On Being Sexy in Public
Thoughts on dating, existentialism & being controlled down to your toenails.
I.
It’s open hunting season for the men of Bed-Stuy. Every single day, I am catcalled or harassed on the way home. It usually happens along Myrtle Avenue, right beside a long and colorful mural that denounces street harassment. Recently, a man veered his bike from the street onto the sidewalk so he could follow me. Last week, two men tried to spray me with water from their water bottles. When I tell a date about this incident, he says it is because I am “much hotter than the average person.”
Several women from history try and fail to guard Myrtle Avenue. From the street-facing wall of a giant Food Bazaar, they wear their most stern faces of disapproval. Cute slogans like “not your baby!” and less cute slogans like “street harassment is about power & control” punctuate the figures, the rolling colors and geometric designs.
An article announcing the mural’s creation in 2015 reads: “Brooklyn High-Schoolers Sexually Harassed While Painting Mural About Sexual Harassment.”
II.
Lately, being under the gaze of any man feels intolerable. Being looked at feels like being photographed, and every man is the photographer from Emily Ratajkowski’s story.
I am disrespected by men and then asked: why are you making a big deal of this? I am physically scrutinized and then asked: why do you feel uncomfortable right now? I am condescended to and then asked: why don’t you want to keep talking to me? Every time I draw a line, criticize an off-color comment, or make clear how I want to be treated, I alienate a new character. I am called a “brat” or else made to feel like one. My white female friends, Caucasian or Arab or otherwise, do not seem to have similar experiences quite so constantly, because men see them as more worthy of respect, care, and commitment.
In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon laments the way that white people, through their gaze, construct the identity of black people, thus blocking them from constructing their own, or ever really knowing themselves. It’s an essentialist argument: black people are prevented, because of the white gaze, access to themselves. They do not know what blackness means outside of the imposed definitions. I feel the same way about femininity, should an essentialized femininity exist, and about the intersection between femininity and blackness.
III.
At the time of writing, I am officially off the apps. To the men on Myrtle Avenue, I am just a body that crosses their line of vision for five seconds. To the men who I interact with more meaningfully, sharing song requests and political opinions and other aspects of humanity, I am still just a body in transit, and that is cruel to bear.
This is how I know the above: every square inch of my body is a site for microaggressions. Men love commenting on how much I giggle, how small my wrists are, how slender my neck is. Because nothing escapes their gaze, they even comment on my feet, the ridge between ankle and heel, my “cute toenails."
The difference between a compliment and a microaggression is difficult to establish when markers of feminine beauty always seem to lend themselves to being violated, dominated, and otherwise erased. To be beautiful is to be small, soft, easy to overwhelm, overpower, choke, and kill. In Roxane Gay’s “Hunger, A Memoir of (My) Body,” the author writes about making her body a “fortress” after being raped when she was younger. The higher her weight climbed, the safer she felt. This makes perfect sense.
I’ve long joked that men only want to date a woman they can easily throw out of a window. When this is not a joke but a point of departure, what should you do? Become heavy and immovable like an anchor? Become cold and rusty to the touch? Thingify yourself in a different way?
IV.
Lyrics about toenails that feel like microaggressions:
White toes in her heels, she the latest (“Lil Baby,” Young Thug, 2019)
My bitch got white toes (“Mistress,” Gunna, 2018)
I got some pretty hoes, pretty white toes (“I’M ON SOME,” Gunna, 2020)
You know I got a thing for your pretty white toes (“Vibrate,” Tyga, 2019)
White gold, white toes, and my bitches yellow (“Boffum,” Moneybagg Yo, 2020)
Look at my bitch, she got the white toes (“Shanghai,” A$AP Ant, 2018)
Contexts about lyrics about toenails that feel like microaggressions:
White toes in her heels, she the latest/ She got plastic Cartiers, think she made it
My bitch got white toes… She don't want to leave me 'lone
I got some pretty hoes, pretty white toes/ They can't wait 'til I stick it in/ Switched up her dress code, bought her lipo/ Just to make her feel good again
White gold, white toes, and my bitches yellow…Cover my bitches in Prada/They'll never see Chanel, that shit for my momma
Look at my bitch, she got the white toes/ She wanna look lavish/ I took her to Paris but I can't do marriage
V.
A couple of blocks up from the Myrtle Avenue mural, my nail tech tells me that he hates painting his clients’ toes white. He says that white tends to seep into the nail-bed, staining near-permanently and inviting fungus. He takes one look at my feet, battered through years of running and injury, and says no more white for you.
Instead he presents me with a shimmery rose gold, which I decline: I associate shimmer with being juvenile, feminine, ridiculous. I feel like men associate me with these things in general, so on some days I try to mitigate the damage. I choose the black pants over the cheetah print dress, the running sneakers over the chunky green heels. This is very girl boss of me, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Sometimes living inauthentically feels like the only choice, so the nail tech and I negotiate our way to a pale blue. When I go home I look up the ingredients of white nail polish: many of them have the strength to embalm a dead body.
VI.
A couple of weeks ago on One Thing, we talked about how capitalism owns your body in the workplace, warping your sexuality into something that enables the powers that be. Patriarchy does a similar thing: it makes stories out of visual cues, white toenails and Steve Madden slides, red lipstick and cheetah print dresses. The theory you’ve read does not matter. Your intention does not matter. You do not matter.
In Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood explores the 1990’s women’s piety movement in Egypt. She notes how a group of women start wearing the hijab to make themselves religious, rather than wearing it because they are religious. That line of logic is simple and true, laden with the potential of self-creation, the hope of existentialist philosophy. It makes sense that practicing Ramadan might induces faith where there might not be, or that wearing a pink sparkly dress has the power to evoke femininity.
Since taking off the hijab two years ago, I’ve thought a lot about our external choices and how they construct who we are. Although they do so with our permission, the constructions are based on a world of meaning and code that is beyond us. We can wear white nail polish but we cannot define what that means; we can present as women but the meaning of that will never be in our control; we can have choices but only if they are grounded in powerlessness. Although it seems we should not be complicit in the meanings that the world assigns to things, somehow, we are.
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