Stopping Jezebel: Some Thoughts on the Complexities of Black Women Owning their Sexuality

I was thirteen and a freshman in high school when I got my first boyfriend. I didn't know anything about dating or relationships. It wasn't "serious" although I thought it was at the time. He would walk me to class. I'd watch him perform. We'd sit in the hallway giggling and holding hands. I even shared my first kiss with him.


Then we broke up. And one of the ways he used to get back at me was calling me a ho and a slut.

Later, I distinctly remember being taken aside by an older Black woman. She explained to me that I was called a slut because that's what men do when they're angry. And I could have avoided it if I had never been alone with him in the first place because once you do anything with a man he will expect you to have sex with him and if you don't he will begrudge you for it.

That's because boys will be boys. And it's because you are a (Black) girl.

That was my introduction to the politics surrounding the Jezebel image.

Black Women & The Continuing Problem of Respectability

The myth of hyper-sexuality is a stereotype Black women have been forced to bear for centuries. It originates from slavery and is still thoroughly woven into our cultural imagination. It controls how Black women's bodies are viewed. It minimizes our sense of personal choice. It takes sexual subjectivity away from Black women.

Scholar Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term "politics of respectability" in her landmark text Righteous Discontent. In this text, she outlines how nineteenth century Black Baptist women countered the notion of hyper-sexuality by supporting a strict form of sexuality: a more perfected and stringent version of the rules of sexuality in which white women were expected to follow in their hetero-patriarchal society. They believed that this would allow them to escape some of the vitriol of being labeled immoral and impure.

Of course, respectability politics makes a fallacious assumption in believing that Black people are maligned because of an inability to strictly conform to white middle class norms. Most white people do not even conform to white middle class norms. Black folks are degraded because of race. Every other reason is simply an excuse or a way of masking the true nature of anti-Blackness.