In retrospect, I know that I was thinking just the right amount. Chris didn’t see me as a “black woman” because he didn’t want to see me as one. It was easy for him to make this judgment when I was just a 400×600 image online, unmoving and unspeaking. But it could’ve been worse, I thought. He could have called me a nigger or exoticized me, which only demonstrates how low my standards were for white men at the time. He concluded the night by kissing me on the cheek and asking to schedule our next date, so I assumed that my silence had worked to my advantage. The next time we met, we went to an Indian restaurant and then another bar, and we kissed on the lips before parting ways. Then I didn’t hear anything from him, and I grew anxious. At first I thought it might be because his twelve-hour workday was taking a toll on him, but the timing was too convenient; it was about a week before Valentine’s Day, and my mother told me that men always get weird around Valentine’s Day if they are not in a relationship with the woman they’re dating.
After two weeks, I’d had enough. I texted him saying that if he wasn’t interested in me, he could have at least let me know. Less than a minute later, I received a seven-screen text from him saying that I was a nice girl but that I was right, he had lost interest. I didn’t respond. And then I thought: Why didn’t I correct him? That was when I realized that, as a black woman, silence would never save me. It wouldn’t make me more desirable, only more susceptible to whatever a man wanted to give to me, even if it was a pittance.
Before I moved to New York, I imagined the male gaze to be like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, which watch over all of Long Island in The Great Gatsby. You can never be out of the line of sight. I perused tweets and essays by women whom I admired, in which they proclaimed that they didn’t need men to feel beautiful, let alone desired. I envied their confidence. Most of these women were in long-term relationships, whereas I had never been in one of any length and I wasn’t quite sure what men wanted. I viewed men as potentially scary, but I still wanted to be desired by them.
After Chris’s rejection, I had redirected all my energy into realizing my dream of living in New York City as quickly as possible. Although I moved without a job, I didn’t have any college loans, and I saved up thousands while working at a test-prep company for months prior to my move. Now that I was here, I began to think it was normal to live under the male gaze. The first time I walked down the street in central Harlem and I saw a man’s head turn as I walked by, I felt an electric current inside of me. I felt human. I realized that I still had a body, that there was more to me than books and literature. So I invested more time in my appearance. I decided to wear MAC Satin lipstick instead of Frost, because its deep purple hue dramatizes my face. I favored wedges over flats so that my five-foot body could be more easily seen. It became normal for me to walk out my front door and have a man call me “beautiful” or “sexy.” They were attracted to me, and that attention was addictive. I wasn’t attracted to them—but was it okay that I was flattered? Could I admit that I felt like a child tasting something sweet for the first time?
I began to expect these responses—the head swiveling and the compliments—and if I didn’t get them, I thought that I was doing something wrong. Being seen as beautiful mitigated the truth that I was in a massive city where few people knew my name, and even fewer cared if I was doing well. The only people with whom I shared substantial conversations were my two roommates. Most days I wouldn’t receive a text message from anyone besides my mother. If, just for a moment, I could matter to the gender that I was trying to attract, that momentarily erased my invisibility. But when the moment ended, I’d search for my next fix. It is the conundrum of being doubly subjugated: You are both invisible and hypervisible, stripped of humanity. And if you are not acknowledged at all, even in the most vulgar of ways, then do you still have a body? Are you still a woman without men watching you? Whenever a man asked for my number, I would either give it or lie and say that I was in a relationship. Even now I can never say “no” outright, because I’m afraid of hurting his feelings at best, being attacked at worst. And always—always—I ice my rejection with a smile. My smile is what catches men’s eyes the most. I once sat on the uptown 2 train as a group of men discussed how beautiful my smile was; I pretended I didn’t hear them.
Because of my smile, a man attempted to woo me in a subway station after we’d made brief conversation about a crazy person yelling obscenities on the other side of the track. He asked me if I had a man, and of course I lied and said yes.
He smirked and replied, “I’m still gonna get you anyhow.”
When I learned that he was a native Harlemite, I told him I was unsure how friendly to be to strangers.
“If you don’t want to be spoken to, then move to Minnesota or Oregon or somewhere. I don’t get why some women have to be a bitch about it,” he replied in his strong New York accent.
My smile weakened.
I realized that no amount of smiling or lying to most men can thwart their intentions. If they want me, and there is no other man by my side, then they feel as if they have a right to make advances towards me as soon as I come into their sight. That I don’t want them is irrelevant. When men pursue black women, the women are always considered culpable, as if their presence alone is an excuse for a male to act unlawfully. If I am a child on the playground, I am a part of the game to be slapped on the ass; if I am not worthy enough to be assaulted by a black or brown boy, then I am undesirable.
If a black woman in Louisiana did not cover her hair with a scarf, then she could cause a white man to lose restraint. During slavery, the idea of a “Jezebel,” or the black woman who has an insatiable libido, was used to justify relations between the slave master and his slaves. This expectation that all we want to do is fuck is reflected in how society does any and everything to suppress and spit on what comes naturally to us, like the hairs that grow out of our scalp, our dance moves, our language. Something must’ve happened during the first rape of a black female slave by a white captor, when the black man witnessed and could do nothing. She was humiliated, her body splayed open, and we as her descendants have yet to be given our clothes back. Every part of our body is a sex organ. We are present, and therefore we have to be theirs.
When I was a high school freshman, there was a twenty-year-old student who had been held back a couple years, and he always sat at the back of the bus. He would watch me, his eyes circling the circumference of my well-endowed chest before scaling my body. I considered his obvious attraction a compliment, because even more exciting for a teenage girl than captivating a guy is captivating an older guy. We exchanged numbers, and during one of our phone conversations my stepfather picked up the phone and was beside himself when he heard a grown man’s voice on the line. Before calling me down to the kitchen table, my stepfather called the guy, and as soon as he answered the phone, my stepfather boomed that he should never call the house again or else he would be reported to the police. I don’t think the guy got a word in before my stepfather cut him off by hanging up the phone.
When I was summoned downstairs, my mother and stepfather were silent.
“Did you know that that was a grown man on the phone?” my stepfather finally asked.
I shrugged. “He goes to my school.”
“Morgan,” my stepfather calmly replied, “that was a grown man on the phone. Do you know what he could have done to you?”