Free Yourself

This is not an easy road.

This road to alleviating the remnants of misogyny from our community but it must be done.

Misogyny pervades every aspect of our culture. The fight to stop it has been a long one. I argue that the most important to tackle misogyny head on is by stop shaming women for being sexual human beings. If people want to build a safer community for women, they have to stop regarding women as objects. They must examine how they themselves perpetuate rape culture--a culture that harms women and girls.

Too much of our value as women is emphasized on things that do not matter such as how we dress and how many people we have had sex with. It is time to move away from that. It is time that people value women for the full human beings that we are. It is time that people stop placing into boxes that do not give us enough space to breathe, enough space to feel our full potential and power as women… enough space to be human.

Respect for women can not be conditional. That is not respect at all. That is merely tolerance. If all that is stopping a man from disrespecting a woman is by what she wears, that shows how little he respected her in the first place. When people say that a woman must maintain “modesty” in order to be treated with respect, it shows how disposable people think women are. A woman should not have to be modest to be treated with respect. A woman should not have to hide herself in order to be accepted.

We have to free the chains. We have to free all the chains. We have to recognize how sexual abuse impacts Black women and girls, particularly. People must unpack why they view Black femme sexuality as something deviant instead of something that should be respected. The Black community must work to dismantle rape culture within our community. It is time to stop calling our young girls “fast-tailed” when they are preyed upon and sexually abused by older men in our community.

I want a better world for women. I want women to be able to be regarded as whole humans. I want people to recognize our humanity. All of it. I want people to stop reducing a woman down to her sexuality because they do not understand and accept that women are multifaceted and we come with a myriad of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. A woman’s body is hers. Her sexuality is hers to express and own. Understand this. Accept this. Once we all come to the light, we might all be free.