okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

Okay I have to admit I got sucked into the vacuum of Black erotica. I read one of Zane’s books one lazy summer afternoon and was a bit randy reading what to some may be the equivalent of rough third-wave feminist fiction in urban form. I mean those girls were really doing their thing, a true … , see, that’s the problem with that entire genre. Chances are your 12 year old is in the public library reading one of these books when you were trying to espouse the virtues of Nancy Drew. Yeah the last thing I was to see is a bunch of tweens at a book signing.

You can save yourself some time and watch one of those infamous films out there because where everyone else likes to take hours trying to cram some “reality” stuff in (yeah someone is still getting paid, trust me) we tend to get it over with in 20 minutes. Some girl that isn’t really into it, is completely unconvincing and is looking at her reflection in the lens of the camera instead of really handling her business. Some guy that is overwhelmed and feels that he’s reached seventh heaven still in disbelief that he even scored such a girl, even on film. How come when we’re on camera on a dirty couch in a seedy hotel it’s over before it’s even started but everyone else has some sort of “plot”, if you want to call it that. With propaganda like that it’s no wonder that Johnny wants Shaquita.

Interracial movies are a lot better, but i have a complex watching them in all fairness. It’ll screw with your mind a bit, because if you consume too much of your time reading those books you’ll look at Black women through a cloudy lens of objectification and we have entirely too much of that already. There are still some real Black women out there that exist that can’t be bought so easily, that don’t have deep seated issues with relationships in that way so yeah I have a bit of a problem that the ones that do seem to be dominating what little bit of a literary genre we have.

Some move on to do other things and are serious writers; but the real issue is that the writers themselves are simply pandering to our own instant gratification and our own shallowness and short attention span as readers. How much do we really want to read, if you can get through a novel without demanding some sort of physiological response that’s saying a lot these days. It wasn’t always this way, we used to have controversial works written by homosexuals exposing the hypocrisy of the Black church and offering a look at race in America through a different perspective. There were books that really challenged our minds and caused us to look outside of ourselves, rather than within towards our own selfish needs.

In many ways Black art sort of died in the seventies, yet rap music had little to do with it rather the other genre of entertainment that existed at that time sort of paved the way for rap music. In the beginning they had a positive message, albeit chose controversial ways to get that message out there, but as with all other things that tried to use bad to preach good they digressed. I’m hard pressed to find any real cultural or instinctive value in the Dolemite movies, though I loved watching them for all the wrong reasons.

That’s where that seed was planted, and we have taken it so far you have to wonder if we can ever get back on track. On the one hand as fun as it is to hear about these heroines there are many more Black women out there that aren’t using their disposable incomes to position themselves that have real lives with children and other responsibilities that are trying to make something of themselves in their communities and work hard to enrich the lives of everyone around them. That isn’t a very entertaining story, and I’m sure it’s not the reality we like to confront but we can’t just keep escaping our reality either.

Black erotica is popular, prescient and omnipresent now because women want to be that person in that novel, if not but for a day. We’re taking back the erotica that was lost on historical romance and trying to put it in a way that we can relate to, and it does serve a purpose. But that is a small part of our larger existence as a whole, and seems to fill those gaps where the mainstream culture is refusing to allow positive, definitively “high-end” literary works to speak on behalf of African-Americans. Magazines that used to mean something at one time, our magazines, like Essence and Ebony, are too quick to play up these works, granted those magazines talk about each, and, every, single, piece of Black art that’s out there (much of which I had never known about) yet even still.

It also suggests that as desirable and authentic some of us consider Black women to be, either out of respect, naively, or out of pure fascination, that we’re still defined through sex. Erotica has been out there for years, but the mainstream stuff doesn’t get nowhere near as much attention as these works do. Usually it takes a former dancer or adult video performer to write a memoir for anyone to even take a second look at it, and those books usually over promise and underwhelm. I picked up another book by an unknown author; the writer was showing off talking in Italian and worked up to a revelation that not only was the mother putting her daughter out there for profit but once they got down together with a client at the same time! Needless to say I took my cold shower and called it a day.

It isn’t that these aren’t our experiences; anything but, just that back in the day it wasn’t really anything you’d talk openly about. On one hand it is great that those cards are out on the table, because it suggests that we aren’t as stuck up and conservative as we had tried to come off as being for all of those years but on the other it isn’t always that good of a thing for us to be known through either. Perhaps the next time I’m in Barnes and Nobles I’ll sit down with my snotty pastry and drink some vitamin water and take my time as I sink into the sofa reading my book, which will be conveniently behind the latest issue of Time magazine, yeah I’m discrete like that. I’ll go to sleep and fantasize, and then find some closure with my old lady …