Dear friends,
I guess when the First Lady of the United States happily admits that if she could be anybody else it would be you, then why not do a hit record that graphically describes you giving a man a blow job, because you want him to like you?
As a matter of fact, perhaps Michelle and her two girls are rockin' with grandma to Beyoncé's new hit called "Partition" right at this moment. And not to leave out the White House, the long blonde "Weave Queen" even mentions in the lyrics that her sperm donor "Monica Lewinsky-ed" her gown. Yum Yum - or Yuck?
Surprisingly, she's getting great support from many African American women. I can only imagine that these are the same women who bought Steve Harvey's book, "Act like a lady- Think like a man".
Nevertheless, it just goes to show that there is no correlation between having any amount of money and having self-esteem, much less self-respect.
This whole affair reminds me of an incident in my own life, back in 1978. I was a big-time amateur boxer in New England who had recently been introduced to and soon would sign with none other than Smokin' Joe Frazier as a pro.
Because I was an amateur boxer, that means that I wasn't paid for fighting. In fact, for that reason, during the daytime I worked in Boston's now former Newmarket Square meat district. I was what was called a "beef lugger" (super-strong guys who unloaded sides of beef from trucks) - an occupation that no longer exists, because now beef is chopped up and boxed right there in the slaughterhouse, then driven around the country to supermarket chains via tractor-trailer trucks. In any case, everybody who worked in the meat market, from meat cutters/butchers to truck drivers and luggers made pretty good money. On Fridays, therefore, it wasn't uncommon to see prostitutes walking around the dock.
Now, it was a hot early summer day and a young African American woman in high heels and a mini-skirt, about my age at the time (24), for a couple of weeks, had been coming around on Fridays at lunchtime - that is check-cashing time, and prostituting herself by giving blow jobs to all comers (pun intended) for $10 - gas was only about $.40 a gallon then.
Usually there would be about a dozen or more guys, almost always "white", lined up outside the little closet- size door that secured the tiny room where she did her work. This particular Friday, when her business was apparently slow, she came walking along the ramp offering blow jobs for $10 to any takers. When she reached me, I looked her in the eyes with a disgusted expresion on my face and said, "What are you doing out here shaming yourself and all other black women sucking off these white boys?" She simply sucked her teeth, shrugged her shoulders, turned around, and started walking in the other direction, still hollering out her offer.
About two weeks later, either right before or after July 4, with only a week to go before I would be going to Joe Frazier's Gym in North Philly, I was taking my son, who was three years-old at the time, to his daycare's annual picnic. It was a very expensive and exclusive daycare, but it was hooked up with a big shoe company, and I didn't even have to pay anything because a close friend's mother told her company that my son was her grandchild and employees didn't have to pay for daycare. She also did that for me, because I was a single parent and that was unheard of for a guy to be in those days.
At any rate, when I walked into the picnic area at the playground behind the daycare, sitting there at a picnic table with her toddler, in a nice classy summer dress was guess who? That same young prostitute from the meat market who I had scolded only two weeks earlier. The look on her face, as the commercial says, was "priceless."
My son had been going to that daycare for a year and a half, but I'd never seen this woman, other than at the meat market, before. I was just as shocked as she was. Both feelings and conflicting feelings stirred in me. I mean, on the one hand, I wanted to blast her and embarrass her. This was all happening within a split second. Then the son of a West Indian woman came out in me. "Be respectful." So, as she stared into my eyes, perhaps expecting the worse, I simply nodded my head at her and kept walking into the picnic area towards the other guests.
I never saw her again after that day. I've always hoped that that incident may have been one for her to change her life.
Still, the issue of women and young girls bowing to Male Supremacy, as opposed to resisting it, if not trying to totally destroy it, has everything to do with the female half of our species being locked out of the experience that everyone should have: of trying to be fully human by mastering both one's inner and outer powers/capabilities, in conjunction with the way that s/he lives life.
Finally, Beyoncé claims that the pathetic lyrics of the non-melodic trashy so-called song on the link below is somehow contributing to the advancement of feminism. That is not only a lie, but a stupid one! Will she teach her little baby, Blue Ivy, to look at life within the context of how she can make a man "like" her? Or, will she encourage her daughter to develop a "sense of self" that is based upon the latter's powers/capabilities to accomplish goals by herself and on her own, without relinquishing her dignity to any man - or woman - regardless of any promises of trinkets, baubles, or dollars?
G. Djata Bumpus
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