Artistic Revolution of Beauty

"The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:57:16 +0000

“The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often stigmatizes and shames this same group of people. Women of color and poor women are blamed for their inability to keep their legs closed and for having too many children. For marginalized groups of women, sex is not linked to pleasure or freedom; it is demonized and used as an example of all the ways in which these women lack self-control. As a result, a lot of conversations around sexual freedom discount the experience of people of color, failing to take into account how much sexual freedom is assumed to hinge on a woman’s privilege—be it because of her race, economic status, or social standing.

Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jill Nelson, Alice Walker, Leti Volpp, Saidiya Hartman, and countless other feminists of color have either directly or indirectly brought up the idea that the social consequences of sex are greater for women of color. Women are sexualized by the media, period, but women of color face a unique set of circumstances where they have historically been hypersexualized, and then held to white standards of purity. According to popular ideas of sexuality, women of color start out impure. One concrete example of this happens around rape and sexual assault. When the survivor is a woman of color, the assumption is that she started out consenting. After all, the bodies of women of color are for consumption and therefore they are always ready and willing to have sex.”

- Samhita Mukhopadhyay (via wretchedoftheearth)