us, by us.
Janet Jackson’s “Speaker Phone” (1997) (or “Throb” (1993) or “Would You Mind” (2001) or “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun)” (1986)), cupcakke’s “Juicy Coochie” (2016) (or “Deepthroat” (2016) or “Vagina” (2016)), Rapsody’s “Lonely Women” (2024), Donna Summers’ “Love to Love You Baby” (1975), Donna Mcghee’s “Make it Last Forever” (1978), Victoria Monet’s “Dive” (2020), and TLC’s “Let’s Do it Again” (1994) are all examples of other songs carrying the potential for Black women’s homoerotic intimacy through their spotlighted moments of sexual vocality.
This is in contrast to the sexual vocality found in a song like “Fuck Me (Interlude)” by The Notorious B.I.G., released in 1994 and featuring Lil’ Kim. Between the exaggerated sound of bed springs and her hurling of anti-Black and fatphobic insults, which are not worth repeating here, you can barely hear the “oh yeah’s” and “mm’s” that sound her pleasure. While I cannot claim that it is impossible for Black women to find something akin to sexual liberation in this song (I mean, anything is possible, right?), her sexual vocality here is in service of proving Biggie’s ability to “fuck” to his predominantly male fans.
This performance of vitality and prowess is a different flavor of homoeroticism that scholars in Black music have spoken to that emerges between Black male artists, their peers, and/or their male fans (Hill 2009; Walcott 2003). Lil’ Kim and her sexuality exist in this song as something to be possessed, and it would not take much to trace how that possessiveness manifested in Biggie and Kim’s relationship outside of the music (Alexis 2017).
Somewhere on the internet, some time ago, I saw some discussion around Floetry’s “Say Yes.” While I do not remember exactly what was said, and the internet moves too fast for me to find it now, I do recall many folks in the comment section—including other Black women—saying the song was good, but the ending was too much. Not too long before this, Ambrosius’s opening line, “there is only one for me,” was used comically by another Black woman in a skit about being asked for a piece of gum.
Now, I ain’t gon’ hold you, that is one of my favorite videos on the internet, and as I have listened and re-listened and re-listened to “Say Yes” while drafting this essay, alongside feeling more than my share of fire in my belly, I have seen the opening shot of that video so clearly in my mind and got a good, good chuckle out of it. And while these couple of instances online are not the totality of how folks engage with this song—and its appearance on several “freaky r&b” playlists on Spotify is confirmation—they are representative of the pervasiveness of the indifference we are encouraged to put on when engaging with Black women’s pleasure.
Someplace between being seen as too much and being categorized as a joke, Black women’s desire is always already seemingly inconsequential, especially when it is self-produced. It is a tale as old as this country, and a tall order to rectify. Although I will always hold out hope that this can change, we are not there now. So, the work cannot just be about convincing folks that Black women’s sexuality does not begin and end with the tropes they have been taught to believe.
The task, as Black feminist scholars have shown, is to remind Black women that while we can get a joke off at our own expense and have the agency to believe someone’s moans have overstayed their welcome in a song, we have got to take our erotic selves seriously and spend time getting to know what that looks and feels like for us beyond what we have learned. And we can do that with and through music.
The music video for “Say Yes” is composed of moments that explore the intimacy of the way Ambrosius and Stewart engage with their world. We get close-ups of their hands touching the escalator railing or writing in their journals; we slow down in moments when they make eye contact with passersby. We are left wondering who, if any of them, will be their lovers.
Is it the artist sketching Ambrosius a few seats down in the subway car as they share a smile? Or maybe it is the skateboarder that gives Stewart a double-take as she walks by, or the one she locks eyes with while watching dancers on the subway platform? Maybe they are on their way to a lover we have not seen yet. As we travel with Ambrosius on the subway towards its next stop and with Stewart down the escalator to the subway platform, the video’s final shot is of them seated together in the subway car, sharing a smile, as it pulls away, and the video fades.
References:
Alexis, Diamond. 2017. “Lil’ Kim Speaks On Her ‘Violent Relationship’ With Biggie.” https://www.bet.com/article/fsqkrx/lil-kim-speaks-on-her-violent-relationship-with-biggie.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images.” Pp. 69–96 in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London; New York: Routledge.
Hill, Marc Lamont. 2009. “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31(1):29–54. doi:10.1080/10714410802629235.
hooks, bell. 1992. “Selling Hot Pussy.” Pp. 61–77 in Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
Kwate, Naa Oyo A., and Shatema Threadcraft. 2015. “Perceiving the Black Female Body: Race and Gender in Police Constructions of Body Weight.” Race and Social Problems 7(3):213–26. doi:10.1007/s12552-015-9152-7.
Lorde, Audre. 2020. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” in Sister outsider. New York, New York: Penguin Books.
Miller-Young, Mireille. 2014. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–22 in A Taste for Brown Sugar. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
moore, madison. 2021. “DARK ROOM. Sleaze and the Queer Archive.” Contemporary Theatre Review 31(1–2):191–96. doi:10.1080/10486801.2021.1878510.
Walcott, Rinaldo. 2003. “The Struggle for Happiness: Commodified Black Masculinities, Vernacular Culture, and Homoerotic Desires.” Pp. 131–46 in Pedagogies of Difference. Routledge.
