Kahlia’s Tale: What Is Sexual Liberation?

This article was originally published on February 8, 2021 on my Medium page.

*Writer’s note (content warning): This article briefly mentions content on emotional abuse, sexual consent, state harm, and use of the term “rape”. Photo is from Afrosexology.*

2020 was a whirlwind of a year and 2021 thus far is proving to be an extension of such energy. I want to start this off by acknowledging the privilege I have with the ability to work remotely and quarantine at home. 2020 was an extremely tough year for a multitude of reasons (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic, election season, uprisings, etc.) and I would be raggedy if I didn’t at least address it briefly. Given this reality, I personally had some free time to lean into the things I wouldn’t have normally considered under different circumstances.

Processing in a Parallelogram

My previous conception of heaux-shit (which I define as any sexual activity that is non-normative compared to the status quo of purity culture) was influenced by a white feminist interpretation of sex positivity. My understanding of most rhetoric from white feminism is that it’s mostly guided by the need to be equal to white cishet men. This disallowed me the opportunity as a Black queer person to find sexual freedom juxtaposed to Black queer feminism/womanism, which has helped me better confront my learned ideas about my body. White feminism is very “anything you can do I can do better” type of political energy. Having my sexual liberation be essentially measured by how similar I am to the value of white cishet men in a colonized US context, or any cishet man for that matter, left me with a sexual life that was devoid of any ethic of care, desire, reciprocity, and intimacy I truly craved. I no longer desire to maintain this facade of sexual liberation. I use terms like “femme-ness”, “detriment fucking”, and the examination of my own sexual experiences alongside how I navigate systems of oppression to illustrate how I discovered a deeper understanding of sexual liberation.

As a Black cis woman (who is newly navigating queerness), this realization in conjunction with Jazmine Sullivan’s 2021 album Heaux Tales, Shrimpteeth’s question post on Instagram, and Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body is Not An Apology has greatly impacted my overall understanding of sexual agency and my previous desires for Black cishet men. The sexual attraction is still there but the process of decentering them as I navigate my more evolved sexual autonomy is crucial and freeing. I am discovering more of my own sexual desires and reckoning with my sexual power during a whole ass panoramic.

Heaux Tales, inspired me to publicly document and reflect on my own journey with sexual liberation. Her beautiful voice is paired with audio narrations from Black women, which span from topics within hetero-sex, love, and relationships. A project that Sullivan intended to be a homage to her own sexual liberation. While there has been commentary around whether or not this project was actually pro-heaux, I think that this project helped to continue conversations around what sexual liberation is and/or could be for Black women. This piece is my sociopolitical offering to that conversation.

Navigating this pandora has given me more clarity on some aspects in my life that should be altered, removed, and/or allowed to stay. I’ve also physically and intentionally experimented with my sexual expressions and allowed my newer conception of “femme-ness”** provide me with language to finally create the conditions for my true desires. My older conceptions of femme-ness considered anything feminine as being weak, fragile, overly sensitive, and this hindered my ability to access my full humanity. Keep in mind, these thoughts around femininity were heavily influenced by misogynoir that was embedded in my household and the world around me. Nonetheless, these newer conceptions have helped me see who I am when I feel safe and to better name that I desire to be cared for with tenderness. All of these things have been crucial to my sexual liberation journey. With a more radical politic that can better name the violence of misogynoir, patriarchy, and gender expectations based in binaries, I have been able to engage in deeper self-reflection regarding my sexual agency that coincides with my healing journey.

Cumming To My Senses

This deep, mental, and emotionally reflective process essentially began in 2019, right before the pandemic commenced, and further snowballed into an awakening of sorts in 2020. I distinctly remember stumbling across Shrimpteeth, on my timeline and reflected on some of the questions they posed in a post. This post included a list of questions to guide Instagram users into self-reflection to better assess our own desires, personal meanings of sex, and identify what parts of us are being neglected during sexual encounters and relationships. The question that really stuck with me even after I closed out the app was; “why do you engage in sex with your pals?”. Up until that point, I never really unpacked why I have previously chosen to engage in sex with my past partners (who have all been Black cishet men) and it led me to a wave of thoughts regarding my these sexual decisions.

This conversation cannot be had without discussing the political underpinnings that govern cishet relationships in any form. Unfortunately, there is patriarchal violence embedded in casual sex culture. The power dynamics present in heterosexual relationships, whether they be mostly sexual or romantic in nature, create interactions that may technically be consensual according to what is socially acceptable but coercive when you fully unpack those interactions from a deeper political lens. These issues directly have impacted how I navigate casual sexual relationships especially when I consider how compulsory heterosexuality helps create the conditions that assume these behaviors are to be expected. These behaviors and interactions tend to be expected because the mandate of patriarchal violence is to possess power over gender oppressed people (i.e. Black cis/trans women, gender-nonconforming folks, nonbinary people, etc.). This calls for a radical consent culture that destroys rape culture and completely revamps how we engage in relationships with each other. Rape culture isn’t just sexual assault cases grabbing headlines. It is also consenting to shit you don’t actually want to do because of the internal/external pressures created by these systems. While we can do some healing work that makes radical consent culture plausible, it will also take dismantling patriarchy and other systems of oppression to fully carry out this cultural shift.

While my experiences were not created outside of these systems, I still had to sit with some hard truths. I had to be radically honest with myself about why I would shrink and contort my authentic self in order to not “fuck it up.” Or why I would completely detach any emotion from the situation to avoid being perceived as overcommitted (re: “catching feelings”), and how it resulted in me being mentally absent from the sexual experience. Or why I felt as if I was asking for “too much” by suggesting we do more than hang out in my bedroom, smoke, and watch Netflix. Or why I would sleep with people I wasn’t super into or attracted to soothe my own low self-esteem because I didn’t want them to feel undesirable. It’s the mental gymnastics for me. I had to sit with the fact that I literally accepted the bare minimum and called it sexual liberation.

And that’s a big ass pill to swallow.

I, then, had to acknowledge the source of such actions. How did I learn to adopt these tips and tricks to avoid conflict and intimacy? Who taught me I was asking for/doing too much? Where did I learn this body shame and negative self image? Why was I unconsciously moving through sexual shame?

To help answer these questions, I’ve been reading The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor. (I haven’t finished it yet but we working on it.) In the text, she brings up this concept of “Best-Interest vs. Detriment Buying”, which refers to how what we consume is aligned with our self-worth. She defines “best-interest buying” as pouring our resources into the things that exhibit what we truly want for our lives. It’s essentially an investment in our pleasure and radical self-love. In contrast, “detriment buying” is then consumerism motivated by internalized beliefs of unworthiness or deficiency. These two concepts brought more clarity to how I’ve navigated my sex life. I call this “detriment fucking”, which is essentially going through the motions in your sexual experiences because of internalized worthlessness. You don’t engage in these experiences because of a true burning passion. You engage because of the assumption that this is the best it’s gonna get for the time being.

I’m also clear these unhealthy behaviors stem from my upbringing. Without getting too far into detail, there was presence of emotional abuse, sex negative ideologies, and mild forms of bullying within my family and amongst my peers. I also wasn’t taught to radically love myself or my body, so I naturally learned how to loathe it thanks to society. Additionally, there’s an acknowledgment of the fact that the people in my life were/are also indoctrinated by these systems. In my healing journey I’m learning to reconcile and hold space for all of these things while maintaining boundaries that leads to internal peace and personal freedom.

How I Plan To (Internally) Glo Up…Disrespectfully

For starters, I’m back in therapy again. Sorting through and unlearning the behaviors born from these experiences to build a healthier version of myself. Ultimately, my sexual decision-making was not conjured in a vacuum, but was rather an extension of unchecked trauma and societal expectations that influenced how I regarded myself. In various ways, the sexual relationships with cishet men taught me what I truly want, and has led me to better understand that my sexual healing and liberation is a journey and not a destination. Moving forward, I think it’s best I learn my lessons in different, more satisfying and fulfilling ways. Like setting and enforcing boundaries that won’t require me to contort myself for someone else’s ego. Or allowing myself to be emotionally vulnerable while practicing sustainable communication. Stuff like that. If I can articulate this current space I’m in regarding my sexual self, I can absolutely rework how I engage with folks sexually that aligns with the version of me that is learning to radically love herself.

And, with the help of taking precautions in this pandemy and a naturally low libido, I find myself going from having a rather “sexually active” year in 2019, to being mostly sexless in 2020 (and beyond?). It’s not something I’ve felt any particular way about either. It’s peaceful not having to deal with the extra shit that comes with negotiating sex, especially with cishet men. Speaking of cishet men, I’ve also come to the conclusion it’s not a requirement to sleep with them. There are very specific things I require these days in terms of how I’d like to be treated. For an abundance of reasons (i.e. patriarchy, toxic masculinity, overall selfish socialization, etc.) and while still under these systems, they simply do not have the capacity to provide me with what I require. Besides, only considering cishet men as my suitors, in any regard, is severely limiting and I choose to opt out. Compulsory heterosexuality is just not it for me and I find some peace in knowing I don’t have to participate in the fuckery.

Lastly, my personal commitment to dismantling these systems, with community of course, is also a key component of how I will continue to navigate my sexual journey. For me, that’ll call for investing time and energy into cultivating a sexual life that is in alignment with best-interest fucking while also leaning into a sexual liberation praxis that is more in service to Black liberation.

Black folks’ sexual liberation journey is political, complicated, and for some…violent. Black sexual liberation would mean that we would be able to navigate any relationship from a place of radical consent. Thus, sexual liberation is not apolitical and cannot be fully achieved without dismantling white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, rape culture, ableism, and other systems that have not been named but also contribute their share of violence. There’s only so much sexual liberation that can be obtained while under the duress of these systems especially since Black people are not free. Never forget that the personal is always political.

**I recognize that femininity has historically been coded as white and can also be in line with the gender binary. This is me acknowledging that my conceptions of femininity and/or femme-ness is still rooted in the gender binary in various ways both then and now and should continue to be dismantled.**