I just didn’t see the point back then. I did, however, see the point in publicly declaring oneself to be in a monogamous relationship. It was never lost on me that society thinks a woman should be allotted one dick to use and she should be happy with it for the rest of her life. But I always saw sex as something to be enjoyed. Repeatedly. With as many different partners as possible.
In interviews I am often asked what sage advice I have to offer young women. I admit the advice I give in Redbook is different than what I tell people over drinks. There is a gorgeous, perfect, talented young actress who I talked to at a party a few weeks ago.
“Look, you can’t take your pussy with you,” I said. “Use it. Enjoy it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, until you run out of dicks. Travel to other countries and have sex. Explore the full range of everything, and feel zero shame. Don’t let society’s narrow scope about what they think you should do with your vagina determine what you do with your vagina.”
As I talked, the look on her face was the slow-clap moment in movies. There was the beginning of the realization that I was really saying this, then the rapturous joy of a huge smile as she knew I meant every word. Enough with teaching people to pretend that sex is only for procreation and only in the missionary position and only upon taking the marital oath. If you’re having consensual sex with another adult, enjoy it.
So repeat after me: I resolve to embrace my sexuality and my freedom to do with my body parts as I see fit. And I will learn about my body so I can take care of it and get the pleasure I deserve. I will share that information with anyone and everyone, and not police the usage of any vagina but my own. So help me Judy Blume.
three
BLACK GIRL BLUES
Here is a secret to talking to teenagers: they open up best when you’re not sitting across the table staring at them. For the past year I have mentored a class of teens around age fourteen. I find they share the most about what’s going on in their lives when we’re taking a walk. Recently, I took them out on a particularly gorgeous, sunny day. As this one boy Marcus got a bit ahead of me, he did this stop-and-start fast walk, like some sort of relay race. He would stop in the shade of a tree, then sprint through the direct sunlight to stand at the next tree.
“What are you doing?” I finally asked.
“I don’t want to get any blacker,” said Marcus.
“You’re literally running from your blackness, Marcus,” I said. “You know? It’s a bit much. I’m not going to win any mentoring awards if you keep this up.”
I checked in on him at lunch—the other secret to getting teenagers to talk is food. He explained that the relay race was all about girls. The girls he considered the hottest in school only liked the guys who look like Nordic princes. And that’s not him.
“You’re perfect,” I said. “Look at my husband. He is not light skinned, and he has not exactly lacked for female attention. So many girls are gonna love you exactly the way you are. I’m not light.”
“You get lighter sometimes,” said Marcus. “I’ve noticed.”
I scoffed. “If you want to stay inside on a soundstage with no windows for months on end,” I said, “you too can look jaundiced. It’s because I work inside.”
“Yeah, well. It’s possible then. So I’m just gonna stay out of the sun.”
This kid I’m supposed to be mentoring had been sold the same ideal I had when I was young. I too went through periods where I stayed in the shade. I was obsessed with putting on sunblock, and in late summer I would insist on showing people my tan lines. “Look, this is my original color,” I would say, proffering my shoulder to a white girl. “Look how light I am.” I was really saying, “I have a chance to get back to that shade, so please excuse my current darkness.”
I learned to apologize for my very skin at an early age. You know how you tell little girls, even at their most awkward stages, “You’re so pretty” or “You’re a princess”? My family played none of those games. The collective consensus was, “Oof, this one.”
I was so thin that I looked like a black daddy longlegs spider with buckteeth. This is not overly earnest, false-humility celebrity speak, I swear. In case I didn’t know that, the world presented a relentless barrage of images and comments making it clear to me and all my peers that most of us would never get within spitting distance of classic beauty. But I thought that at least my parents should think I was cute. When they would gather my sisters and me for a family photo, they would check each face for perfection. There was always a pause when they got to me. “Ah, Nickie, what a personality you have. You are funny.”
In my family, light skin was the standard of beauty. This was true both in my dad’s family, who were all dark-skinned, and my mom’s family, who were very light. My mom was the most beautiful woman in the world to me—and I looked nothing like her.
With my dad, I simply wasn’t his version of pretty. His ideal is very specific: short, light skin, long hair. I checked none of the above. Of my sisters, I looked the most like my father, and I think he wanted no part of that. As for my mother, only now do I understand that she made a decision to never praise my looks because she grew up being told her looks would be enough. They weren’t. Young Theresa Glass was encouraged to build a foundation on the flower of her beauty and simply trust that it would remain in bloom long enough to win the security of a good man. Her thoughts on the books she read voraciously would only spoil the moment. “Shh,” they said. “Just be pretty. When you get a man, talk all you want.”
So my mom was the nineteen-year-old virgin who married the first guy who said he loved her. And by the time she had me, she’d realized that marriage was not the end-all. He didn’t want to hear her thoughts, either. Looks had gotten her no-fucking-where.
I couldn’t lighten my skin to be considered beautiful like her, but I thought that if I fixed my hair, I had more of a fighting chance at being told I was pretty. At age eight, I begged my Afro-loving mother to let me start straightening my hair with relaxer, which some called crainy crack. Twice a month on Saturdays, she begrudgingly took my sisters and me on the hour-long drive from Pleasanton to my cousin’s salon in Stockton for the “taming” of my hair.
My mother had rocked an Angela Davis Afro in the seventies and did not approve of these trips to the salon. Yet she repeatedly caved to our demands that we straighten our hair, a political act of surrender on her part, or simply maternal fatigue. Either way, my desire to be seen and validated by my white peers when it came to my hair had the power to override her beliefs as a mother.
I cut out pictures from magazines to show my cousin what I wanted. If I was the Before, the straight-haired, light-skinned women in these pictures could be my happily ever After. One day when I was twelve, I brought a picture of Troy Beyer, the biracial actress who played Diahann Carroll’s daughter on Dynasty. She was basically Halle Berry before there was Halle. I didn’t even know that she was biracial, and I didn’t know what work went into making her gorgeous straight hair fall so effortlessly around her light-skinned face. I just wanted to be that kind of black girl.
“This is what I want,” I said.
My cousin looked confused, but shrugged and went to work. The deal with relaxer was that it was usually left on for about fifteen minutes to straighten hair. It’s a harsh chemical, and the way I understood it was that no matter how much it itched or burned, the more I could stand it, the better. If fifteen minutes means it’s working, then thirty minutes means I’m closer to glory. At thirty-five minutes I might turn white!