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                                           Latto (center) with the girls advancing the culture.

                                                                         Atlanta, 2023

I'm baffled by the 21st century idea of what an event or party should be. I'm far from being what anyone would call a church girl, but what is going on? 

There's not much imagination or mystery, but a lot of excess and exposition. I was sipping the tea of popular culture, which I do from time to time, and came across an image of the rapper Latto's 25th birthday bash in Atlanta. 

The theme of her party was Heaux Up x Pimps Down. Well, who doesn't want that? The sis is clever. This is aligned with Latto's bad bitch image. Such party-events are a part of the bigger branding picture. The word brand has a different meaning now than it did 30 years ago. A brand used to be a thing, like Pop Tarts or jeans. Then capitalism and social media collaborated into making a person a brand.

Latto's aesthetic style is getting into the realm of trash which will inspire other young girls to go out looking like strippers on patrol. Such style in pop culture - vacillating between Reality TV and sex doll avatar - has been going on for about 20 years now. Two things started this Twilight Zone post-feminism: the Plastic Kardashians and social media. It's a contradiction where empowerment is being naked on the internet. Fierce and filter are like distortion tools for self-exploitation. 

The vulgarity has impacted young black women who don't need to augment anything because being of African descent is wild, natural beauty. There isn't a black girl on earth that has to enhance a thing nor will she age like a cornflake girl. 

"What do you mean our time of life? How old do you think I am? You forget, your people never know how old we are." 

- Florence to Maude, 1972

Cardi B has been open about her changes; her motivation being that it was an investment in her stripper game. Cardi is the queen of body commodity culture. Her raps, image, and exposition are all based on her body parts. Megan too. I wonder how far they'll roll with all that through time? Will they end up in Vegas, into their 50s, rappin about their W.A.Ps? I'm fairly radical in my value system, but W.A.P tripped me out with its hella bold raunchiness. 

The 20s and 30s are one phase of a woman's life, the 50s - 60s are different in form and context, closer to our own mortality. We aren't baby girls anymore. I haven't been a baby girl since Seals and Croft's Summer Breeze. 

I'm clutching my old ass pearls because I don't think it's necessary or provocative to see everything. Alas, the body commodity remains profitable. It's like we've become Hottentots for sale with raps, beats, and tarantula eyelashes. 

Young women in trash glam look like saturated drag queens more than natural women. Drag queens look dope in heavy make-up, because drag itself is performative, an art form. The young Gen X queens in Paris is Burning, did this without social media, but with DIY glam and grit. I'm here to tell you, no one can mess with anyone who does anything well from scratch. Anyone can click on a filter for that Disney princess heaux glow. 

The modern age is a maximum marketing machine - image, the body, street culture, and trash. The daring garner attention and attention pays the bills. I have no idea how anyone makes money on IG.  Google and Apple Pay are tools of the matrix to me. 

I love trash as ironic camp not as an aesthetic standard of womanhood. I'm critical of entertainment imagery that will get into the heads of black girls in potentially destructive ways. Being autonomous girls and women with agency over our own bodies, in healthy relationships to ourselves and others are defiant moves. Being an entertainment heaux or bad bitch player panders to the enduring stereotypes of a racist society:

The heaux, the pimp, and the drug dealer -  the rulers of The Game.

The Game is rough and cheap and people are interchangeably rough and cheap. Rarely does anyone get to the top of it without taking someone else out. There can be loyalty, betrayal, violence, and drama.

My first serious boyfriend when I was about 18 was a pimp who was trying to get straight - that is, more square. He wanted to be a DJ and rapper.  I used to design flyers for him out of encouragement and caring. His reality, with its transient exploitation and skin trade, messed his head up. He didn't adapt well to me or my straight friends ( kids outside of the game he was into ).

When I broke up with him, he said he had a gun and threatened to hurt himself. 

RUN! 

Pimps can be master manipulators. They are always jockeying for leverage and power. When applied effectively, the guilt trip can be a form of manipulative power. T.S. Madison is a favorite trans comedian and podcaster. I like listening to her interviews. She keeps it real, I'll give her that.

No...I don't really know a lot about love because I used to be a H-O.

I also learned aspects to the game, from the point of view of women, strippers I worked with in New York.  Most were tough and functional, some were strung out, lacked discipline, and could be easily misled. It was usually white girls who got into the wacky situations.  I once booked a girl for a bachelor party gig on a boat. She went to the gig high on heroin. The bachelor party conned her bodyguard off the boat and he called me in a frantic state. That was my job - booking gigs, dispatching the phones, and collecting the money. Realizing she was alone with a gang of dudes, stripper girl freaked out and jumped off the boat into Long Island sound. 

Myself in Hell's Kitchen that night, I had to call in the Long Island cavalry to rescue the girl from that gig. 

In the game one has to be disciplined. There is no space for the expression of softness because soft is vulnerable and the vulnerable can be hurt. 

The tough strippers and hustlers had a kind of force field around them. The most powerful I met carried themselves like ladies, not heaux. There is a distinct difference. Being a lady is like an armor, a superpower. A lady can't be turned out because her presence endeavors respect. I apply such armor. My other armor is that I'm androgynous and present to hustlers like a lesbian. 

There ain't no BET princess or church wife going on over here. I'm also not very good at the sidekick, partner-in-crime, up in the club homegirl. I never learned how to do any of that. I'm interchangeably  the good friend and the lone wolf.  

Turned out is a street term for turning a good girl into a working girl.

In order to do that, a pimp or a madame uses mind control. Once a hustler gets in someone's head, it's a wrap. The promise of love and devotion that are never true. The promise of freedom is never manifested, except in death. 

The Game itself is capitalism and transactional. Whether you make 100 or 1000 a date, a heaux is the product. I'm anti-pimp because pimps are clowns who are not men.  I'm a socialist advocate for the labor of a heaux. Heaux should keep 100% of their profit without a middleman to take a cut. A pimp is the pitchman, a negotiator. Without sexual labor they would have nothing and no one to pimp.

I had a neighbor years ago in West Berkeley who was a old G from Chicago, several years older than me. He was a trip; a vulgar cat with missing teeth, but we were cool. We had one squabble after his wife hit my car door as she backed out of their driveway. When I confronted them, his wife cussed him and me out. He came at me with the ' Listen, sis, she ain't got insurance....' yappity yap.  At that point, I decided to let it go because we, as a people, go through enough shit and sometimes turn that shit on one another. 

Who could any of us become given better circumstances and degrees? Without the need to create hustle culture outside of the social order of white men and women? To the victor go the spoils of respectability.

Always, always choose your battles with the Gs. And always be cool. 

My neighbor and I were friendly, but there was a line. That line was that I was a homegirl, not a part of his game or anyone else's. I was just a regular lady who worked a square ass job and reads books. 

You know what niggas don't do? Niggas don't read books! - Chris Rock, 

Morally questionable in his livelihood choices, the G neighbor was still a person. What I did appreciate about the G, we shared a love for Elton John and he did look out for me and others on the block. Eventually he tried to hook-up and when rejected, reverted to hood rancor in a hilarious text. Were my feelings hurt by a pimp talking shit? 

Not really, no. 

We live with constraints that have existed for generations. Limited resources, lack of opportunity and access, and dysfunctional family systems. The visibly invisible who became more visible in the black girl magic age.  As standards of American beauty and womanhood - Farrah is dead. Molly is dead. Becky and Karen, a kind of mockery of the dead. 

When I have been utterly broke, I would eat at McDonald's or on one meal a day. I borrowed money from friends. I scavenged. The one thing I never did, no matter how tough things were, was heaux or hustle. I worked and worked tirelessly, like a character out of The Color Purple. Without belief in one's beauty and capability intact, all is lost and I wasn't giving either away. 

 I would challenge a bill, apply for a program, and fill out forms. I had a revelation when I was younger where I went to the county to apply for welfare. I sat with the form and read the fine print. I realised that if I pursued that path and got that deep into the system, I would not come back out. Social services can be a resource or like a prison for the dependent mind. 

I was determined to get it together and have my own shit. I navigate the system enough and I won't answer to anyone beyond that. Brick by brick, step by step, I got myself together.

Even in downest times, sleeping on a friend's couch, in my car, and challenging living situations to save on rent, I've always been adaptable. I suppose I inherited what we call backbone. I had to go through black girl hardship and loneliness to get to a place where I could sit at my own window and gaze out onto the world. 

 I've certainly earned that. 

Are heaux in the world? Not in the grand, romantic sense. Their world is myopic, chaotic, prone to relentless scrutiny, negotiation, and exhaustion. They are people in constant in motion with bags, totes, wigs, cell phones, and make-up; racing against time. It's not as glamorous as the media presents it.  

When I lived in Miami, I shared a few rides with girls on the pole. I was struck by their self-assuredness, their get-to-it approach to a kind of after-hours routine. I always did ride shares in Miami because they were cheaper. One young sis was picked up outside a strip club. She entered the car wearing heels and a trendy metallic jacket, a tote bag hanging from her shoulder. She sat next to me in the back seat and I caught a glimpse of her bikini top underneath her jacket. She wrapped the jacket around herself against the AC of the Uber and went to her phone. Her long dragon nails tapping quickly in a text. She was very young, not even 25.

Another was an Airbnb guest. I lived in a shared house in Liberty City and managed Airbnb, strategically - to save on my own rent and mitigate my millennial housemates from renting to random clowns off the interwebs. Young people of the modern age do not vet anyone or anything. 

The young girl had a body shot for her profile. I gave my housemates a heads up, that she's either a stripper or a heaux. My street-hustle knowledge was questioned. 

Have you ever seen anyone post a body shot as a profile picture on a platform except maybe Tinder? Let's get down to brass tax with that.

Sure enough, Airbnb showed up with her ' boyfriend' who was actually her pimp. They were a cool young Haitian-American couple from Tampa. She went out every night working Miami clubs while he hung out in the guest room and collected her earnings. They stayed with us for about a week. I knew cleaning up after them would be a chore. They had camped out like they were in a motel. The glamorous life. 

I wondered what the girls' stories were and whatever happened to their dreams? I know black girls dream. We all do.