Oh shit! My first blog post...

Where do I start... 

Well for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a hoe... Well maybe I didn’t want to be a hoe as a child, but it was definitely something about a woman that was sexy, confident and not allowing emotions to cloud her judgment that was intriguing as fuck to me. Yeah, that’s what it was. That’s what it had to be. I remember watching tv shows and movies depicting "hoes" and I was always rooting for them. It wasn’t their "hoe" actions necessarily, and it damn sure wasn’t peoples negative reactions to being a hoe... it was the way that a "loose woman" owned her shit. I could tell the difference early on between a woman who owned her shit, and a woman that just allowed shit to happen to her, and I had no desire to be the latter. 

I saw power in it, a power that some fear, and others embrace.

Do you remember the movie "Two can play that game" starring Vivica A. Fox (Shante) and Morris Chestnut (Keith)? I feel like most black people have... but in short, it's a rom-com where power dynamics, stereotypical relationship behavior and the battle of the sexes meet. Now I'm not going to go deep into a synopsis of this movie, especially because I've grown to hate rom-coms as a genre, but I want to talk about Connie! Connie was the "hoe" in the movie (played by Gabriel Union). Gorgeous, college educated, career-driven, ambitious (a lot of the same qualities as the main character Shante), but the only difference between the two is that (in the words of Shante), Connie was a HOE! The kind of hoe to sleep her way up to the top. Now, I'm not going to go into respectability politics and how Connie exercising her sexual agency in a way that benefits her career goals is admirable, so let's just accept hoe as Connie's truth for the sake of this post. Now why is Connie being a hoe frowned upon? Is it her sexual promiscuity? or simply the fact that Connie was throwing the pussy at Keith? More than likely both right?

But here's the problem with calling Connie a hoe while putting Shante on a pedestal in the category of "respectable girlfriend - it literally pits women against each other in a man's world where the only thing that can stop a man from cheating is a man that doesn't want to cheat (it damn sure isn't a woman being free sexually). Too often we as women blame the other woman and refer to her as the hoe, when let's be honest, Connie didn't move in on Keith until AFTER he went on a date with the red bone from work and Shante broke up with him.

I would argue that if Shante was in a similar situation, she would've acted in the same way (didn't Keith say he had sex with Shante on the first night?). So it's not really that Connie is a hoe and Shante is not (and I'm using Connie and Shante as fictional representations of two types of black women), but in fact, both of them are hoes. The difference is that Connie owns her shit and embraces it. Shante played games and portrayed a role that she was somehow of a higher caliber than Connie when she also used her sexuality for her own personal gain. Sounds like a classic case of projection, if I do say so myself.  

Now I'm no relationship expert, but I think there's some strength in accountability and owning who the fuck you are and using what you have to get what you want (I'll talk about my love for strippers and the Player's Club separately). We all have things about us that we can use to level the playing field, and I think the moment you try to define someone as a hoe for doing that, you're really just jealous that they're making that shit work for them. 

After all, it's all a matter of perspective right... and we're all a hoe to somebody regardless of the sexual activities we participate in. Might as well hug that lil hoe in the mirror and tell them to be the best hoe they can be. 

xoxo