Nudity and the Fears of the Black Female Body

Anyone who's ever listened to or seen Erykah Badu knows that homegirl is crazy. Crazy in the good sense, though. From her ever evolving hairstyles to her tantalizing and reckless interviews(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GM851j20k) she's about as irreverent as they come. Since her infamous 1997 hit "On & On," I've fallen for her nutty and quirky antics. Those who are familiar with her know that she doesn't play by the rules of female stardom: she doesn't hypersexualize herself, she doesn't mind people thinking she's weird and her music typically has messages targeted towards the black community about its own strengths and weaknesses. That's why I find it so weird that when she dropped her most recent song "Window Seat," people went ape sh...ok mad, they were "mad" when they saw the video she made for it.

First of all: it's amazing. She starts off at the scene of JFK's assassination in Dallas with a recording from a reporter saying,"only a few minutes until he arrives," which gives the scene a sense of history. She continues with the lyrics informing her listeners of her own complexity. She claims on the one hand "I need you to want me....I need your attention" but then she qualifies that later by saying "don't want nobody next to me/ I just want a ticket outta town." She wants it all and I say let her have it!

The crux of the video is her decision to strip off her clothing. Now, it's clear that Americans have this mixed emotions about the human body and sexuality. We sell everything you could imagine with a 95% naked female body: razors, beer, watches. You name it and there's a scantily clad broad somewhere pitching it to you. But as soon as a woman in her late thirties with a slender but obviously mother-of-two type body strips down and removes that last 5% of her clothing that the other chicks don't, it becomes criminal. Reminds me of something from like 6 years ago...oh that's right. In 2004 when Janet Jackson's breast flashed the nation, some children's innocence was lost forever and the FCC got really up in arms. It was just awful, the worst of crimes, right? Wrong.

I just don't get it: how is fair to tease about sex and the body all day long but as soon as parts of a real body are shown (or even pixelated like in this video), our heads spin and we get angry? There is nothing inherently sexual about her strip down in this video. She's not pouting her lips or angling her hips out a la Gisele Bundchen. No, she's literally walking through the streets and taking clothes off like any of us might do before a shower. Ok hopefully we don't all fling our clothes around like that the way she does but you get the idea. The video asks us to think about what we're gonna do when presented with a natural nude body. Are we gonna immediately assume her actions are meant to be sexually appealing? Depending on our answers to the question, we then have to ask more questions: Is she just trying to shock us? Is it impossible for us to separate a female body from its potential to be used sexually? What of the fact that she's a black artist? Is she setting black women back? We're compelled to reflect on ourselves and our understanding of the significance of the body.

In many of the reactions I read online to this video and in the conversation I had with a few close friends, I realized that Badu is using her body as a test: are we gonna get hung up on how she looks (revealing our superficial interest in the configuration of her body and her violation of "the rules") or are we gonna move past it and understand that she's using her nude body as a metaphor to talk about the nature of being a vulnerable individual? At the end of the video, a shot rings out and Badu falls to the ground while the music stops and we hear her voice speaking the words, "They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they don't understand/ they move in packs, ingesting every act of hate on one another/ they feel more comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow/ they are us, this is what we have become afraid to respect the individual/ a single person or event or circumstance can move one to change, to love herself, to evolve." We find out after watching this expedition that all along, she was suggesting that people are quick to pounce on someone who doesn't fit the status quo and who are willing to stand out at the risk of attack.

The other part of the heated reaction I sensed was that people were disturbed by the idea that children were there to watch the scene unfold. My question, then, is the following, "Aren't we all naked underneath our clothes?" Nothing about what she was doing was sexual or intimate. She was literally walking down the street. Not writhing as we see (and, I might add, as many kids see nowadays) in many popular music videos, for example. She was walking. Of course it would be uncomfortable for parents to have to explain something like that to children but isn't that the job of parents? To explain the complicated nature of the world to their kids? It's kind of hard for me to get really upset about a supposed violation like that since I know that wearing clothes and depending on clothes to cover ourselves up is a social construct that is both very useful and aritificial at the same time. No, I didn't grow up in a nudist colony but part of me sees clothing as just another way we limit ourselves and in this video, I see no harm in her using the fact of her nakedness as a teaching lesson to viewers to get them to see how powerfully covering oneself up has infiltrated our collective consciousness.

My other issue, too, is that people get so upset when naked bodies are exposed because they believe that anything remotely relating to sex is distasteful while those same parents shove violent videos games into the Play Stations so their kids will shut up and leave them alone. We'll excuse violence or scenes of violence though they can literally train young children to think it's ok to physical harm people but as soon as a hint of nudity comes up, all hell breaks loose. When's the last time a butt cheek killed anyone? Never. And if you can find a time when it did, I will personally hand you $600,000 in a banana costume. Not.Gonna.Happen.

I hope that one day, seeing a real black woman's body, not one being objectified as a tool to make a rapper's video seem more glamorous or alternatively a blimp-sized Precious look a like, will be ok in America. I hope, too, that when we consider a person stepping outside the box and challenging our notions, we don't fail her test and get stuck on the debate about how her hips look. Unless it's sexualized or Mammy-looking (yes, I've taken a bunch of African American Studies courses recently), we haven't the first clue of what to make of a real looking black woman. Badu let's us know with the word "EVOLVING" scribbled across her back and her silly Rick James-wig-wearing self at the end of the video that all of these transformations in our awareness can change with a bit of humor, though. It's the right sort of attitude to take, given how serious we get about nakedness, and especially black nakedness, in our culture. I mean, how have we made it this far and forgotten how beautiful the black female body is? Why do we waste our time fearing it? What's up with that?

An Oscar Curse? Or Just a Curious Phenomenon?

And the "Oscar Curse" strikes again: Sandra Bullock has decided to divorce her husband Jesse James after it was revealed in March that he slept with lots, and lots of other women besides the actress. I want us all to think about the main woman involved in this scandal, a one Ms. Michelle McGee. The woman has arm sleeves of ink and even has the word "Sinners" tattooed on her forehead to reflect the way we're all sinful (don't ask me how I know this....I just do). Of course I shouldn't rag on her too hard. I mean while she did let someone take a piping hot needle with ink to the front of her head, she did have the decency to keep her bangs over the tat...you know, to be modest. Gotta give her credit for that. Anyhow, when comparing women like McGee and the James' other ladyfriends (especially that fox of an ex-wife) with a woman like Sandra Bullock, the star of "Ms. Congeniality" and "The Marriage Proposal," I feel like I'm watching an episode of Sesame Street where they play that game "Which one of these things is not like the others?" James seems to like himself some *cough cough* adult film star-looking ladies. I don't begrudge him that. To each his own...beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that mess. But for the love of the Creator, why did he and Sandra Bullock ever get married in the first place?

There've been a bunch of sham marriages that we've watched crumble in the public eye. None of them seems quite as preposterous as this coupling, though, because the two don't seem compatible in anyway. She's been the average the American sweetheart type woman who isn't exactly sexayyy but who has the allure of being a mediocre talent, packaged to perfection. Let's put it this way: if you saw Sandra Bullock on the street without make-up and if she never became famous with the help of amazing PR people, no one would give a second glance at the woman as she walked down the street. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that you'd be hard pressed to find any black female of equivalent attractiveness and talent in the spotlight the way she is and she definitely wouldn't be romanticized as a Hollywood darling. But that is a separate topic for a different blog post :) If we look at Jesse James, we get a totally different type of person. The man looks like he was birthed on the backseat of a Harley and his tattoos and bandana imply that he was raised in the backwoods of Alabama. Again, nothing wrong with that. It's just that he's definitely not the kind of man you wanna run into late at night after he's had a few beers. He also looks like a straight up hooligan in some recent photos from US Weekly as he poses like a Nazi, giving Hitler the ever important shout out. He's a real catch. Totally dreamy.

Now I have no particular affections for either of these two people and I really don't care for hearing about their problems. The one thing that DOES interest me, though, is that Bullock is now part of the supposed "Oscar Curse" where women who win the Best Actress award subsequently lose their significant others. Let's review, shall we? Helen Hunt and Hank Azaria's relationship crumbled after her win in 1998, Gwenyth Paltrow and Ben Affleck broke up a few months after her award in 1999, Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt's relationship fell apart after she won in 2001, Halle Berry lost Eric Benet to his sex addiction in 2002 (what a shame), Hilary Swank broke up with husband Chad Lowe in 2005, Reese Witherspoon split with Ryan Phillippe in 2006, and Kate Winslet filed for divorce from Sam Mendes after her win in 2009, etc. Regardless of whether these relationships fell apart in the weeks after the award ceremony or in the years following, it's interesting to entertain the idea of a "Curse." I like to think of it more as a question of power dynamics. Does a woman become less attractive once she enjoy great recognition for her work? Is having a partner's whose professional achievements grows with each new day inherently overwhelming to some men? Or do women who receive these sort of accolades disparage men who cannot do the same? Can't people be successful without the destruction of their personal lives? Really, what's up with that?